Woman fends off bear attack in her own garage

Knight Ridder Newspapers


Kim Heil-Smith of Devil Track Lake, Minn., stands in the entryway of her home where she was mauled by a black bear.


Clint Austin/KNT


DULUTH, Minn. -- Kim Heil-Smith walked into her garage outside Grand Marais, Minn., one night last week expecting to pull something out of her car.

Instead, she ended up wrestling a large black bear.

Heil-Smith, who was talking on a cordless phone at the time, opened the door from her home's entryway into the attached garage about 9:30 p.m. and found herself face-to-face with a sow and her cub.

"I opened the door and she was right there, between the car and the side of the house. She didn't have anywhere to go, so she came at me," said Heil-Smith, who lives on Devil Track Lake Road north of town.

"I tried to shut the door on her, but she was too strong. She wrapped her arms around me and I fell back."

The big bear bit her head, shoulder and both thighs.

Heil-Smith suffered multiple puncture wounds and scratches that required many stitches at Cook County North Shore Hospital, said John Shenett, Cook County Sheriff's Department deputy.

Heil-Smith, 37, who was home alone at the time of the attack, was amazingly calm and upbeat when describing the ordeal.

"I was pretty scared at first, I wasn't thinking. Then I just got mad at this bear being in my house. I finally was able to get my knee up so she couldn't bite me, and then I grabbed her nose and yelled, 'Get out of my house!' " she said. "I think that must have startled her because that's when she left."

She's also amazingly forgiving toward the bear.

"I don't blame her, really; she was just protecting her baby. I don't think she did it maliciously," Heil-Smith said.

Heil-Smith had been on the phone at the time with her friend, Debby Nelson. The phone was knocked out of her hand during the attack. But instead of yelling for help, Heil-Smith was yelling, "It's only a bear" to avoid scaring her friend."

I didn't want her to think it was a man with a gun or anything," Heil-Smith joked.

"She's pretty tough," Scott Smith said of his wife. "It was one mother against another. I wasn't here when it happened, but I could see the results when I got home."

After the bear left with its cub, Heil-Smith found the phone and dialed 911. When paramedics arrived, they found her cleaning blood off the floor.

"I didn't want my daughter to come home from volleyball and see all that blood," she said. "So they helped me clean it up as they were fixing me up."

A life-long resident of the Grand Marais, Minn., area, Heil-Smith said she's not really afraid of the many bears in the area. But she may check her garage closer next time she heads out.

"I usually close the garage door to keep them out of the garbage and the sunflower seeds. But I was going out again that night and I didn't close it this time," she said. "The bear was just helping her cub find food and I got in her way."

Dave Ingebrigtsen, assistant Department of Natural Resources wildlife manager in Grand Marais, said this attack sounds "more like a cornered animal than a problem bear."

There have been very few nuisance calls in the area and no reports of troublemaking bears.

"It doesn't sound to me like an animal we'd have to track down," he said.

Dave Garshelis, a DNR bear expert, agrees.

"Generally with black bears, there's no indication that females with cubs are more dangerous than a single bear. That comes from grizzly bears," Garshelis said. "Black bears generally aren't aggressive. But when any animal feels cornered, they'll sometimes act. Not very often, but it can happen."

The most recent attack in Minnesota occurred last year when an upland bird researcher was attacked in the Mille Lacs Wildlife Area. Wildlife experts believe that animal was unusually aggressive and the DNR tried, but failed, to track it down and destroy it.

Garshelis said black bears will almost always avoid confrontations with people. If they attack, Garshelis said, general wisdom suggests fighting back against black bears to ward them off. That's contrary to advice for grizzly bears, for which experts suggest playing dead.

Minnesota has more than 20,000 black bears.

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&cid=519&u=/ap/20031009/ap_on_re_us/bear_attack_3&printer=1

Alaska Bear Mauling Recorded on Tape
Wed Oct 8, 8:04 PM ET

By RACHEL D'ORO, Associated Press Writer

ANCHORAGE, Alaska - The graphic sounds of a fatal bear attack were recorded, Alaska state troopers discovered Wednesday while reviewing a tape recovered near the bodies of a wildlife author and his girlfriend.

