Among the Bears: Raising Orphan Cubs in the Wild

by Benjamin Kilham, Ed Gray (With)

Overview

A first-person account of wild bear behavior that is both a thrilling animal story and a groundbreaking work of science. In the spring of 1993, Ben Kilham, a naturalist who lives in the woodlands of New Hampshire, began raising a pair of orphaned wild black bears. The experience changed his life. While spending thousands of hours with the cubs, Kilham discovered unknown facets of bear behavior that have radically revised our understanding of animal behavior. Now widely recognized for his contributions to wildlife science, Kilham reveals that bears are altruistic and cooperate with unrelated, even unknown individuals, while our closer relatives, the supposedly more highly evolved chimps, cooperate only within troops of recognizable members. Kilham, who turned a disability, dyslexia, to his advantage as a naturalist, offers fascinating insights into the emotional life of bears. His work-which has been featured in several National Geographic television specials-also illustrates the powerful black bear intelligence that has survived bounties and overhunting to make them North America's dominant omnivore, familiar to every reader. Beyond the natural history, he introduces individual bears who become enthralling and memorable characters. As in the bestselling books by Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey, Among the Bears explores the breaking down of mutual suspicion and building up of trust between species, with its hopeful implications for the shared future of humans and animals in the wild.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780692401552
Publisher:	Benjamin Kilham
Publication date:	03/05/2015
Pages:	306
Sales rank:	590,249
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.69(d)

About the Author

Benjamin Kilham is a woodsman and naturalist who over the past twenty-five years has discovered and then field-tested a new, exciting wildlife biology. Ed Gray is a naturalist writer and founder of Gray's Sporting Journal. They both live in Lyme, New Hampshire.

Read an Excerpt

Springtime in New Hampshire begins in February, with the lengthening days that deliver the first thaws. The bright sun and deep blue skies give way to star-filled nights, when subzero temperatures remind us we're still in winter's grip. These are the wake-up calls that prod my wife, Debbie, and me to get ready for the maple-sugaring season in Lyme, the small town on the Connecticut River where we live. It's a glorious time to be outside after a long cold winter, though the work seems unending: digging out the snowshoes; repairing sap lines, which stay on the trees year round unless they've been downed by fallen limbs and trees or chewed by fox, coyote, bobcat, and squirrel; and finally tapping the trees themselves. All of this before the elusive first sap run.

Until 1993, the year the bears came to stay with us, life in the Kilham household had taken on a comfortable rhythm during the early spring. From that first promising sap run, usually early in March, to the last one at the beginning of April, my time was always split between our sugaring operation and my mainstay of gunmaking, an exhausting work schedule entirely dependent on the sap runs. On a typical morning at our house on the village green back then, I would see Debbie off to her office job at seven and within the hour be out the door myself. The mud and snow would crunch beneath my feet in our driveway as I walked by the empty raven cage on the way to my shop.

The ten-foot-high cage — one side of which covered the south side of my shop and the other attached to the house — had only recently gone empty, a quiet testament to the aging of my father that I tried not to think about. The cage had once been a vibrant and life-restoring place, holding a number of recuperating ravens and crows as my father patiently observed their behavior while we nursed them back to health. But now he was in his late eighties, and though his mind was still sharp and would stay that way for several more years, the frailties of his advancing age had finally come between him and the handling of his beloved birds. A way of life for our family now seemed to have passed, and there was little I could do about it. The cage, I thought, was likely to stay empty for some time to come.

Meanwhile, I had work to do, and lots of it. At the door of the shop, I'd grab the lock in my hands to warm it a bit before dialing the numbers of the combination. The door would then open and close behind me with a loud, extended creak. (Old friends and even new customers still tell me I should fix the door. It's not much of an advertisement for your mechanical skills, they say, usually with a smile but not always. I don't mind. I learned a long time ago to live with the friendly jibes and open criticism of people who don't understand my methods. So I don't bother to explain that I leave the door that way on purpose; the loud creaking serves me well by announcing anyone entering the shop, even when I'm operating high-speed machine tools. That's another thing I learned a long time ago, even before I learned I had dyslexia: to accept a good solution when it presents itself, even if others would never have done things that way and still can't see that it is a solution.)

As always, a blast of warm air would hit my face with the smells of a gun shop — a mixture of machine oil, solvents, and cutting oil which permeates the room. Then, as now, the shop was cluttered with too many tools, too many guns, and too many papers. As I walked past my desk and the oak-and-glass counter, I reached out to poke on the radio to a country western station; I like to listen to songs with lyrics I can understand. Passing the bluing ranks (which I use to put the black finish on guns), my old 1940s Cincinnati horizontal milling machine, my new heat-treating furnace, the Buffalo drill press, and finally the most important machine in the shop — the Bridgeport vertical milling machine — I would reach my bench. Behind the bench is a large South Bend lathe, surface grinder, welder, and assorted polishers and sanders. Along with the machine tools, on a given day I might work with a multitude of hand tools, including micrometers, calipers, screwdrivers, punches, chisels, rasps, and files.

