dead, 2 injured in bear attack at MT campground

[EvilDon]

 dead, 2 injured in bear attack at MT campground
By MATT VOLZ, AP
Wed Jul 28, 5:30 PM EDT
At least one bear rampaged through a campground Wednesday near Yellowstone National Park in the middle of the night, killing one person and injuring two others during a terrifying attack that forced people to hide in their cars as the animal tore through tents.

Three separate attacks left a male dead and a female and another male injured at the Soda Butte campground. The female suffered severe lacerations from bites on her arms, and the surviving male was bitten on his calf. Both were hospitalized in Cody, Wyo.

Wildlife officials did not release the identities or ages of the victims. A response team was being sent to piece together what happened.

"We don't know if it was one bear, two bears, a black bear or grizzly bear," Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks spokesman Ron Aasheim said. "Obviously, the bear's gone now. Will it come back tonight? That's the question."

Authorities were setting traps and seeking bear hair, saliva and droppings while measuring the bite wounds of victims to determine the type and number of bears involved in the attack.

Park County dispatchers took a 911 call early Wednesday from a male reporting that a bear had bitten his ankle and was tearing up tents, Aasheim said. Dispatchers got two more calls, including one from a man who said a bear bit the leg of his daughter's boyfriend.

At 3:50 a.m., park officials went through the campground to advise campers to get into their cars. A half-hour later, the dead male was discovered at a campsite. Authorities then evacuated the campground, sending campers to nearby hotels.

It was not immediately clear how many people were in the campground at the time.

The same campground was the site of a 2008 attack in which a grizzly bear bit and injured a man sleeping in a tent. A young adult female grizzly was captured in a trap four days after the attack and transported to a bear research center at Washington State University in Pullman.

The 10-acre Soda Butte campground has 27 sites for tents and recreational vehicles in Gallatin National Forest, some five miles from the northeastern entrance of Yellowstone National Park.

It is located just off the mountainous Beartooth Highway about 125 miles southwest of Billings.

"It is a populated area for bears, not just grizzly bears but black bears," Gallatin National Forest spokeswoman Marna Daley said.

The campground, which is run by the U.S. Forest Service, has been closed, as well as two other nearby campgrounds, Daley said. Forest Service officials will consider closing more campgrounds after consulting with state wildlife officials leading the investigation, she said.

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AP Writer Amy Beth Hanson contributed to this report.

Copyright 2010 The Associated Press

[EvilDon]

Survivor of Mont. bear attack says she played dead
 

By MATTHEW BROWN, AP
Thu Jul 29, 9:04 AM EDT
A woman who was attacked by a bear in the middle of the night at a busy campground was bitten on her arm and leg before she instinctively played dead so the animal would leave her alone, she said Thursday.

At least one bear rampaged through the campground near Yellowstone National Park on Wednesday, killing one man and injuring Deb Freele of London, Ontario, and another man.

Appearing on the network morning talk shows from a Wyoming hospital, Freele said she woke up just before the bear bit her arm.

"I screamed, he bit harder, I screamed harder, he continued to bite," she said.

Her survival instinct kicked in, and she realized that the screaming wasn't working.

"I told myself, play dead," she said. "I went totally limp. As soon as I went limp, I could feel his jaws get loose and then he let me go."

She said the bear was silent.

"I felt like he was hunting me."

A frequent camper, Freele said that she was already prepared hours after the attack to go camping again, though she acknowledged that it will take time to recover both physically and emotionally.

She suffered severe lacerations and crushed bones from bites on her arms. The male survivor, thought to be a teenager, suffered puncture wounds on his calf.

The names and ages of the male victims have not been released.

The bear attack was the most brazen in the Yellowstone area since the 1980s, wildlife officials said. Wildlife officials still were trying to capture the bear — or bears — late Wednesday with five baited traps. The campground was closed.

One camper said he heard the screams from two of the attacks.

Don Wilhelm, a wildlife biologist from Texas, thought the first scream was just teenagers, maybe a domestic dispute in the middle of the night. He tried to go back to sleep, stifling thoughts that a beast might be lurking outside his family's tent.

Minutes later, another scream — this one coming from the next campsite over, where a bear had torn through a tent and sunk its teeth into Freele's arm.

"First she said, "No!' Then we heard her say, 'It's a bear! I've been attacked by a bear!'" said Wilhelm's wife, Paige.

By that point, the bear already had ripped into another tent a few campsites away, chomping into the leg of a teenager who had been sleeping with his family. The solo camper who was killed was at the other end of the Soda Butte Campground.

