Park Ridge Nature Researcher Fatally Mauled by Bear

Chicago - A northwest suburban man who dedicated his life to studying nature died last week when he was attacked by a grizzly bear just outside Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming.

Erwin Evert, 70, of the 1400 block of Tyrell Avenue in Park Forest was found dead on the evening of June 17 in a remote area of the Shoshone National Forest in northwest Wyoming, about 10 miles east of Yellowstone, according to the Park County (Wyo.) Sheriff's office.

A release from the sheriff's office said the body was found by a member of the U.S. Geological Survey's Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team in an area where bears were being captured for research. He died of "fatal injuries caused by an encounter with a bear," the release said.

The researcher was searching the area after Evert's wife notified him that her husband was missing, according to the sheriff's office. Evert was not armed and was not carrying a pepper spray often used by hikers to deter grizzlies.

Game wardens, agents from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and U.S. Forest Service searched for the bear suspected in the attack, a bear believed to have been captured earlier by the Grizzly Bear Study Team, tranquilized and then equipped with a radio collar as part of a research project.

On Saturday DNA tests confirmed that a bear shot and killed by searchers from a helicopter was the animal responsible for mauling Evert, Sheriff Scott Steward said.

Steward said the attack was the first he's heard about in the Cody area, but bear attacks in the greater Park County area do occur.

"In this whole region of Park County it's not uncommon to have one or two a year," he said, adding most bear attacks are reported in late summer or early fall when hunting season begins.

Evert and his wife divided their time between a home in Park Ridge home and a cabin in Cody, Wyo., about two miles from the site he was killed, the sheriff said.

Evert was a botanist who studied plants in the Yellowstone area and collected thousands of samples which he shared with the Rocky Mountain Herbarium and the Morton Arboretum in Lisle, where he volunteered as a research associate, colleague Andrew Hipp of Morton said.

Evert had spent summers in Wyoming since purchasing a cabin there in 1971 and recently published a 750-page book on his 39 years of plant research, Hipp said. He provided Morton's herbarium collection with more than 20,000 plant specimens and lectured there on his "explorations," Hipp said.

"He was a real asset to the arboretum," he said. "He really enriched our research into plant biodiversity."

Funeral arrangements for Evert were not available at press time.