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Bear Man
Last year, authorities in
Whistler had to kill a dozen bears. The resort community
doesn’t have a bear problem, says Michael Allen.
It has a human problem
By Masa Takei
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.
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