I Spent 45 YEARS Filming Grizzly Bears... Here's What I Saw

The real story of grizzly bears I think has never been made. Almost everything I ever learned about grizzly bears while I was growing up turned out to be wrong. If we don't start facing these creatures as they really are, we risk losing them forever. It's taken me over 40 years to discover how their amazing intelligence is the key to finding new ways for people and grizzlies to coexist. What I hope to do in a film is bring as much of that alive as possible. Ever since I was a young boy, I've been around animals and guns. Cougars roamed the woods I played in as a kid. I guess hunting, trapping and living off the land were simply in my blood. When I first moved into northern BC, I was offered a job as a guide outfitter, and that's a vocation that allows you to take non-resident hunters into the wilderness hunting. And I have to say that I was actually overall quite sickened by the whole business of a guide outfitting, especially grizzly bears. I just could not understand why people would travel across the world to kill a grizzly bear, and yet it was a booming business and that's what I did for several years. I have skinned a lot of grizzly bears in my life and I'm not very proud of that at this point, but that's the reality of the business. We killed 13 grizzly bears in one fall season and I felt that it was just a wrong thing to do. I just couldn't do it anymore. My heart was broken and I was really ashamed of myself. There was one incident that really drove home how pointless trophy hunting had become for me. A man I met from Wyoming came to kill a grizzly bear. We had a pretty good time and he went home with the bear. The fellow told me that he had a spot in his office that this bear was going to go up on the wall. Years later, I was in the city where he lived and I gave his business a call and I got his daughter on the line and she told me regretfully that he had passed away. I thought I'd ask her, you know, do you still have that grizzly bear in your father's office and she said no. I never liked it. I took it to the dump and I thought, my god, that grizzly bear that we killed would still be walking around had this man not killed it and I had a bad feeling about that one. I learned a lot from that. I'm really not against hunting. I just don't like the idea of hunting grizzly bears. First of all, we don't eat them and I just find that hunting something that you don't utilize goes against my philosophy of nature and how we should conduct ourselves. Bears are just so super intelligent. They're very important to the ecology and I think they should be celebrated rather than disrespected. Just as I was having serious doubts about helping people kill grizzly bears, something happened that dramatically changed the course of my life. During the days I was hunting, I got a job offer from a government agency doing research on salmon stocks. The project included the construction of a weir on the salmon spawning grounds. Our team's task was to collect biological data from the spawned out salmon that were caught on the weir. We knew we were working in the heart of a grizzly habitat, but I wasn't ready for all the bears that showed up once the salmon started collecting on the weir. My days as a guide outfitter hadn't prepared me for anything like this. Pretty soon, it became apparent to me that I don't really know much about grizzly bears at all. When you're hunting, you're watching a bear that's either coming towards you or you're stalking it and you kill it. So you don't really get to look at these animals much and once they discover you're hunting them, you displace them very quickly. At first, most of the grizzlies were hesitant to go for the fish while we were at the weir. They'd leave as soon as we arrived. As time went on, some of the bears actually seemed respectful. While we did our work, they'd retreat a short distance and wait for us to finish our sampling. Then when we left, they'd go right back to fishing. Gradually, the bears seemed to get more confident around the weir. Before long, it turned into a free-for-all. We no longer felt safe working so close to the bears. It was basically the philosophy of the day that you had to be very, very careful around grizzly bears and when you encountered them, you were most likely to meet some form of tragic end. So we got out the usual arsenal of deterrents, shell crackers, rubber bullets and even rocks and went to war. We did manage to deter the bears from coming around while we were there, but pretty soon I started to question our strategy. I wondered if by antagonizing the grizzlies, we were actually making the situation worse. All our encounters with bears were becoming riskier. When we met them on a trail, it was obvious that now they saw us as the enemy and they started acting defensively. When they knew we wouldn't be around, they still went to the weir and created havoc. One bear would rip a hole in the weir and another would come along and make it bigger. Even at night in our cabin, we could hear them carrying on down at the weir. We lost a lot of sleep and a lot of samples. Plus, every morning I had to spend hours repairing damage from the bears. Eventually, we had to choose. Either terminate the project or find some other way to deal with the