Inside Vancouver
Bear Man
By Masa Takei published May 1, 2008
Jeanie has 766 friends on Facebook. The Whistler mother is also notorious for taking her children into the resort village and picking food out of the garbage. “She’s just trying to be a good mother, doing what she thinks is best for her children,” says her long-time friend Michael Allen, 43. As Allen looks at 10-year-old photos of Jeanie, her reddish-brown hair strikingly beautiful, he admits that “these days, she’s looking beat-up and ugly.” Life’s been rough for Jeanie. Last year, one of her daughters was struck by a motor vehicle and died. Another daughter, Juniper, was shot and killed while perpetrating a break-in. Her son, Jack, was found on the shores of Lillooet Lake, shot by persons unknown. For five nights in December, Allen stayed with Jeanie from dusk to dawn, trying to keep her out of trouble. “If things continue the way they have,” he says, “she’ll be dead within a few years.”
Allen should know. He’s studied Jeanie, and the 100 or so other bears around Whistler, since moving to the area in 1993. His sister, a Whistler schoolteacher, knew his love of bears and urged him to check out the local population. “As soon as I got here,” he recalls, “I jumped on my mountain bike and rode down to the landfill. A bear ran across the old Cheakamus River bridge right in front of me. Then I got around the corner and there were four bears in the garbage. They didn’t even look up at me. I was in heaven.”
For the next five years he spent every free moment, many hours each day, observing the bears. He’d get to the dump at 4 in the morning and snooze until the bears drifted in around him. To make ends meet, he worked at snowmaking on the mountain and wielded a chainsaw on an trail crew. He’d return to the dump in the evenings. He once followed a bear over three days, out of Whistler, eventually emerging in Brackendale, 68 kilometres away.
“I doubt there’s anyone in the world who’s had as much field experience with black bears,” says Allen’s boss, Arthur DeJong, mountain planning and environmental resource manager for Whistler Blackcomb. Allen is not a trained biologist or zoologist. He’s simply a guy with an intense, unwavering interest in bears. One of his goals, he says, is to follow a group of female Whistler black bears from birth to death, a life cycle that typically spans between 20 and 25 years.
Recent Comments
Discussed
February 2009
I've read and printed Bear Man article many times and use it in my bear education. Michael is the real thing...a real Bear Man and I hope to get my Urban Bear Club (FBCN club) out to Whistler sometime this year for a Whistler Black Bear tour. I've only been once but it's a time to remember and inspire me when I get discouraged about bear people and what's happening to bears.
I'm writing the 1st article on "bears" for BC Nature, magazine for the Federation of BC Naturalists [FBCN] to come out in late March (spring issue). Join the FBCN and read it and get more information on Nature Clubs.
NORTH SHORE URBAN BEAR CLUB is a club that meets mostly by email but also has been invited by the BC Parks elders to use their Heritage Centre on lower Mount Seymour with BC Nature and generously offered the use of the boardroom and other facilities of Grouse Mountain Refuge for Endangered Wildlife [GMREW].
We're hopeful that orphaned black bears will have Intermediary Care, after primary rehab, before they are released, soon. More hope for bears.
And support Michael Allen and his work in Whistler. Michael has done more to educate people about black bears than all the brochures of anyone else. Wish we had him on the North Shore.
Join us. Betty at