Trooper Chris Hill said Timothy Treadwell may have been wearing a wireless microphone likely activated when he was attacked by the brown bear at Katmai National Park and Preserve. The videotape has audio only; the screen remains blank for the three-minute recording.

"They're both screaming. She's telling him to play dead, then it changes to fighting back. He asks her to hit the bear," Hill said. "There's so much noise going on. I don't know what's him and what might be an animal."

The bodies of Treadwell, 46, and Amie Huguenard, 37, both of Malibu, Calif., were found near Kaflia Bay on Monday after an air taxi pilot arrived to pick them up. The pilot contacted the National Park Service and state troopers to report a brown bear was apparently sitting on top of human remains at the campsite.

After rangers arrived one of them shot and killed a large brown bear when the animal charged through the dense brush. Rangers and troopers later killed a smaller bear apparently stalking them.

An autopsy on the human remains confirmed Wednesday the couple were killed by bears.

Troopers recovered video and still photography equipment as well as three hours of video footage from the site, across Shelikof Strait from Kodiak Island.

Much of the footage is close-up shots of bears — for which Treadwell was well-known.

Some scenes show bears no more than a few feet from Treadwell, co-author of "Among Grizzlies: Living With Wild Bears in Alaska." Others show a more timid Huguenard leaning away as bears come close to her on the bank of a river.

http://www.adn.com/front/story/4127139p-4142019c.html

Biologist believes errors led to attack
BEARS: Californians' choices may have contributed to fatal encounter.

By CRAIG MEDRED
Anchorage Daily News

(Published: October 10, 2003)

Human remains and clothing found in the stomach of a 28-year-old brown bear killed by National Park Service rangers Monday have confirmed that the animal fed on the bodies of California animal activist Timothy Treadwell and girlfriend Amie Huguenard, authorities reported Thursday.

Fresh details about the attack near Kaflia Bay in Katmai National Park on Alaska's southwest coast also began to emerge.

According to a memo from Alaska Department of Fish and Game biologist Larry Van Daele, Treadwell set up his bear-viewing camp "in such a way that bears wishing to traverse the area would have had to either wade in the lake or walk right next to the tent. A person could not have designed a more dangerous location to set up a camp.''

In videos found at the scene, Van Daele said, Treadwell described "his campsite as (in) a potentially dangerous location, but he expresses his confidence that he understands these bears and they will not harm him.''

On Wednesday, Fish and Game dispatched Van Daele -- author of a book on the history of the brown bears on Kodiak Island and an authority on the half-ton coastal cousins of the grizzly bear -- to Kaflia to investigate what is believed to be the first deadly bear attack in Katmai park history.

"What caused this individual bear to kill and eat humans is unknown,'' Van Daele concluded. "It was very old but not in remarkably poor condition.''

Most likely, the biologist said, there was a chance encounter between the people and the bear that resulted in the bear attacking and the situation worsening from there. Though authorities who arrived on scene Wednesday found two bears competing to eat the carcass of an adolescent bear also killed by rangers on Monday, Van Daele stressed that he saw nothing to indicate "strange bear behavior occurring in the area.''

Alaska brown bears commonly scavenge any mammal carcasses they find, but attacks on humans are rare and cases of brown bears actually eating humans are so uncommon that even calling them rare would be an overstatement.

Audubon Society biologist John Schoen and other experts on Alaska grizzly and brown bears on Thursday pointed out that Treadwell's proclivity for trying to get close to Alaska bears for more than a decade illustrates nothing so much as the bears' amazing tolerance for humans. The self-proclaimed former drug addict and eco-warrior from Malibu, Calif., regularly approached bears on his summer sojourns here, often easing to within feet of them while talking to them in a sing-song voice.

On videotape recovered at Treadwell's camp, Van Daele said, there is more evidence of this potentially dangerous behavior.

One "video shows Ms. Huguenard within 3 meters (10 feet) of a sow with cubs as they fish,'' Van Daele wrote.

"One of the cubs came even closer to her while (Treadwell) filmed. She seemed uncomfortable but did not move. Some journal entries suggest that she was not as comfortable with the situation as he was. One of the last of his journal entries described his dismay as a large, adult male fought with one of his (Treadwell's) favorite sows near the camp.''