I have been in the gunsmithing business for twenty-four years. Most of the time, I'm juggling five or six projects at once. Short-term projects, such as adjusting trigger pulls, I can complete in one sitting; longer projects, such as building a custom rifle, require a lot of planning and a variety of skills. I don't think I would have found this career without the understanding and encouragement of my high school principal, who gave me the chance to pursue it when barely anyone had even heard of dyslexia, let alone knew how to handle someone afflicted with it. Today, even with so many programs and required funding for special education, it's hard to imagine a high school principal encouraging one of his or her students to pursue gunmaking as an independent study project — even when it is exactly the right thing to do.

During sugaring season, I'd generally work in the shop until noon, when the sun was high enough to make the maple sap run; then I'd drive the five miles out to our sugar house. Our eighty-acre, 1,200-tap sugar bush is situated on a series of wooded ledges with plastic-tube sap lines that flow into a central holding tank. The holding tank is partway up the hill behind the sugar house; when the tank is full, we run the sap into another tank by the sugar house and then directly into the evaporator.

As I approached the sugar bush on a day in early April 1993 — the day before my life changed forever — the sun was bright and the water glistened off the mud on the town road, a good sign that the sap would be running already. In New Hampshire during this time of year, you can count on both frost heaves and mud, and the driveway leading to our sugar house was muddy that day. But I knew where the soft spots were, and I drove up to the sugar house without getting my old pickup stuck or unnecessarily adding to already-deep ruts in the path. I could hear the sap splashing against the side of the holding tank as I got out of my truck. The day looked promising.

After transferring the sap into the tank by the sugar house and filling the five-by-fifteen-foot evaporator with wood, I fit the fire. The evaporator's firebox can handle firewood four feet long; it provides enough energy to remove 250 gallons of water an hour, which produces five gallons of pure maple syrup. The heat bat up, and soon steam billowed out of the cupola and from both ends of the building. There was so much sap that I ended up boiling it through the night and into the next morning. I got home just in time to hear my telephone ringing. It was Forrest Hammond, calling from neighboring Vermont.

"Ben," he said. "Would you consider raising a couple of orphaned bear cubs?"

"Frosty" Hammond was the Vermont Fish and Wildlife biologist in charge of the ongoing Stratton Mountain Bear Project. Of course I'd heard of it. And the question itself hadn't come completely out of the blue; I was a licensed wildlife rehabilitator with both state and federal permits, and there aren't that many of us around. I even had some experience with a bear; a yearling, which was thought to have been struck by a car that past December, was then in one of our rehab cages. Because the little bear seemed to have lost her coordination, Debbie and I had named her Wobbly Bear. Like all the other creatures we had helped, Wobbly Bear was a rehab project; our hope was to get her on her feet and back in the woods as quickly as we could, even though her neurological condition might make that impossible. But cubs? Even with my limited knowledge of bears, I knew this much: cubs were a long-term project.

Frosty explained his problem: In seven years, forty-nine wild black bears had been closely studied, primarily by being monitored with telemetry, a process by which bears are fitted with special collars that transmit radio signals on individual frequencies so the bears can be tracked separately. In a normal year, Frosty continued, sows with cubs can usually have their collars changed without disrupting the family, but 1992 had not been a normal year. The beechnut crop failed in the fall, and six of the seven sows in the study had no cubs. The seventh sow, the mother of twins, was underweight and abandoned her cubs after having her malfunctioning collar changed. Frosty monitored her activities over the next five days with telemetry until he was sure she had taken another den and would not return. Concerned about the cubs' health after at least two days alone in the den, he asked Alcott Smith, a local veterinarian, to help him remove the cubs from the den. Then he called me.

Although I had the required state and federal permits, Frosty would still have to handle the red tape. The permit to raise black bear cubs could only be given at the discretion of the executive director of the New Hampshire Fish and Game Department, Donald Normandeau. Since the cubs came from Vermont, Frosty would have to obtain permission from the commissioner of Fish and Wildlife in Vermont as well. Both departments were aware that I had Wobbly Bear in my care at the time, so Frosty thought he could go through channels and obtain permission rather quickly. The cubs, he said, could be ready for me by April 13; if I decided to take them, that would give me just a few days to make preparations.