grizzlies. I loved the work, so I decided to try and change my relationship with the bears. While we did our sampling, I started studying how the bears were interacting. I noticed that near the salmon, they usually ignored each other and respected boundaries and threats. Every time a bear crossed a certain line, their dominance hierarchy kicked in. Even though grizzlies are powerful predators, they were very good at avoiding physical conflict. One bear would often displace another with just a simple non-aggressive signal. It usually took just a subtle gesture to prevent a confrontation. I just got to watch that and see what they were doing and I'll be darned if, you know, if I practiced that same behavior with a bear that I would be able to displace that bear myself. Most required very little encouragement to keep their distance. Other times when stronger persuasion was needed, my tone of voice usually got the desired effect. The key was never to overreact or back down. I learned to stay one level above them in dominance. That kept them a little unsure of just what I might be capable of doing. And they seemed to respect the fact that I never did it. I didn't try to appear like a bear or be part of their dominance hierarchy. I was just a human being in the midst of these animals, but I would act the same way they did. I sort of got along with them and I said, well, you know, you guys take it as far as you want, but if you get to a level that I feel threatened, I'm going to come down on you real hard. Every bear had its own level of tolerance, so I treated each one differently. Some were safe to have very close, while others needed to stay further away. The trick was to avoid making the bears feel we were trying to threaten or dominate them. Yet, just like them, I wanted to set firm limits on what we would tolerate. If I caught a female damaging the weir, I reprimanded her. That way she'd never pass on that bad behavior to her cubs. As long as our relationship was based on respect, bears and humans could actually get along quite well. Eventually, I started taking my sons to the weir. They learned all about grizzly bears right by my side. By avoiding constant conflict, not only did I spend far less energy getting along with the bears, but the work became a lot safer. We're all the winners. The bears stayed alive, there wasn't a war going on, and I got to work and I continued the job. I did it for 37 years. A few years into the project, I started using video to record the bears' interactions and behaviors. Not only did this help me get to know individual grizzlies, it launched my career as a wildlife cinematographer. To keep track of them year after year, I began naming each grizzly and tracing its family history. I've worked with some bear families for over four generations now. I've noticed it's often the female offspring that inherit their mother's territories, practice the same methods of foraging, and display the same behaviors around other bears. The more accustomed to me and my camera the bears became, the greater the tolerance they showed. Eventually, I was able to follow certain grizzlies back into the woods and capture some of their more intimate moments. While filming, I came to appreciate the remarkable trust that had grown between us. Not only did I feel a mutual respect, but I could see it was being passed down by the mothers to their offspring. Surprisingly, many of the bears seemed as curious about what I was doing as I was about them. Hey, drop that! Get out of there! Oh, you little devils. My efforts encouraging tolerance also opened the door to helping with some field research. I was asked by a scientific organization to collect grizzly bear hair snagged on barbed wire for DNA sampling. With a video record, we were able to identify which bears the samples came from. I used an attractant to lure the grizzlies to a tree they used as a rubbing post. One at a time, guys. Just one at a time. Occasionally, my system was a little too successful. Unless I could film a single bear on its own, there was no way to know which hair samples belonged to which bear. Studying interactions at the weir revealed some surprises about how mothers raised their cubs. At first, these family squabbles seemed dangerous. Gradually, however, I learned these encounters weren't really disputes at all. Instead, mothers were teaching their offspring how to handle aggression and avoid violence. They used the weir as a sort of kindergarten where their cubs could learn the ropes. No real damage came from the tussles, and the youngsters learned valuable lessons. I soon learned that males and females have very different temperaments. While most young bears were usually comfortable near me, I had to be more cautious around males. A mother grizzly called Bernice brought her male cub to the weir. I named him Ace. I filmed Bernice off and on through her entire life, and she was one of the most tolerant and gracious grizzly bears I have ever known. Ace was the only male of three siblings. He was the dominant one, that bit of a troublemaker. And he seemed intent on living his entire life in just a couple of days. When he was a yearling, his trust and curiosity got the better of him. Stop right there, Ace. A little closer. Ace preferred to hang out with me rather than his mother. That can be