Fighting for Survival

In many Indigenous cultures, the grizzly bear holds a special place because it passes through the natural and supernatural worlds between summer hunting and winter hibernation.

The great bear bifurcates the modern world too; a stakeholder in the realms of politics and biology. The January 8 U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announcement rejecting state petitions to delist the grizzly from Endangered Species Act protections and creating a new multi-state recovery region came a dozen days before the end of President Joe Biden’s administration. Its fine-print details still haven’t been published in the Federal Register, but opponents already have court challenges lined up.

By the time grizzlies start crawling out of their dens this spring, Donald Trump will occupy the White House and his appointees will lead federal wildlife agencies. But the future of North America’s king of the charismatic megafauna depends on much more than presidential administration changes.

In particular, people’s personal perspectives on grizzly bears show how the solution to their management isn’t a black-or-white decision. For every member of Grizzly 399’s fan club there’s someone haunted by Night of the Grizzlies. There are hunters who’ve been mauled by grizzlies and insisted the bear was in the right to do so, and ranchers who love seeing grizzlies but would just as soon never see one again.

For the past five years, Alex Metcalf and his colleagues at the University of Montana’s Human Dimensions Lab have been studying those perspectives in depth. In a word, what they found was “complex.”

“What we learned from those surveys is Montanans have very positive attitudes toward grizzly bears—they like them a lot,” Metcalf said. “At same time, they want to see grizzly bears managed.”

But the quest for the “Goldilocks zone” of optimal coexistence of people and predators has some subtle nuances, especially where grizzlies are concerned. For example, there are three ways to think about the grizzly population size in the Rocky Mountain West. One is “how many bears are there?” (What’s the accurate current population?). A second is “how many bears should there be?” (Do we need more or fewer?). And a third is “how many bears are needed for population resilience?” (The biological rates of cub births, mortalities and landscape carrying capacity).

“If people believe grizzly bears are naturally expanding on their own, they tend to have more positive views about their recovery,” Metcalf said. “If they feel grizzly bears are imposed on them or populations are unnaturally expanding due to human intervention, they tend to feel less positive.”

A major factor in that mix is whether people trust their state and federal wildlife managers to be reliable. Another is direct or vicarious experience (Have you had a bad/scary encounter with a grizzly, or know someone who has?). Hunters in particular play a big role here. While only 13 percent of the survey respondents had seen a grizzly close to their home and just 5 percent had experienced property damage by a grizzly, “we suspect that word of mouth and notoriety of conflict situations substantially influences beliefs about the species,” was the finding of their 2023 paper.

However, simplifying matters to a question of tolerance or intolerance for grizzlies presents a false choice, Metcalf warned. It ignores the large number of people who are enthusiastic, distant or indifferent toward wildlife; people who are afraid of bears but want them in the ecosystem, and people who love bears and also would love to hunt them. The result is a polarized debate that will never reach the Goldilocks sweet spot of satisfaction with carnivore management.

“If conflict continues, if we fail to extend empathy to fellow Montanans who experience these things, we could see polarization start to happen,” Metcalf said. “That’s not good for anyone, or bears.”

The FWS grizzly decision addressed both past and future matters. That’s significant for several political factors. While those seeking state oversight of grizzlies didn’t get their big prize, the proposed rule does offer some tools they’ve been demanding. And although grizzly protection advocates have long called for a unified management landscape, the proposal actually shrinks the ESA designation from the current entire Lower 48 states to just a corner of the Pacific Northwest. 

Opponents such as Sen. Steve Daines, R-Montana, accused the service of “continuing to move the goalposts on recovery.” But both bears and people have changed the circumstances underpinning that recovery plan, which was issued in 1993. And despite proposals from officials such as Rep. Harriet Hageman, R-Wyoming, to try delisting grizzlies by congressional action, the ponderous process of federal regulation might give more people expanded local control while improving the bears’ survival chances.

Brown bears (Ursus arctos) used to inhabit the Northern Hemisphere from the Arctic Circle almost to the Tropic of Cancer. In North America, that extended from Alaska to northern Mexico. In Eurasia, it went from Sweden and Russia south to Saudi Arabia and Japan. Before the western settler expansion signposted by Lewis and Clark’s 1805 Voyage of Discovery, an estimated 50,000 grizzly bears (Ursus arctos horribilus) roamed the continental United States between the Canadian and Mexican borders. The brown bears of northern Canada and Alaska (such as the salmon-gorging Kodiak bears), and their Eurasian cousins are slightly taxonomically different from grizzlies in the Lower 48.