Then, the screams stopped.

After a quick parental back-and-forth over whether to shield their 9- and 12-year-old sons with their bodies or make a break for it, the Wilhelms took advantage of the silence and darted to their SUV.

They drove around the campground, honking their horns and yelling to alert other campers. Along the way, the met with a truck leaving the campground with the teenage victim, who apparently tried in vain to fight off the bear by punching it in the nose.

"It was like a nightmare, couldn't possibly happen," Paige Wilhelm said later.

In 2008 at the same campground, a grizzly bear bit and injured a man sleeping in a tent. A young adult female grizzly was captured in a trap four days later and transported to a bear research center in Washington state.

The latest attack had residents and visitors to this national park satellite community on edge. Many were carrying bear spray, a pepper-based deterrent more commonly seen in Yellowstone's backcountry than on the streets of Cooke City.

"The suspicion among a lot of the residents is that the bear they caught (in 2008) was not the right one," said Gary Vincelette, who has a cabin in nearby Silver Gate.

Last year, another grizzly broke into three cabins in Silver Gate, said Vincelette. That bear was shot and killed by a resident when it returned to the area.

"Three attacks in three years — we haven't ever had anything like that and I've been coming up here since I was a kid," Vincelette said.

About 600 grizzly bears and hundreds of less-aggressive black bears live in the Yellowstone area.

The region is pasted with hundreds of signs warning visitors to keep food out of the bruins' reach. Experts say that bears who eat human food quickly become habituated to people, increasing the danger of an attack.

Yet in the case of the Soda Butte Campground attack, all the victims had put their food into metal food canisters installed at campsite, said Fish, Wildlife and Parks Warden Capt. Sam Sheppard.

"They were doing things right," Sheppard said. "It was random. I have no idea why this bear picked these three tents out of all the tents there."

The 10-acre campground in Gallatin National Forest has 27 sites.

Two other campgrounds were also closed while the attacking bear or bears remained at large. U.S. Forest Service officials said they would consider closing more campgrounds after consulting with state wildlife officials leading the investigation.

___

AP Writers Matt Volz and Amy Beth Hanson in Helena contributed to this report.

Copyright 2010 The Associated Press

[EvilDon]

Grizzly caught after MT mauling that killed MI man
 

By MATTHEW BROWN, AP
Thu Jul 29, 6:20 PM EDT
A mother grizzly and two of her three cubs have been captured after killing a Michigan man and injuring two other people during an overnight rampage through a campground near Yellowstone National Park.

The sow, estimated to weigh 300 to 400 pounds, was lured into a trap fashioned from culvert pipe covered by the dead victim's tent Wednesday evening. The bear tore down the tent again and was caught in the trap, said Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks spokesman Ron Aasheim.

By Thursday morning, two of the year-old bears had been caught and the third could be heard nearby, calling out to its mother.

Montana wildlife officials on Thursday identified the man killed in the mauling as Kevin Kammer, 48, of Grand Rapids, Mich. The bear pulled Kammer out his tent and dragged him 25 feet to where his body was found, Aasheim said.

The other victims, Deb Freele of London, Ontario, and an unidentified male, have been hospitalized in Cody, Wyo.

Fish, Wildlife and Parks Warden Capt. Sam Sheppard said he was confident they had captured the killer bear because it came back to the same site where the man was killed early Wednesday.

Sheppard described the rampage — in which campers in three different tents were mauled as they slept — as a highly unusual predatory attack.

"She basically targeted the three people and went after them," Sheppard said. "It wasn't like an archery hunter who gets between a sow and her cubs and she responds to protect them."

Officials have said the sow will be killed after DNA evidence confirms it was the same bear that attacked the victims.

"Everything points to it being the offending bear, but we are not going to do anything until we have DNA samples," Aasheim said.

State and federal wildlife officials will determine the fate of the cubs. Sheppard said they are unlikely to be returned to the wild because they could have been learning predatory behavior from their mother.

Freele said Thursday she was bitten on her arm and leg before she instinctively played dead so the animal would leave her alone.

Appearing on network morning shows from a Wyoming hospital, Freele said she woke up just before the bear bit her arm.

"I screamed, he bit harder, I screamed harder, he continued to bite," she said, adding that she could hear her bones breaking. "I told myself, play dead," she said. "I went totally limp. As soon as I went limp, I could feel his jaws get loose and then he let me go."

Freele said the bear was silent.