a real danger. Sure enough, eventually he wanted to play with me. I knew better, but it was so tempting to let him come close. Ace took to making mischief. Nothing serious, but he had always looked me right in the eye, defiantly, to show me who was boss. His pranks included stealing anything that belonged to me. The more personal, the better. Eventually, I moved on from the salmon project to pursue wildlife filmmaking full-time. For me, learning about tolerance was the key that unlocked the world of grizzlies. Today, I continue using the lessons I learned at the weir to uncover more of their secrets. Unfortunately, much of what I learn about bears reveals how precarious their lives really are. The more we encroach on their world, the more conflict with humans threatens their survival. But it hasn't always been this way. Throughout the areas where grizzlies roamed, indigenous peoples coexisted with them for thousands of years. For grizzlies to survive, we have to rediscover how people and bears can get along. This has become a mission for me, one that takes me deep into some of the most remote wilderness in western Canada. Every summer, I go back to the same river in British Columbia, just downstream from the salmon weir. I also film grizzlies in northern Yukon, on the open tundra, in the mountains, and along a river near the Arctic Circle. With every expedition, I learn more about how grizzlies survive, and explore how people and bears can live together. When I'm filming grizzly bears, I always am in the presence of a apex predator. And they're a big, strong, powerful animal, and they have some pretty amazing tools to injure you with, so I have to give them room to feel comfortable. I never pursue bears. In their world, being pursued means an enemy and tends to kill you. I want them to know that I'm just here, and they can tolerate me if they want to. I never get in between them and their food source. Basically, I respect their citizenship in their environment. When I first started filming bears and working with bears, you know, I made all the mistakes. And I did have some hair-raising moments encountering bears, but I'm still alive. I've got a few scars, but none of them are from grizzlies. It's taken me years to learn how to stay safe around grizzlies. I never try to film bears without first building a relationship of mutual respect and trust. And you have to know when to draw the line. On the rare occasion when a bear doesn't respect the boundaries we've agreed to, I may have to resort to stronger measures to drive the point home. Oh yeah, I've seen that look before. You're going to come over here and show your buddy how brave you are, aren't you? No, you better stop there. No, you're not doing that. That's far enough. One more step. Holy. He's not going to be very happy with me after that, but better to get that done now and get it over with. He's pretty normal already. He's playing with his buddy again. You can't have him coming any closer than that. During July, this stretch of river is the final destination for tens of thousands of salmon migrating from the Pacific Ocean. Large chinook and much smaller pink salmon spawn in the final weeks of their lives. At times, this river is thick with salmon. Before long, grizzlies arrive for a feeding frenzy. Even though it's early in the season, these bears are now showing a survival mechanism called hyperphagia, telling them to gain weight. The race is on. It's a desperation time. They hardly notice me, recording one of nature's great spectacles of survival. What a treat for a young bear, finding this female chinook salmon that was dying on the riffle but virtually unspawned. She had a whole stomach cavity full of eggs. He's just like a kid with an ice cream cone, and he'll get every last one of those eggs. 100 percent fat. These bears now are gaining two to three pounds a day, and you can really see it. But not every grizzly is so fortunate. We've got a bear coming up to our homes. An old male that frequents this area. This guy could well be in his late 30s, and he's real thin. Sure looks like he could use a good meal. Poor old fella doesn't have enough teeth left in his gums to puncture a hole in that fish and pack it away. He'll probably have to tear it up with his claws in order to get at the meat. Just a little glimpse into how harsh nature can really be. I'm gonna set up right here. Here comes Katie. She's coming right on with her two two-year-olds. They're a little bit wary of me right at this distance here. She's just looking for fish, and she's phenomenal at it. I just love this bear. Ever since my days at the Weir, I've been fascinated by grizzly bears underwater. From my viewing platforms, I can study them moving around in a world where few people have ever seen them. Bears are swimming in this river all the time. They put their head and eyes underwater, just kind of like snorkeling around, and they'll go down into the deep of this pool and walk around looking at the carcasses and picking up something that's fresh. At 30, Foamy is one of the oldest mums on the river, and these cubs may well be her last. Despite her age, she can still perform some fishing tricks very few other bears can match. Spot is a young male, determined to add to his menu of live salmon by retrieving carcasses from the bottom. To