"Charlie Russell, Who Befriended Bears, Dies at 76" (NYT obituary). Russell did not die in a bear attack (like the "Grizzly Man" in the Werner Herzog movie). He died of complications of surgery.

Mr. Russell was outspoken in his belief that the view most people — including many of his fellow naturalists — held of the bear was wrong.

“I believe that it’s an intelligent, social animal that is completely misunderstood,” he said in a PBS “Nature” documentary about his work. To prove the point, he and his partner at the time, Maureen Enns, a photographer and artist, spent months each year for a decade living among bears in a remote part of eastern Russia....

His and Ms. Enns’s experiment on the Kamchatka Peninsula ended heartbreakingly. When they returned there for the 2003 season, they found that almost all the bears they had become acquainted with were gone, presumably slaughtered. A bear gallbladder — the prize for poachers, valued in some countries as an aphrodisiac and general health remedy — had been nailed to their cabin wall, like some kind of warning.