At Home With the Grizzlies, Puffins of ‘Living Edens’

For more than 50 years, the remote, mysterious Kamchatka Peninsula in far eastern Siberia was off-limits to outsiders, even to the average citizen of the Soviet Union. Kamchatka housed a top-secret submarine base that gave the Soviets access to the Bering Sea and the Pacific Ocean. And Bering, one of the two islands off the peninsula, was an eavesdropping post. Only about 400,000 people live on Kamchatka, which is roughly the size of California.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the world has been permitted to visit this forbidding land, where giant grizzly bears, Steller’s sea eagles, Northern fur seals, snow sheep, puffins and sea otters have flourished.

In 1998, Emmy Award-winning documentary film director and producer Kim MacQuarrie (“Spirits of the Rainforest”) spent eight months in Kamchatka and Bering Island to capture the area’s remarkable and varied wildlife for his film “The Living Edens: Kamchatka: Siberia’s Forbidden Wilderness,” which can be seen tonight on KCET and KVCR.

MacQuarrie recently talked about his experiences there by phone from his home in London.

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Question: Describe what it is like to be in a place that is so remote.

Answer: It is like Alaska was 100 years ago. In Kamchatka you get off the helicopter with all of your equipment and the helicopter flies off and there are tons of bears walking around. Unlike Alaska or the States, they are so unused to people that a grizzly bear will just look at you and then look the other way. It has no clue who you are. It is really a dense population of bears. It was quite a thrill. You realize there is no other place like that in the world.

Bears will come up to you. The Arctic foxes will come up to you. They are very curious, and the puffins are really cool. I filmed on this little island called Puffin Island. I spent a month there. There are several million puffins that show up in the spring and they are very comical creatures. If you stand still, they’ll forget you are there and they’ll waddle right up and go right by you.

Q: Are the Kamchatka grizzlies truly the biggest in the world?

A: They are very big. I don’t know if they are the biggest. Kodiak Island also has that claim to fame, but they are as big as the ones on Kodiak Island. Both of them are very big--around a thousand pounds--because they have a large diet of salmon.

Q: Were you able to get these bears emerging from their dens?

A: We did. We were able to follow a mom and three spring cubs from 20 feet away. Myself and a guide got chased up a tree on one occasion by a mom with three cubs. I heard my guide say, “You take the tree on the right and I’ll take the tree on the left.” I had brought this book on bear attacks that said if you are going to climb a tree, you need to climb higher than 33 feet; that is the highest known grizzly bear attack. I got about 5 feet off the ground. Fortunately, the mother had stopped [chasing us]. That was lucky.

Q: How many people did you have in your crew?

A: I had two other cinematographers who were there for a month each. I was there by myself on Bering Island for four months. We got there in April when it was still snowed over because we wanted grizzly bears coming out of their dens. We were there all through summer and fall and then I left in mid-December, so it was all snowed up again.

Q: Siberia conjures up images of ice and cold. What was it like?

A: We had horrific weather. The cinematographer and a guide got stuck on a mountain.

When I was on Bering Island, I took a zodiac boat to go to very remote areas. You would arrive on a beach and set up camp and you would be filming sea otters and a number of times, storms picked up. When a storm comes up, there is no way you can launch a boat, so you are stuck there until it blows over. Many times me and my Russian guide were huddled in the tent during a big storm. Sometimes we had to wait a week to get off the beach.

Q: Did the Russian officials think you were a spy?

A: Yeah. There are still top-secret places there, and they are very suspicious of outsiders, especially Westerners.

Q: Did the police or officials ever try to take your camera equipment?

A: Well, they went through our equipment in our hotel. I think they had ex-KGB following us. You have to fill out permits everywhere you go in Kamchatka and Bering Island to tell them where you are going and why you are going and what you are doing there. We had all of our stuff in a hotel, the cinematographer and I. When we went out and came back, all of our stuff had been gone through.

Q: Is it true you had a run-in with the Russian Mafia chief?

A: When I got there to do a scout trip to see if this program was feasible, the director of the parks system had been fired for embezzlement and the head of the customs had been fired for embezzlement. In Russia, if you do any kind of business or any kind of filming, you need what they call a “roof over your head.” That means some kind of an organization--whether it be the Mafia or some strong political organization--that can protect you from everybody, including the KGB.

The only person I could speak to was the local Mafia chief, who owned a fleet of helicopters and the TV stations and gold mines. I had five meetings with him. I couldn’t come to terms with him because he wanted so much money.

At the last minute, a Russian friend found me this organization, the Wildlife Protection Organization. They agreed to sponsor the film and be the “roof.” They protected me from all kinds of problems and the Mafia guy, too. The bears are the easy part, the Russians are really hard.

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* “The Living Edens: Kamchatka: Siberia’s Forbidden Wilderness” airs tonight at 8 on KCET-TV and KVCR-TV.