Weekend America

A Man Among Bears

Sean Hurley

MAY 3, 2008

Ben Kilham plays with a young black bear cub

(Wildlife Journal)

View the Slideshow

A little more than a week ago, a 700-pound Grizzly bear named Rocky attacked and killed his trainer, Stephan Miller. Rocky was the bear in the Will Ferrell comedy "Semi-Pro." California authorities have no plans to remove Rocky from his compound or euthanize him.

That probably wouldn't surprise naturalist Ben Kilham -- for the last 16 years, he's been studying black bears in the forests of New Hampshire. He's written a book about his experiences, "Among the Bears." Kilham's work had generated controversial claims about the way bears think, interact and even communicate.

Reporter Sean Hurley recently spent some time with Kilham, and among the bears.

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Ben Kilham lives with his wife in the mountains of New Hampshire in a home he built three years ago. There's a small beaver pond out front, ducks in the nearby woodlands, and through the trees you can see the jagged line of a distant ridge. I had come to hear more about his work with the black bears and hopefully to get a glimpse of this cautious, and according to Ben, highly misunderstood animal.

We sat together in his post-and-beam living room. The walls were covered in incredibly good paintings and sketches done by the Kilham family, past and present. "Well," Ben said, "We could go out and try to locate Bert. I have a collar on him. I haven't been able to close on him but we could go into the woods following his signal."

Ben tracks about ten black bears by means of telemetry radio collars. We wandered out in his pick-up truck to see if we could triangulate Bert's position. Bert is one of the older male bears that Ben keeps a close watch on.

We drove along the dirt road until we hit the secondary. Ben turned on his telemetry receiver and we continued along in the wash of static and whines. Soon we heard a beeping noise and Ben peered down at the receiver beside him. "He's about halfway between where we stopped up there, just about on that angle."

I was still trying to figure out how telemetry worked. "So Bert's right in the middle?" I guessed.

"Yeah, he's about the same strength signal from each end," he said.

Ben decided to take me to Bert's den, which, based on the telemetry, was not at that moment occupied. We parked the truck and walked out together through a rising wood and then crossed over a thorny meadow. Ben gestured to a small, open cave. This was Bert's den. If I wasn't going to see a bear, I thought I might at least appreciate the inside of a bear's house.

Ben pointed out my first obstacle. "There are some sticks he hauled in..."

I hauled the sticks out of the den opening (Ben suggested that Bert probably played with these at night before sleeping) and then shimmied backwards into the wet dirt hole.

"All right... Man it's really wet!" I called up to Ben. My jeans were soaked through. Ben was smiling down at me with a wicked but charming glint in his eye. "This is just where you wanted me, isn't it? Down here?"

He laughed and then pretended that Bert had arrived for a little snack in the form of a damp reporter, "Interview's over, Bert!" Ben called.

By closely observing the bear's life and habitat, Ben has come up with several theories. One of his more controversial ideas suggests that bears cooperate with each other. "I've watched a strange female bear come in and take food in her clearing and she didn't attack that stranger. And the reason she didn't attack that stranger was because she needed that stranger and she couldn't afford to alienate that stranger. And that's where the reciprocal altruism comes in."

The current scientific belief is that bears don't cooperate, that they don't share food. To support his observations, Ben would need hard data. But Ben isn't a scientist. In fact, Ben can't be a scientist -- at least, not in the traditional sense. He's dyslexic and reads at the level of a third grader.

This puts an advanced degree in wildlife biology out of reach. Without a doctorate, he says he can't publish his findings in scientific journals. "I was very well aware that I would be criticized as not being a good observer and not having my fancy degrees -- that my observations were anecdotal, and I'm using anthropomorphisms, and this is all the general lingo that comes out when someone who is not a scientist tries to do something."

The scientific community doesn't agree with what Ben's doing, but they have gradually accepted many of his ideas. Still, his in-the-field method stands in direct conflict with the standard mode of quantitative science. "My method," he says, "is to observe as much as I possibly can. If I decided right then to be scientific, I would have had to come up with a hypothesis about one very small part of the bears behavior and document the daylights out of that one very small part. In order to do that, I would have missed everything else."

When he was 40-years-old, Ben Kilham took a test and learned that his I.Q. put him in the top 1 percent of the population. There's a rising shift in his voice as he talks about this experience. "At age 40, I deliberately abandoned the cultural world, because it hadn't done any good for me. There was no opportunity in it for me as it existed. When I learned what my I.Q. was -- and that really was a revelation -- I said "Geez, if I'm that damn smart, why can't I just do what I want to do?"

It was late afternoon and we were driving alongside the wide glassy sprawl of the Connecticut River. I was resigned to the fact that we probably wouldn't see any bears. But Ben had one last spot he wanted to take me. We jostled up a mile-long scrap of dirt road in his old white truck moving deeper and deeper into the forest. We were heading for a clearing of grass and clover where Ben often met up with Squirty, his principal bear liaison.

Ben set down some ground rules. "The hierarchy goes Squirty, then me, then the rest of her family."

"I'm way down at the bottom," I assumed.

"You're below the bottom," Ben said, laughing. "I get bitten for bringing people like you in here."

"Oh. I'm sorry, Ben!" I said.

When we arrived at the clearing, Squirty was nowhere to be seen. We walked around the trees and grasses for 15 minutes or so.

Then Ben pointed off into the distance. "There she is right there."

I peered up the ridge, seeing nothing. "Where is she?"

He nodded quietly. "Right up on the hill. Two cubs behind her. Cubs moving now."

I was surprised how surprised I was to finally see them. "Oh yeah. Wow!" I exclaimed.

Squirty and her cubs glided in a line down the ridge, glancing our way, before finally disappearing behind a knoll. Ben sent me back to the truck. He went out to meet her with a small bag of corn.

I kept the window down and could hear him calling gently to her, "Hi Squirty... Hi, girl..."

Squirty's came alone into the main open area and took the whole bag of corn from Ben's hand. And then she began to slowly walk away with the plastic grocery bag, liked she'd just finished her shopping. Ben trailed after her.

Maybe it's because Ben has a bear-like quality himself -- he's large and quiet and deliberate and watchful -- but as he moves happily alongside Squirty and they head out toward the cubs, it dawns on me that he and his bears have an awful lot in common. They both live at a similar distance from the world. Who they are and what they have to offer is not easily accessible or readily available.

They are both wary of man and his methods.

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