Bear Farm
The bespectacled, bearded fellow shown
in the second row of photographs above is "bear man" Charlie Vandergaw, a
68-year-old former science teacher who resides on a homestead in the Yentna
River Valley, fifty miles northwest of Anchorage,
Alaska.
As the Anchorage Daily News reported
of him:
What goes on each
summer at Vandergaw's remote homestead is so far from the ordinary as to be
almost unbelievable. Visitors tell of him petting black and brown bears,
playing with grizzly cubs while sows stand by, sitting on bears and teaching
them tricks. His own photographs show even more. They capture him easing to
within feet of breeding grizzlies and nursing an injured brown
bear.
A visiting photographer
is amazed to see head-and-shoulder shots of breeding grizzlies taken with a
wide-angle lens — photos that would require the photographer to be within
feet, if not inches, of the
bears.
There are photos of
Vandergaw playing with grizzly cubs while their mother lounges nearby. There
are pictures of gangs of bears around his cabin, of individual bears in his
cabin, and even close-ups of a grizzly's injured
mouth.
It might all seem
unbelievable if not for the fact that his photos are confirmed, in effect, by
those taken by other photographers and by the black bear wandering around the
yard.
Vandergaw says his relationship with
bears dates to his retirement from teaching in 1985. Over the years he has fed
bears, befriended bears, nursed injured bears back to health, and allowed bears
inside his cabin; now it is not unusual to find several black and brown bears
lounging around his "Bear Farm" yard on any given day. Wildlife officials have
been critical of Vandergaw's activities, maintaining that he (and his human
visitors) risk an eventual mauling by the bruins, and that his conditioning the
creatures to become used to a human presence and to seek handouts of food puts
the bears at risk of being shot as dangerous pests. (Vandergaw maintains that
the bears are not his "pets" and that they "know better than to demand food from
people.")