"This, to me, was just an absolutely freaky thing," she said. "I have to believe that the bear was not normal. It was very quiet, it never made any noise. I felt like it was hunting me."

Freele suffered severe lacerations and crushed bones from bites on her arms. The male survivor, thought to be a teenager, suffered puncture wounds on his calf.

The bear attack was the most brazen in the Yellowstone area since the 1980s, wildlife officials said.

One camper said he heard the screams from two of the attacks, which started around 2 a.m. Wednesday.

Don Wilhelm, a wildlife biologist from Texas, thought the first scream was just teenagers, maybe a domestic dispute in the middle of the night. He tried to go back to sleep, stifling thoughts that a beast might be lurking outside his family's tent.

Minutes later, another scream — this one coming from the next campsite over, where a bear had torn through a tent and sunk its teeth into Freele's arm.

"First she said, "No!' Then we heard her say, 'It's a bear! I've been attacked by a bear!'" said Wilhelm's wife, Paige.

By that point, the bear already had ripped into another tent a few campsites away, chomping into the leg of a teenager who had been sleeping with his family. The solo camper who was killed was at the other end of the Soda Butte Campground.

Then, the screams stopped.

After a quick parental back-and-forth over whether to shield their 9- and 12-year-old sons with their bodies or make a break for it, the Wilhelms took advantage of the silence and darted to their SUV.

They drove around the campground, honking their horns and yelling to alert other campers. Along the way, they met with a truck leaving the campground with the teenage victim, who apparently tried in vain to fight off the bear by punching it in the nose.

"It was like a nightmare, couldn't possibly happen," Paige Wilhelm said later.

In 2008 at the same campground, a grizzly bear bit and injured a man sleeping in a tent. A young adult female grizzly was captured in a trap four days later and taken to a bear research center in Washington state.

The latest attack had residents and visitors to Cooke City on edge. Many were carrying bear spray, a pepper-based deterrent more commonly seen in Yellowstone's backcountry than on the streets of the national park satellite community.

"The suspicion among a lot of the residents is that the bear they caught (in 2008) was not the right one," said Gary Vincelette, who has a cabin in nearby Silver Gate.

Sheppard, the warden captain, said there was no truth to that.

The grizzly involved in the latest attack showed no outward signs of sickness or starvation that might have explained its unusual behavior, said Fish Wildlife and Parks spokeswoman Andrea Jones.

About 600 grizzly bears and hundreds of less-aggressive black bears live in the Yellowstone area.

The region is pasted with hundreds of signs warning visitors to keep food out of the bruins' reach. Experts say bears who eat human food quickly become habituated to people, increasing the danger of an attack.

Yet in the case of the Wednesday's attack, all the victims had put their food into metal food canisters installed at campsite, Sheppard said.

"They were doing things right," he said. "It was random. I have no idea why this bear picked these three tents out of all the tents there."

The 10-acre Soda Butte Campground in Gallatin National Forest has 27 sites.

Two other campgrounds were also closed while the attacking bear or bears remained at large.

___

Associated Press Writer Amy Beth Hanson in Helena contributed to this report.

Copyright 2010 The Associated Press

[EvilDon]

Grizzly bear euthanized after Mont. triple mauling
 
 ...
By MATTHEW BROWN, AP
Fri Jul 30, 7:33 PM EDT
Wildlife officials euthanized a grizzly bear Friday after DNA tests confirmed that the sow and her cubs were responsible for a triple mauling that killed a Michigan man and injured two other campers.

Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks said in a statement that hair, saliva and tissue samples tested at a Laramie, Wyo., lab determined the adult bear was the same one that rampaged through Soda Butte Campground near Yellowstone National Park early Wednesday.

The sow's three cubs will be sent to ZooMontana in Billings, said Chris Servheen, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service grizzly bear recovery coordinator. The zoo and wildlife officials were making arrangements Friday and they hoped the transfer would take place as soon as possible, he said.

Jackie Worstell, executive director of the Billings zoo, said the cubs would join its grizzly exhibit, which already features a Eurasian brown bear and another grizzly from Yellowstone.

Worstell said she doesn't believe the cubs will have learned the predatory behavior that their mother displayed in the unprovoked attacks at the campground.

"They're so young and it was a one-time incident," she said.

Officials will perform an autopsy on the sow to determine if any physical ailments or conditions caused her to attack the campers, Servheen said.

Grizzly bears that display unprovoked aggressive behavior toward humans, or cause death or substantial human injury, should be removed from the population under an agreement among eight state and federal agencies, state wildlife officials said.

