Crawling on all fours, singing and talking in that sort of odd, high voice normally reserved for babies and small dogs -- "Hey, little bear, love you, aren't you beautiful, that's right, love you" -- Treadwell sidled up to wild bears, his camera and video recorder whirring, and he filled notebooks with observations, scrawled in wavering schoolboy print. Some of the animals, he maintained, seemed to actually enjoy his company. A wounded bear he named Mickey slept near his tent for weeks and recovered; mother bears would leave their cubs nearby when they went off to forage, as if asking him to babysit. By his own admission, he even went so far as to plant a kiss on one bear's nose after it licked his fingers. Treadwell had found love, so powerful it bordered on obsession.
He called the objects of his affection grizzlies, but they were and are considered by Alaska biologists to be brown bears, the coastal version of the species Ursus arctos. The inland variation is commonly known in North America as grizzly (Ursus arctos horribilis). The distinction between grizzlies and brown bears is, most Alaskans would argue, the difference between pit bulls and Labrador retrievers. But Treadwell chose to call his bears grizzlies for reasons any publicist could explain, and justified it in print by rightly claiming they were the same species.