My feelings about taking the cubs were, to say the least, mixed. On the one hand, I knew that in many cases black bear cub rehabilitation has been unsuccessful, usually because the cubs become too habituated to people to be returned to the wild. Two years down the road, Debbie and I could end up with a couple of unreleasable bears for which we'd have to find a "home." But there wouldn't be any homes. Not for meat-eating animals that weigh hundreds of pounds, with appetite and strength to match.

On the other hand, I already had my own unconventional theory on how the cubs could be raised successfully. Instead of keeping them in a cage, my idea was to walk with and handle them without restraint, and to do so in an unfenced, big-woods setting. But for this scheme to work, I would have to establish a relationship with the cubs, to become one with them. At the same time, I would have to turn a deaf ear to the "known fact" that tame cubs would become troublesome bears. While this might be true with pen-raised bears, I guessed that the exposure of the cubs to their natural habitat and to the wild bears living there would override their dependence on me. After all, if cubs naturally leave their mothers at eighteen months, surely they should be able to leave me, a surrogate who isn't even a bear. If I was right, these cubs, when given the choice, would choose the company of wild bears over the company of humans.

My plan, radical to others but not to me, was to raise the cubs in as natural a set of circumstances as possible, so that their instincts and ability to learn would enable them to develop normally. In the process, I hoped, I would be given an unprecedented look into the intimate lives of wild bears as they were growing up. But I also knew my limitations. Could I teach the cubs what natural foods to eat? Could I respond quickly enough to danger to send them up a tree and out of harm's way? If bear cubs learn by following and imitating their mother, which was the currently accepted theory, how would it affect them to follow and imitate me? Was it ethical for me even to try?

Copyright (c) 2002 Benjamin Kilham and Ed Gray

Table of Contents

	Preface	xi
Chapter 1	The First Cubs	1
Chapter 2	The First Walks	10
Chapter 3	The Beginnings of an Education	15
Chapter 4	Delicacies, van Gogh, and a Dark Cloud	27
Chapter 5	Impossible Lessons and the Fabric of Learning	34
Chapter 6	Summertime, and the Living Is Easy	39
Chapter 7	Nature's Bounty and a Long Walk Home	48
Chapter 8	Mysteries, Gunfire, and the Escape Artist	58
Chapter 9	Bear Hunters and Late-Night Dining	67
Chapter 10	Slowing Down	74
Chapter 11	To Den, Finally	81
Chapter 12	Time to Think	87
Chapter 13	A New Year in March	91
Chapter 14	A Very Difficult Month	104
Chapter 15	Moving On	119
Chapter 16	Between the Bears	133
Chapter 17	The Triplets Arrive	138
Chapter 18	Public Notice	166
Chapter 19	The Triplets Grow Up	169
Chapter 20	Squirty Stays Close	189
Chapter 21	Squirty Has Cubs	197
Chapter 22	The Moose Mountain Cubs	207
Chapter 23	Squirty's Dynasty Begins	211
Chapter 24	Confrontation and Resolution	214
Chapter 25	Bears in the Backyard	226
Chapter 26	What Is It About a Bear?	246
	Epilogue	275
	Acknowledgments	277
	Index	279

Editorial Reviews

The Barnes & Noble Review
Ben Kilhamm, a naturalist living in rural New Hampshire, takes the reader on a wonderful and insightful journey into the lives of wild bear cubs. He begins his adventure at the suggestion of a friend who has two abandoned and malnourished bear cubs. Although Kilhamm has spent his life around animals, helping to care for those that were sick and injured, this would be his first experience with bears. He begins with very little knowledge of raising cubs and decides that the best way for these bears to have a future is to be raised in the wild. And so Ben begins his life as a surrogate mother to the cubs, and with this new role comes lots of adventure and mishap.

As the bears bond with their surrogate parent, we are given a deeper insight into how bears communicate, experience the world around them, and care for each other. With each set of cubs that Ben brings up we are introduced to different and complex personalities. We find out through Ben's experience that the bears' bond with each other and him by suckling. We also learn that they communicate their plans to each other ahead of time, with one of the cubs letting Ben know what they intend. As the bears get older, Ben takes them on longer journeys through the woods of New Hampshire, and it is during these walks that we see the cubs explore their world. Some of the trees that the cubs come upon seem to really excite them, indicating that they are a bulletin board of sorts for the bears in the area. When one of the cubs is left behind, it will let out a cry of distress, and its sibling will respond by going back. The cubs also help each other navigate; if one has trouble climbing down a rocky slope, the other will go back and offer instruction, guiding its sibling the whole way down. Ben also conducts little experiments with the cubs: At one point he leaves a mirror in their pen and observes their highly interesting reactions.

