Kamchata bears wiped out

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, September 2003:

TORONTO–Bear researchers Charlie Russell and Maureen Enns
returned to Canada heartbroken in mid-July 2003 after poachers using
a helicopter killed all 20-to-40 of the grizzly bears they had
studied since 1995 on the Kamchata Peninsula of Siberia.
Russell and Enns documented their work in a PBS television
special, Walking With Giants: The Grizzlies of Siberia, and in the
book Grizzly Heart: Living Without Fear Among the Brown Bears of
Kamchata.
“The people who killed the bears nailed the gall bladder of a
baby grizzly to the research station’s kitchen wall as a gruesome
taunt,” wrote Alanna Mitchell of the Toronto Globe & Mail.
“The bears were killed so we would go home,” Russell told
her, after permanently closing the research station because no more
living bears could be found.
Russell and Enns formed and funded a ranger team in 1998 that
aggressively pursued poachers of bears, sturgeon, and salmon.
Tigers had already been poached out of the region.