The sow and two of the three cubs were trapped by Thursday, and the last cub was captured early Friday. The bears — crying and scratching at the steel sides of traps — were taken from the Soda Butte Campground in a three-truck convoy to Bozeman.

Their departure brought relief among residents and visitors in Cooke City, an old mining town just outside Yellowstone National Park that was jolted by news that three people were attacked as they slept in separate tents.

"They captured them? All of them?" asked Linda Olson. The 60-year-old nurse from Minnesota let out a sigh when she learned the answer was yes.

Authorities said the bear family, under the tutelage of the mother, specifically targeted campers — a sharp departure from the usual behavior of grizzlies attacking only when threatened or surprised.

Evidence indicated all three cubs likely participated in what Warden Capt. Sam Sheppard called a sustained attack on Kevin Kammer, 48, of Grand Rapids, Mich. He was pulled from his tent and dragged 25 feet. At least one of the bears fed on his body.

Fibers from a tent or sleeping bag were in the droppings of the captured bears, and a tooth fragment found in a tent appears to match a chipped tooth on the sow, which weighed more than 300 pounds.

Despite the unusual nature of the attacks, there also was a realization in Cooke City that bear run-ins would continue. Three million tourists a year visit the remote and wild Yellowstone region of Montana and Wyoming, which has an estimated 600 grizzlies.

"It's a great spot, but you have to realize we're in their home. We're part of the food chain," said Pat Froelich, 75, as she ate breakfast at the Bear Claw Bakery and watched the trucks haul the grizzlies from town.

The two other victims, Deb Freele of London, Ontario, and Ronald Singer of Alamosa, Colo., were initially hospitalized in Cody, Wyo.

Singer, 21, was treated and released. Freele was scheduled to have surgery Friday for bite wounds and a broken bone in her arm, said her husband, Bill Freele. He expected her to be released from the hospital sometime this weekend.

Deb Freele is a native of Michigan and knew Kammer but did not realize he was in the same campground or that he was the victim until she saw his picture with a story about the maulings, her husband said.

Bill Freele was in Cooke City on Friday retrieving the couple's camping equipment. He said he agreed that the mother bear should be killed "because it tasted humans."

He was fine with placing the cubs in a zoo. "Just don't tell me where it is," he said.

___

Associated Press writers Amy Beth Hanson and Matt Volz in Helena, Mont., and Ben Neary in Cheyenne, Wyo., contributed to this report.

Copyright 2010 The Associated Press

[EvilDon]

Grizzly in Mont. maulings was light, not starving
 

By MATTHEW BROWN, AP
Mon Aug 2, 7:31 PM EDT
A grizzly bear that preyed on three campers outside Yellowstone National Park was underweight but not starving, and it was in an area with ample natural food supplies, wildlife officials said Monday as they worked to figure out why the animal attacked.

With the necropsy on the female grizzly still being analyzed, officials had no explanation for what caused the bear to rampage through a campground Wednesday with cubs in tow.

"Trying to make some connection between body size of a bear and strange behavior is a stretch," said Chris Servheen, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist coordinating the investigation.

Kevin Kammer, 48, of Grand Rapids, Mich., was killed, and two other people — a woman from London, Ontario, and a man from Colorado — were injured in the nighttime attacks at the Soda Butte Campground outside Cooke City.

The sow was euthanized Friday. Its three cubs are now in a Billings zoo.

The attack was the most brazen in the Yellowstone area since the 1980s, stirring speculation that the bear suffered some physical ailment or was driven to desperation by tight food supplies.

Investigators were working through all possibilities, but Servheen said "nothing obvious has emerged as yet."

The sow was at least 10 years old but had healthy teeth indicating it was not a geriatric animal, said Andrea Jones with Montana Fish Wildlife and Parks. Some grizzlies live more than 20 years.

It weighed 221 pounds — less than the average of 300 to 400 pounds but still within a healthy range.

The director of ZooMontana on Sunday described the cubs as malnourished. But Jones said her agency was not describing them that way; the animals were underweight but not starving.

And the number of cubs, although higher than the average of 2.2 cubs per female, was still within the norm, said Chuck Schwartz, a grizzly bear expert with the U.S. Geological Survey.

"She was small, her yearlings were small, but we see small runty cubs, small runty yearlings," Schwartz said. "The only thing that's unusual to me is the fact that this is a predatory event."