Such fights among bears are not uncommon, particularly late in the year when the bears are scrambling to put on as much fat as possible before winter. A poor berry crop this year and tapering salmon runs would only compound the situation, said Van Daele, who noted that the smaller brown bear killed in the area by park rangers and Alaska State Troopers on Monday had been largely eaten by other bears by Wednesday.

Rangers, troopers and Fish and Game biologists had to drive one bear off what was left of the carcass and shoo away another lurking in the alders nearby in order to investigate Treadwell's camp. They literally battled their way in, firing firecracker shells and using the whoop-whoop-whooping of a helicopter overhead to drive the animals away and keep them away.

From what was found at the campsite in this bear-infested area, and other information, Van Daele said he developed a theory on how Treadwell and Huguenard might have died on Sunday night.

"We will never know exactly what happened, and it is somewhat risky to speculate,'' he warned, but in effort to lend some sense to what happened, he offered this hypothesis based on journals, videotapes and evidence at the scene.

"The most telling piece of information is an audio recording made during the actual bear attack. This goes on for about six minutes and starts with (Treadwell) outside of the tent investigating a bear that came into camp. It was obviously raining very hard at the time and seems to have been twilight or evening, judging from some comments.

"The bear attacks (Treadwell), and he calls for help. Ms. Huguenard opens the tent fly and is very upset. At her urging, he 'plays dead.' It sounds like the bear then retreated for a couple minutes but returned. It again went after him, and he begged her to hit it with something. She in turn screamed for him to fight. The audio ends with his sounds no longer evident and her screams continuing.

"Based on all the evidence, I would guess that this old, large boar had been hanging around the areas getting the last fish of the season. There was little else available to eat, and he competed with the sow for food. Although not in bad condition, he needed more fat for the winter.

"That evening, probably Sunday night, (the male) was walking along a major bear trail and walked by the tent. When he encountered Mr. Treadwell, the bear reacted and either bit him and/or hit him. When he 'played dead,' the bear left, but as is often the case, when Mr. Treadwell started moving again, and/or Ms. Huguenard came to his aid, the bear returned.

"At this time, for some reason, the bear killed and ate him. I suspect that Ms. Huguenard's screams, which sound eerily like a predator call, may have prompted the bear to return and kill her. He then cached her body to be eaten later.''

A predator call is a device hunters use to lure foxes, coyotes and wolves into rifle range. It has a high-pitched tone meant to imitate the call of an injured animal. The calls have been known to attract bears in Alaska.

The old boar that fed upon Treadwell and Huguenard -- and is likely the one that killed them both -- was estimated to weigh more than 1,000 pounds and had broken canine teeth. Van Daele doesn't think the other bear that rangers shot at the scene Monday, an apparent 3-year-old, had anything to do with the killings. That bear's stomach, along with most of its carcass, had already been consumed by other bears.

"In my assessment,'' Van Daele added at the end of a five-page memo, "Mr. Treadwell's actions leading up to the incident, including his behavior around bears, his choice of a campsite and his decision not to have any defensive methods or bear deterrents in the camp, were directly responsible for this catastrophic event.''

Treadwell had carried bear-repelling spray for self-protection when he first began coming to Alaska to commune with the bears but had stopped carrying it in recent years. The founder of Grizzly People, an organization for bear lovers, Treadwell didn't believe it was right to spray bears with the irritating pepper spray -- even if it caused no long-term injuries to the bears.

"He just felt that was an invasive, aggressive mechanism that translated into a kind of attitude. He didn't want to have that attitude,'' said friend Joel Bennett, a Juneau filmmaker. "He kind of wanted to resign himself to whatever happened.''

My gosh Lisa, I can't imagine what those two must have gone through! And, can you imagine opening your back door and coming face to face with a bear????!!!!

Makes me glad to live where I do at this "fattening up" time of the year.

That had to be just awful. I can't imagine.

We have a lot of black bears around this area.
They especially
like the slightly populated areas that butt up to the mountains.
They like to raid the garbage cans.

I hope everyone who has bears in their area will read this
and maybe be more careful out there.

