David Bittner

My Life among bears

David Bittner has a passion for fish and bears.

He saw a dream come true in 2002, when he spent three months alone in the Alaskan wilderness, renowned for its salmon runs and mighty bears. Bittner grew up in the mountains of Switzerland, where his father took him off the beaten track and taught him how to survive in the wild. His love of nature drove him to study biology at the University of Bern. He accomplished his PhD in ecology and evolution with research on fish. For the last 15 years Bittner has returned to Alaska almost every summer to study and document the life of grizzly bears. Over the years and with a lot of patience he got to know a few individual bears with which he was able to build some kind of mutual trust. He has given names to his favorite bears.

Currently, Bittner is working as a fisheries manager for the Swiss authorities. In Switzerland, he is engaged in conservation activites surrounding the return of the bear in the Alps and dreams about a life as nature photographer and a research project with 'his' bears. His bestselling book ‘Unter Bären in Alaska’ was published in November 2015.