By the time they made the Endangered Species List in 1975, Lower-48 grizzly bears were down to an estimated 700-800 animals mostly concentrated in Glacier and Yellowstone national parks. The Interagency Grizzly Bear Committee formed in 1983 to wrangle the hodgepodge of federal, state and private agencies and stakeholders into a unified voice developing research and rules for recovering the bear. Its resulting 1993 plan designated the six recovery areas and management plans now guiding grizzly bear oversight today.

Since then, grizzly numbers have grown to more than 2,000. About 95 percent of them are concentrated in two recovery areas, known as the Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem—entirely in Montana from Glacier National Park south through the Bob Marshall Wilderness Complex—and the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem—Yellowstone National Park and surrounding chunks of Idaho, Wyoming and Montana). One major element of the new FWS decision is to refocus grizzly recovery from those six areas to a single zone stretching from eastern Montana and central Wyoming to the Pacific Coast of Washington.

Meanwhile, Americans built more than 93,000 homes between 1990 and 2018 just in the Montana counties overlapping current grizzly distribution, according to Bozeman-based Headwaters Economics. Similar rates of land transformation have occurred in Wyoming, Idaho and Washington. Each of those homes puts another person or family in potential conflict with a grizzly bear.

A big friction point in grizzly recovery has been how to think about bears outside those original recovery zones. Each was in mountain country, centered on federal wilderness or national park acreage. None were in the prairies or river bottoms that grizzlies dominated at the time of Lewis and Clark. And by 2024, none had developed productive linkage corridors so grizzlies could avoid becoming genetically isolated “island populations.”

That evolved into a management map rife with confusion and questions. The food-storage orders just for the Greater Yellowstone backcountry involve 21 federal and state agencies, each with variations on whether a camper can store toothpaste in a tent or how to dispose of a dead pack mule on a trail.

And what about grizzlies wandering between recovery zones? On one hand, those are exactly the bears envisioned by delisting goals–bears resilient enough to explore and thrive in new habitat when their old territory exceeds its carrying capacity. On the other, those are exactly the bears that appear at the fishing hole you enjoyed as a kid, so now you can’t let your grandchildren play there the way you once did.

The new FWS plan for a single recovery zone protecting a single distinct population segment, or DPS, across four states aims to modernize grizzly management. It would, according to its January 8 announcement, “increase the speed of recovery in remaining ecosystems and the overall viability of grizzly bears, increasing the likelihood of successfully delisting the entire DPS by addressing the species’ recovery needs as a whole.”

Some stakeholders interpreted that as a course reversal. Montana Stockgrowers Association Executive Vice President Raylee Honeycutt called the plan, “merely an example of the Biden administration’s political agenda.” Making a single, interstate management area, Honeycutt added, “effectively decreases the viability of seeing a delisted status in the near future.”

It also means a continued commitment to grizzly oversight, according to retired IGBC grizzly coordinator Chris Servheen.

“I am pleased with the decision,” Servheen said in an email the day after the FWS announcement. “We must be wary of politicians who seek to delist for short term political gain. Grizzlies would benefit by all parties coming together to work toward real recovery instead of trying to divide us by the ‘us against them’ rhetoric.”

Servheen was the IGBC’s original recovery coordinator back in 1983, and wrote the 1993 recovery plan that’s still on the books. Although he retired in 2016, Servheen remained active in grizzly policy and released a proposed grizzly bear recovery plan last December that foreshadowed many of the points in the new FWS decision.

In particular, both Servheen and FWS spotlighted state wildlife policies as a major roadblock to delisting. The new 398-page FWS Species Status Assessment on grizzly recovery stated that because there are no grizzly bear kill limits outside the Northern Continental Divide or Greater Yellowstone monitoring areas, there was no way to keep hunters of wolves and black bears from incidentally killing grizzlies. “Incidental take of grizzly bears in these areas could reduce the potential for natural connectivity between the NCDE and GYE populations, and natural recolonization of the BE (Bitterroot Ecosystem),” the assessment said.

Servheen’s proposal put the matter in more pointed terms. If grizzlies are ever to be delisted, he advised, state wildlife agencies have to quit helping to kill them.

“What is lacking in the GYE and NCDE conservation strategies is any direction for habitat management in the connecting areas between the ecosystems that grizzlies have begun to occupy,” Servheen wrote. “An even more important issue missing from the [plans] is any consideration of or direction for mortality management in the intervening connectivity habitat between the five recovery areas in the northern U.S. Rockies.”

