Books
Bear Hunger
(Stories and Recipes from the Wilderness. An Encounter with an Extraordinary Animal)
In an era of reality TV, cooking shows, and survival series, this cookbook and adventure book comes at just the right time. Bears have always held a special fascination for people, and Reno Sommerhalder shows that even bears’ diets are similar to those of humans. The bear researcher and trained chef accompanies bears on their forays through the last remaining wilderness oases and captures his encounters in unique images and stories. However, author Reno Sommerhalder’s world is not only adventurous but also delicious - his bear recipes can be enjoyed by both humans and bears. He shows how to smoke salmon, what “wild potatoes” from the shadow scabious are, how to prepare asparagus from willowherb, and how to bake a bear nut cake. This book is another attempt by Reno Sommerhalder to give people a realistic picture of bears, and this time he does so because we all love to eat - the way to a person’s heart is through their stomach
Among bears and tigers -
My adventure in the Siberian taiga (Only available in German)
The Swiss-Canadian bear expert and wilderness guide Reno Sommerhalder has lived with grizzlies in the few intact ecosystems on earth for more than thirty years. His longing for untouched landscapes draws him again and again into the wilderness of Russia. This time Reno accompanied his Russian biologist colleague Sergei Kolchin to the Ussurian taiga, where the two men spent a summer releasing orphaned Asiatic black bear and Ussurian brown bear cubs. According to Reno Sommerhalder, being able to give the cubs the freedom they had been robbed of by poachers was a wonderful and fulfilling experience. The big thrill of this project was not only the daily walks with the young bears in the wild, but also the unique opportunity to share the same habitat with the largest of all big cats, the Siberian tiger. Reno Sommerhalder felt the powerful presence of the Amur tiger, of which today only about 500 still roam the forests of the Far East, every day - and a few times up close!
Untamed - My life on the path of the bear (Only available in German)
The book "Untamed - My life on the path of the bear" will be published in October 2011 by Wörterseh Verlag. The book describes my life among bears. It describes how and why the furry giants became my symbol for an intact environment. The red threat throughout these chapters, is telling the story of how I became the adoptive mother of five orphaned brown bear cubs on the remote Kamchatkan peninsula of the Russian Far East. For a whole summer, Canadian bear specialist Charlie Russell and I lived with these youngsters in the pristine wilderness, taught them to fish for salmon and protected them from adult, hungry male bears. Then six years later, together with my life partner Andrea Pfeuti, I went on another trip to Kamchatka trying to locate the cubs again. The book "Untamed" - tells of these journeys, of funny, serious, fulfilling, dangerous, sad and tragic events. But it also tells of another journey. Perhaps the most beautiful of all. The journey of a persons quest to find himself.
In wildness is the preservation of the world.
Henry David Thoreau