Reading about Ben's cubs, the reader becomes invested in their future, rooting for them to make it safely into adulthood and beyond. We are being given a special insight into the lives and personalities of these subtle creatures. The author's decision to write about his experiences has helped to break down some of the myths about bears and to show us how intricately connected everything in nature is. This book makes for a wonderful and enlightening read. (Stephanie Clark)

bn.com

Among the Bears is the best book I have read about these subtle and intriguing creatures. It shows how even an amateur naturalist with empathy,dedication, and acute observation can obtain important and illuminating insights into the life of a species that seemed well known.

George B. Schaller

An absorbing, often searing account of one of the world's most interesting animals,this wonderfully comprehensive account is a fitting tribute to the black bear, and also to its author,Ben Kilham, for his insight and dedication.

Elizabeth Marshall Thomas

A riveting story by a maverick researcher. This important book will challenge your notions of how animals think,how young mammals learn,and the ways in which bears and people see the world. Ben Kilham's humble and clear-eyed view of these highly intelligent animals,at once so like humans and yet so different,deserves a place beside Jane Goodall's studies of the chimpanzees of Gombe.

Sy Montgomery

Among the Bears provides the first in-depth discussion of what it is like to be a bear. It is a passionate account told by Ben Kilham,a naturalist who has dedicated a lifetime to understanding what makes bears tick. After reading this book,you will never again think of bears in the same way. Yes,they are greedy and cute,but they are also much, much more.

Marc Hauser

Like any expectant parent, naturalist Kilham anticipated challenges in raising the newborns who joined his family in 1993. But as the "mother" to orphaned black bear twin cubs, he had no Dr. Spock to turn to for advice. A licensed wildlife rehabilitator, Kilham wanted to raise the cubs to live successfully in the wild, but had to rely largely on his own common sense to achieve this goal. So he let the cubs teach him, by closely observing and noting their behavior as they rambled together in New Hampshire's northern woods. This engrossing account, which Kilham wrote with the help of naturalist writer Gray, is both an affecting story of interspecies friendship and a surprising refutation of ursine stereotypes. To date, Kilham has raised 26 black bears; the experience has convinced him that, contrary to popular belief, these large carnivores are highly social and are as intelligent as the great apes; they can teach, learn and even deceive. Black bears, Kilham insists, can be "remorseful, empathetic, fearful, selfish, altruistic, joyful and deceitful" and have developed "mechanisms for solving disputes and demonstrating need." With the human population encroaching ever deeper into bear territory, however, human ignorance can create "problem" bears who raid backyard bird feeders or garbage cans. Having lost several of his young bears to bullets from such property owners, Kilham urges people to attempt a better understanding of an animal he finds "closely related" to humans. This important book is sure to be a milestone in the study of animal behavior. 8-page color insert not seen by PW. National author tour. (Mar. 6) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

An intuitive appreciation of young bear behavior, observed and gathered at ground level, from wildlife rehabilitator Kilham. The New Hampshire state wildlife department asked Kilham to adopt a couple of bear cubs six years ago. His work with those cubs, and a selection of other cubs from more recent vintages, are chronicled here. Kilham doesn't pose as an expert, and his writing is of the unvarnished variety, but he quickly and easily establishes himself as an observant individual who makes sensible comments upon the vast amount of fieldwork he has done. His plan was to "raise the cubs in as natural a set of circumstances as possible," so that they might return to the wild. He frames this narrative as a story of their days together, he and the cubs, and lets the information slowly accrue before attempting any conjectures on the bears' behavior. He forms a very close bond with the cubs, but there is always that unpredictable quality to the bears that reminds Kilham and reader alike that these are wild creatures and that the ground we share is shaky with potential misunderstandings and palpable consequences. Kilham has got opinions about such traits as altruism ("thought by many to be solely a human trait," but regarded by just as many as an established animal behavior), self-recognition, the use of tools, as well as everyday survival behavior such as food finding, all buttressed by copious direct observation. He has even discovered an organ in the bear's mouth, "probably to be known as the Kilham organ," used to identify plant chemistry. Where he really shines, though, is in bear-sound interpretation, including a glossary of sounds from moans to "eh-eh" to "huh, huh, huh, huh, huh,"something you ought never hope to hear. The kind of primary research that leads to those rare insights that come to be known as understanding. (8-page color insert, not seen) Author tour

Kirkus Reviews

"Compelling . . . [Kilham's stories] paint a vivid picture of ursine social life and intelligence."—The New York Times Book Review

"Among the Bears is the best book I have read about these subtle and intriguing creatures."—George B. Schaller, Wildlife Conservation Society

"Engrossing . . . both an affecting story of interspecies friendship and a surprising refutation of ursine stereotypes. This important book is sure to be a milestone in the study of animal behavior."—Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher