Charlie Russell is a Canadian naturalist famous for his study of grizzly bears. He is the son of the well known hunter, guide, film maker, and naturalist Andy Russell.
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Charlie Russell grew up on Alberta's Rocky mountains in the Pincher Creek area just outside of Waterton Lakes National Park. He has lived in the Rockies since he was very young, due to his father's fascination with nature, and grew up around a variety of wildlife, including bears.
Russell has studied and mothered orphaned brown bears in Kamchatka, Russia's far east for more than 10 years. Russell's presence in Kamchatka has been sanctioned by the Russian government in an effort to stop the poaching that kills many bears in the area. Bears have become prize trophies for foreign hunters and bear body parts (especially the gall bladder) are in high demand by the Asian traditional medicine trade.
Russell insists that bears are misunderstood and are not as dangerous to humans as is commonly thought. He sees his work more as sociological than biological. He has shown that bears are capable of having non-problematic relationships with humans as long as they are treated with respect. He and Maureen Enns were part of the PBS documentary Walking with Giants: Grizzlies of Siberia. Later Russell and his bears have also been the subject of the 2006 BBC documentary Bear Man of Kamchatka which has also been shown on cable TV in the USA and on Doc Zone, CBC, Radio-Canada in Canada and on ARD in Germany. The expanded 90-minute version of this documentary is known as The Edge of Eden: Living with Grizzlies.