seize his meal, he has to wrestle the powerful current. Filming grizzly bears underwater is just incredible. I can't believe how amazingly human-like they are. When they're walking on their hind legs, they control their limbs a lot like we would. They just paddle with their front feet, and they're swimming across from rock to rock, swimming around in these pools. Pretty fascinating to see that. Wherever grizzly bears and salmon are found together, bald eagles are likely to join the party. We've got one juvenile eagle that's showing a lot of aggression. He's really hungry and he's willing to take on anybody. It's a big female. Oh, brutal. It looks like that female is getting her retribution. That juvenile's hurting a bit, so you'll probably think twice before he tries that again with a bird that outweighs him by five pounds. It's quite something to see all this violent behavior these animals exhibit, and also how resilient they are. Unbelievable. Now we've got a bear coming in on this carcass, so the story is about to end. This bear smelt that all the way up the river. There's really not much left of that fish. Look at the setup right here on this big male. This is a chunky who's built like a boxcar, and a face that's like a road map from all the scar tissue. It's probably 700 or 800 pounds of bear right there. The older male bears, they just walk so deliberately, so confident. They definitely rule. I can't help thinking of these old champions as walking gene pools, yet in many places grizzly bear populations are disappearing, and patriarchs like these could be the last of their line. We still kill these animals for sport. We destroy the ecology they need to live and survive. We just continually take, and we never give anything back. I'm just so grateful that I got to work with these animals for the past 45 years, and I want to give something back to them. For years now, I've been visiting another remote tributary of the Taku, where sockeye salmon migrate to a lake in the mountains where they reproduce. Getting up there involves ascending a stretch of some pretty turbulent water. It's an evolutionary fitness test, and many of the competitors don't survive. Sockeye aren't the only ones who have to fight their way up the mountain, but it's what I have to do to film some very special grizzlies trying to intercept the migrating salmon. Right now, I've got a female grizzly bear with a beautiful young yearling in this rapid, fast-moving water with these huge boulders. She's negotiating around them. She's looking into their cracks, and she's coming in and out of these little rivulets. And the sockeye are hiding in these rocks, and she just knows that one of those fish is going to come back so far, and she's going to catch it right there. She's got it. The cub's watching mom. As soon as mom catches a fish, he tries to find his way over to her. The bears prefer sockeye over all the other fish, and right here, that's what they're getting, and they're getting lots of them. What an amazing strategy. You see them working as a team. The mom is preoccupied with the fish, and the little fella is watching out for other bears. If he smells or sees another bear, he's going to warn his mother. Even though he's just a yearling, he knows that that's his job. And sure enough, here comes a juvenile who can't pass up the opportunity to get some precious scraps of sockeye. But mom's taught her cub well, and the little guy will let this timid intruder know there's no free lunch. She's a big, strong bear, so she does quite well. She's learned to fish with a lot of the male population, like old females will do. I've been filming this bear since she was a cub, 29 years ago. Even as a young bear, she was confident fishing in fast-flowing water. She's reared a lot younger along this river, so she's been a big contribution to the bear population. Every spring, I head into the northern Yukon to film in the Richardson Mountains. It's a completely different world up here. Without a river teeming with salmon, the bears have to eke out a living by ranging across a vast, wide-open habitat. The whole area is alive in the spring. There's a diversity of wildlife in these mountains that really comes to life. A lot of the bears are still in their dens when I arrive here, but within a week or two, all the bears are out on the landscape. This is one of the few places in Yukon where grizzlies are protected from trophy hunters. So it's here that I can capture the natural behaviors of bears that rarely encounter humans. Out in the open, bears use their eyes more than they do in the forest. They watch the mountains, they watch the skylines, they watch all the ridges, and they will spot other animals, and they will spot me. People used to warn me that bears up here are different and could kill me if I got too close. But I've been doing this for years now, and grizzlies here behave the same as they do everywhere else. Occasionally, you will meet a bear in the mountains that is very tolerant of people. After slowly introducing yourself with four or five sessions, you can build up a little relationship with them, and they'll tolerate you through the whole day. I've come across them sleeping even at close distances after a whole year, and they just remember you immediately. The bear will turn and look at me. They