Faces of Climate: Chris Servheen

EDITOR’S NOTE: In our new series, “Faces of Climate,” Mountain Journal is highlighting good work in Greater Yellowstone. As the climate changes the face of the landscape, these people are changing our approach to the issue. Through interviews and imagery, these are your “Faces of Climate.”

Chris Servheen describes grizzly bears as magical. Just the idea of their presence in the woods, he says, adds a level of intensity to the environment and heightens a person’s sensory awareness. 

For a bear biologist who has spent more than 50 years working with and studying grizzly bears, Servheen has had many grizzly encounters, so many that he can’t quite recall the first time he saw one in the wild. But he does remember spending an entire summer in northwest Montana’s Scapegoat Wilderness when he saw just one sow and her three cubs. This was in 1973, two years before grizzlies were added to the endangered species list.

“Every time I go into Scapegoat I see grizzly bears now, and of course I know where to look, but they’re up there in much greater numbers than they were then,” Servheen, 74, said.

Servheen’s experience in the Scapegoat summarizes the way grizzly populations have changed since the ‘70s. He’s seen their numbers at historic lows and, through his 35-year career as the grizzly bear recovery coordinator for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, watched them rise to a point he never would have believed when he first began with FWS. 

“I started in 1981 as the recovery coordinator, and I thought that my job was going to be to just document the demise of grizzly bears because there were so few bears around,” Servheen said. “It was very difficult to think that we would ever get to recovery.”

Full recovery for a species listed on the Endangered Species Act is often realized when it’s removed from the list. For years, grizzlies have been caught up in a contentious listing and delisting battle, as states including Montana, Wyoming and Idaho advocated for delisting to turn control of the species over to the states from the federal government. 

Servheen sees parallels between bald eagles — often seen as the ESA success story — and grizzly bears, particularly in terms of their population growth. 

In the ‘70s, he estimates, only five or six bald eagle nests existed in all of Montana. Now, there are well over 100. Servheen attributes that growth to the bald eagle’s placement on the endangered species list. “The thing that’s different, of course, is bald eagles don’t eat cattle and don’t get into garbage and don’t threaten people when they’re in the backcountry,” he said.

Servheen penned the first grizzly bear recovery plan in 1980, an outline that identified six recovery zones for grizzly bears. At the time, the idea was that in order to sustain the remaining grizzly bears, it would be best to manage them in these zones, as independent populations. But in 1993, Servheen rewrote the plan incorporating a new understanding of grizzly management. 

Instead of looking at the recovery zones as individual populations, and especially for a species like grizzly bears that have such a low reproductive rate, it would be more beneficial to the long-term health of the species if the zones were seen as one population, or a “metapopulation,” as Servheen calls it. 

In 2011, the grizzly population in the Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem recovery zone, located in northwest Montana, started expanding. Within the same year, grizzly bears were identified in the Northern Cascades for the first time since 1996, then in 2023 as far east as the Missouri River Breaks in central and north central Montana.

Watching these changes, Servheen began to update the 1993 plan, including a suggestion to treat grizzlies in the Northern Rockies as a single population instead of as groups of bruins in six distinct recovery zones. He submitted the update to FWS in late 2024, just before the change in administration. Early in Trump’s current term, challenges to the Endangered Species Act didn’t give Servheen much confidence that his suggestions would be implemented. 

But in 2025, independent of what Servheen submitted, FWS advocated for treating all grizzlies in the Lower 48 as a single unit. “I was astonished to see that,” he said. Treating grizzlies as a single unit provides grizzlies with three things, according to Servheen: demographic, genetic and climate resiliency. 

The climate component, and particularly as it relates to climate change, is what puts grizzlies and people on the same page. Climate change is shifting grizzlies’ food sources and making that bird feeder or trash can a much easier get when more historic food is less available.

“We have to think of the long-term because we, humans, are changing the environment rapidly, filling it up, disturbing the animals that live here and making it increasingly difficult for the animals to be on the landscape,” Servheen said. “And [as] all these things are accelerating … the threats are accelerating too. That’s why the idea of managing the Northern Rockies as a single place where all these bears can be healthy and interconnected will lead to true recovery and eventual delisting as an interconnected, healthy Northern Rockies population.”