A wildlife biologist from Alaska, the state with the most grizzly bears, said figuring out why bears attack humans is sometimes impossible. Most grizzlies only attack when threatened or surprised, but every once in a while, one hunts down humans for no discernible reason, said Jessica Coltrain with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game.

"They are large predators that have the capacity to do damage," she said.

The Yellowstone region has an estimated 600 grizzlies, an omnivorous species with a diet of berries, elk, fish, moths, ants and even pine nuts.

The beetle-caused decimation of the whitebark pine has been cited by environmentalists as putting grizzlies in greater danger of extinction because some bears rely on whitebark pine nuts as a mainstay.

A federal judge agreed last year, citing declines in the tree's numbers to restore threatened species protections for Yellowstone grizzlies. Those protections were lifted in 2007.

Schwartz cautioned against extrapolating problems with that one food source to come up with any conclusion about the Soda Butte attacks. Because whitebark pine nuts don't become available until later in the summer, "it's somewhat irrelevant to this case," he said.

Residents around Cooke City, half a mile from the campground, reported seeing the grizzly family around the small tourist town in recent weeks. State wildlife agents said they received no complaints of any run-ins between the animals and humans.

Soda Butte Campground has been closed since the maulings, but authorities Monday reopened two others that were shut as a precaution.

Copyright 2010 The Associated Press.

[EvilDon]

Grizzly in maulings was stressed, had parasites
By MATTHEW BROWN, AP
Mon Aug 16, 8:44 PM EDT
Hunger and internal parasites afflicted a grizzly bear that mauled three campers near Yellowstone National Park, but investigators said Monday those factors failed to explain such aggressive predatory behavior.

The bear's late-night rampage through a crowded campground was the most brazen by a Yellowstone grizzly in a quarter-century. It left one man dead and two people with serious injuries.

But after an in-depth investigation, wildlife officials on Monday produced a 70-page report that left unanswered a crucial question: Why did the bear attack?

"The reality is grizzly bears are predators," said Warden Capt. Sam Sheppard with Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks, who helped produce the report. "You never know when they're going to revert to a predatory response."

Kevin Kammer, 48, of Grand Rapids, Mich., was killed and two people were hospitalized after the 216-pound grizzly tore into their tents in a nighttime attack July 28 at the Soda Butte Campground near Cooke City. There was no evidence of food left out by campers that might have attracted the bear.

The grizzly was captured a day later at the same campground, then was euthanized. Its three cubs are now in a Billings zoo.

Deb Freele, 58, of London, Ontario, suffered leg and arm wounds when the bear ripped into her tent and bit her. As she continues physical therapy to regain the use of her arm, Freele said Monday she had hoped investigators would come up with an explanation for the attack.

"It leaves me unsettled," she said. "There's nothing I can think of doing, outside of not going camping there, that would have changed the outcome."

Wildlife officials have said the animal appeared to be targeting humans and Monday's report said "the bear(s) consumed a significant portion of Kammer's torso."

"In some cases, the bear apparently reached under the rain fly and bit through the tent or the insect screen of the tent to reach the campers inside," the report said.

During the investigation, a seven-member team of state and federal officials and an independent bear expert from Canada looked at the bear's diet, health, past behavior and the condition of her three cubs.

DNA tests on strands of hair found at the campground linked the mother bear to the attacks. And a vegetarian diet was blamed for the mother grizzly's poor body condition, which the report said was "made worse by a load of parasites found in her small intestine."

Otherwise, nothing stood out, said Chris Servheen, a grizzly researcher with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

Tests for rabies and other diseases came back negative following a necropsy.

The grizzly and her cubs had been sighted around the Cooke City area at least twice in the weeks leading up to the attacks. Rumors have since floated around the community that a photographer had been baiting bears in the area with food.

Those rumors remain unsubstantiated, investigators said Monday. And there was no sign the attacking grizzzly had become habituated to humans, which is often to blame when bears have run-ins with people.

The necropsy suggested the bear had not eaten human food for at least the last two years. That conclusion was based on a carbon isotope analysis of hair, blood and serum from the bear that showed very low levels of types of carbon common in human and pet foods.

Bear specialist Kevin Frey with Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks, said the findings underscored that even though bears are omnivores — eating everything from pine nuts to ants to elk — they are still predators that can act as carnivores.

"She obviously was hurting for higher value foods. What caused her mentally to do that, we don't know," Frey said. "There are a lot of bears that are nutritionally challenged at times that don't exhibit that type of behavior."

Copyright 2010 The Associated Press