know I'm there all the time, and they don't seem to mind. When I come across a bear I've never encountered before, it's always an opportunity to build tolerance and trust. This female was lucky to find a caribou carcass. Out in the open like this, she's clearly aware of me and a bit worried I might be after her meal. Eventually, she has to check out my intentions. This is the moment when many people would have grabbed their rifle and shot this bear. But because of what I learned at the weir about bear behavior, I know she's only making a bluff charge. She can't speak my language, so she's communicating in hers, saying, hey human, I'd rather you weren't here, and I need to know if you're after my meal. As soon as she sees I'm not going to run away or approach her, she starts to relax. Suddenly, the whole dynamic transforms into one of tolerance. Once you give a grizzly the respect it deserves and show you're not a threat, it will usually return the favor. This is coexistence in action. Every fall, my quest to record grizzlies takes me to one of the most remote bear habitats in Canada. In an enormous protected wilderness, grizzlies return to Bear Cave Mountain, and every year I'm waiting for them. Nice catch. Well, I'm on the Fishing Branch River in the northern Yukon, right on the Arctic Circle. In late September, chum salmon arrive here to spawn after a 1,500 kilometer journey from the Bering Sea. Between 20 and 30 hungry grizzlies come to the river at the same time as the chum. They're eager to gain as much weight as they can before heading to their dens to hibernate. I film this young mum every autumn during all nine years of her life. These are her first cubs, and I have no idea how they'll react to me. This could be another chance to experience coexistence. She's coming across the river, and her young are coming with her, and we'll just have a look at what they do. This is the very first time that they're coming in towards me. A little hesitant, but they always seem to take the cue from mum, so I expect them to come right by. And here they come. Just move right on past. Everything will be fine. Oh, that was wonderful. I love it up here when winter arrives. Groundwater percolates up through the substrate year-round, so this stretch of the fishing branch keeps flowing freely. The chum spawn right into November, and the grizzlies keep feeding on them, even when it's 40 below. The bear's fur becomes crusted in ice, and nothing makes a better ice scraper than your favourite rubbing tree. I first met Stanley when he was a cub 20 years ago. He's probably the best diving grizzly on the river. I've never seen another bear as skilled at picking up spawned out salmon from the bottom. As the spawning winds down, it gets harder for grizzlies to find enough chum to make it worth their while staying any longer. Eventually, even a deep diver like Stanley is ready to call it quits and head up the mountain to hibernate in a cave. It never ceases to amaze me how these bears have adapted to this habitat, and just how remarkable nature can be. I love all animals. It's not just the bears. The natural world is very intriguing to me. The whole ecology is special. I just find it so exciting, and I love to capture that and to share it. We're starting to be so disconnected with nature because we're losing these animals all the time, and I think that's a sad time for us in our soul when we lose wildlife. So I try my hardest to capture moments to bring some of that connection back. One way I try to nurture coexistence is through my two bear viewing camps. Guests come from all over the world to experience these grizzlies face to face. I guess I could say today that my time guiding hunters for grizzly bears wasn't totally wasted. I do have some bad feelings about it, but I've learned enough about the culture of that business to use it to conserve grizzly bears and keep the animal living on the planet. We have a bear behind us here somewhere. Oh, here he comes. It's Mario, yeah. Oh, he's beautiful. Yeah, he's quite a bear. We're gonna have interaction going on right here pretty quick. You see how it's all about the other bear, see? Not about us at all. Why don't you just play, you guys? Geez. Let's be friends. There we go. Atta boy. Oh my god. Well, it's just two young sub-adults. They know each other, of course, and they have played in the past, but every year they gotta learn each other's position in the hierarchy, a little bit of interaction, and then they'll get comfortable. And they love to play. So we could be seeing these bears for the rest of the time that they're here playing quite a bit. Just stay here and see what happens. Just don't move. There we go. Wow, that was amazing. Like, it was right there. You guys did great. We've seen that one before, haven't we? Facing grizzlies without fear and with mutual respect changes the entire relationship. Those will look nice. Yeah. When people discover what a bear really is and all the old myths just go out the window, they automatically, every one of them, become an ambassador for bears. It's a wonderful thing for me, knowing that these people now are doing what I set out to do. I want to do everything I can to end the story of conflict with bears and renew the story of coexistence. So my journey with grizzly bears isn't over yet.