One of the five must-have requirements for delisting under the Endangered Species Act is the presence of “adequate regulatory mechanisms” so that grizzly killing by humans doesn’t result in population decline. Servheen listed several changes, such as elimination of wolf and black bear trapping and snaring over bait, shooting wolves and black bears with night-vision gear, and hound-hunting of black bears except when grizzlies are hibernating, which typically occurs from about January 1 to February 15.

He also warned that states must “accurately and honestly describe the impact of sport hunting on grizzly bears."

“The states continue to mislead the public with false information about what sport hunting of grizzlies will accomplish,” Servheen wrote. That includes acknowledging there’s no scientific evidence that sport hunting of grizzlies will balance grizzly population numbers, reduce depredations on livestock and property, or minimize bear attacks on humans.

The FWS proposal does include new rules under ESA section 4(d) allowing “added flexibility and responsiveness on private lands and areas where grizzly bear populations are impacting private landowners and livestock producers while continuing efforts to promote conservation and tolerance in those areas crucial to delisting grizzly bears in the lower 48 as a whole.” 

Details of those 4(d) changes will be published in the forthcoming Federal Register. They’re expected to allow private landowners more leeway to kill grizzly bears that are attacking their livestock or property without advance agency approval, and possibly loosen requirements for grizzly handling and killing by state agencies in response to public safety concerns.

All this puts the gears of federal process in motion just as Donald Trump is about to replace U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Director Martha Williams, and the rest of the Biden executive team, with his own personnel and policies. Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte and his counterparts in Wyoming and Idaho are already calling on Trump to reverse action. Congressman Ryan Zinke, R-Montana stated on Facebook that “Thankfully the political hands pulling the strings at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service are about to be fired and I’m already working with President-elect Trump’s team to overturn this decision.”

But unlike a bill introduced in Congress, a proposed federal rule doesn’t have much flexibility for reworking or amending. It either goes into effect substantially as written, or gets withdrawn. The previous rule rules until yet another new proposal wins approval. In this case, the grizzly bear would remain a protected animal under the Endangered Species Act in six separate recovery areas, rather than one contiguous one.

So, for instance, someone in Congress could try to uproot the decision through the Congressional Review Act, a law that allows disapproval of federal agency rules. If such a challenge passed Congress and was signed by President Trump, FWS would likely have to restart its species status analysis and come up with scientific justification for a different decision. Another law, the Administrative Procedures Act, makes it difficult to simply reverse an agency finding. In other words, Trump’s Fish and Wildlife Service director couldn’t immediately issue a rule delisting the grizzly from ESA protection without documenting why the previous agency finding for continued listing was scientifically wrong. And that reversal would have to withstand court challenges from grizzly protection advocates.

Delisting advocates could attack the FWS decision in court as well. In that case, they would sue the Trump administration, which would likely settle the case by withdrawing the rule. But again, that would leave the current grizzly ESA protections and management areas in place—without whatever new 4(d) flexibility might have come with the new rule.

The same thing happened to Trump when his FWS issued a rule in 2017 delisting grizzly bears in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. It was immediately challenged in court, and a federal judge vacated it a day before Wyoming was to start a trophy grizzly hunting season in September 2018. The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the decision, returning all Lower-48 grizzlies to protected status.

No one could say these were “made-in-D.C. decisions.” U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Director Martha Williams was director of Montana’s Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks before Biden tapped her for the FWS post. When Trump was last in charge, FWS was overseen by his Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, who had previously been Montana’s congressional representative, and has since returned to that office.

That 2017 rule was an update of a 2007 proposed delisting rule issued toward the end of the George W. Bush presidency. It was litigated in 2008 under the Obama administration, which eventually lost the case before the 9th Circuit in 2011.

Outside the courtroom, President Bill Clinton’s Interior Department tried to start a grizzly bear reintroduction project in the Bitterroot Recovery Area along the Montana-Idaho border in the 1990s. After years of controversy, the plan was finalized in 2000, only to see Vice President Al Gore lose to Bush in the election. Bush’s Interior Secretary Gale Norton shelved the plan, but never formally rejected it. That mattered because 24 years later, a federal judge ruled the government acted arbitrarily and capriciously in ignoring the project, and ordered it restarted.

The 2025 FWS rule announcement notes that reintroductions such as those considered for the Bitterroot and North Cascades would not be affected. Starting resident populations in those areas would move delisting closer to reality, FWS officials noted, because it would provide more backup places for grizzly populations to persist if something catastrophic happened to any of the other, established bear concentrations.

Regardless, human participation in grizzly affairs won’t be going away. Powerful as they are, the silvertip bears nearly lost their first fight against American civilization. The FWS Species Status Analysis puts it bluntly: “As a conservation-reliant species, grizzly bears will require ongoing management and conservation efforts to remain recovered.”