Lisa

I have to say I hope they will be more carefull when they go out the door and especially at night when you can't see out there very well. It can put you to thinking can't it? I think what happened to those people was really awful.

http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/uniontrib/mon/opinion/news_1e20krist.html

The threat of wild animals to humans


October 20, 2003

There are many ways to die in the wilderness, the possibilities multiplied nearly to infinity by the blind ingenuity of nature, the caprice of fate and the boundless foolishness of human beings.

Even in this coddled age, when visitors to the wild have better gear, information about terrain and weather, and communication with potential rescuers than adventurers in any previous era, scores of Americans each year tumble off cliffs, are crushed by falling rocks and tree limbs, freeze, drown.

And some are killed by animals.

That was the highly publicized fate recently of two Malibu residents, fatally mauled by grizzly bears in Alaska's Katmai National Park and Preserve. The attacks on Timothy Treadwell and Amie Huguenard were deeply regrettable, not just because they claimed the couple's lives – Treadwell and Huguenard had invited tragedy with their naivetι – but because they reinforced the image of grizzlies as bloodthirsty killing machines too dangerous to share the landscape with people.

That distorted image has long been exploited by Westerners clinging to the frontier philosophy that predators should be exterminated as an inconvenience to ranchers. This is a critical point in the political debate over recovery of grizzlies and wolves from near-extinction in the Lower 48. Both species cling to tiny fractions of their historic habitat but are candidates for management by the states.

The outsize terrain bears and wolves occupy in our nightmares owes more to ignorance, however, than to fact. It is unfortunate that Treadwell, a wildlife educator, might through his death actually undermine the public's grasp of predator reality.

For years, the supervisor of Yellowstone National Park's Bear Management Office – responsible for minimizing conflicts between the park's 3 million annual visitors and its 400 to 600 grizzlies – has included an amusing riff in his public talks: a "Top 10 ways to die in Yellowstone" list in the style of David Letterman, based on mortality statistics collected over the past 160 years.

No. 10 is being shot by another visitor. The list includes being trampled by horses, being killed by Indians, crashing a horse-drawn carriage, hypothermia, suicide, hot-spring burns, airplane crashes, falls and – the No. 1 cause of park fatalities – drowning.

Attacks by grizzlies don't make the list (only five fatal encounters have been recorded in the park's history). And while park managers go to great lengths to instruct visitors in bear-country etiquette, they also focus on more likely wildlife encounters. At the Old Faithful visitor center, for example, it is possible to watch a grimly entertaining videotape of park visitors being trampled by bison after getting too close.

People are killed by animals in cities, too. The deadliest mammal in the United States (aside from human beings) is the pet pooch; each year nearly 600,000 Americans seek hospital treatment for dog bites and about a dozen die from the attacks. Stories about fatal dog maulings do not, however, send the same primal shiver down the spine as does news of a death in the wild by predation.

In his fine new book, "Monster of God: The Man-Eating Predator in the Jungles of History and the Mind," David Quammen refers to that horrified frisson as "the awareness of being meat." It is a blunt but entirely accurate summation.

By the reported accounts of friends, Treadwell paid lip service to the idea of grizzlies as potentially dangerous, but his behavior suggested delusion about their true character and his relationship with them. By ignoring sound advice about precautions he should take – choosing instead to provoke close encounters, sleeping and eating in their hunting grounds – he invited them to treat him as just another animal. Eventually, he got his wish. To the bears, Treadwell was not a spiritual companion; he was either a potential threat or a potential meal.

Untrained observers can advance our understanding of wildlife – Jane Goodall knew nothing about animal behavior when she began her landmark work with chimpanzees in Africa – but the only useful lesson Treadwell taught the public about grizzlies was that they remain ineluctably wild, irreducibly themselves, neither the bloodthirsty beasts of myth nor the benevolent giants of his imagination.

Be careful, and you can share the landscape with them. Be foolish, and you can end up dead. Wild grizzlies are an antidote to human arrogance, and that is a compelling reason to keep them around.


Krist can be reached via e-mail at krist@insidevc.com.

Copyright 2003 Union-Tribune Publishing Co.