This July 14, just 10 days after Americans celebrated their nation’s 250th anniversary, U.S. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum came to Big Sky, Montana, and announced “one of the great recovery stories in America.” After five decades of diligent work to build back bear numbers, the federal government will move management responsibility for grizzly bear recovery to the state level. Flanked by governors Greg Gianforte of Montana, Mark Gordon of Wyoming and Brad Little of Idaho, Burgum said it was time “as a nation to celebrate when species go off the endangered species list.”
The grizzly bear may be the best-known current member of endangered species. Unlike the bald eagle (listed 1967, recovered 1995) which was generally loved as the national symbol, public opinion of grizzlies straddles the divide between “charismatic megafauna” and “monster in the dark.” The bear requires vast territories to find enough food to sustain its average 400-pound body. As its recovery range and population have grown, the grizzly has become much more visible to people and more troublesome. It raids beehives and grain bins, kills livestock and backs up tourist traffic for miles.
Gianforte, Gordon, Little and other politicians point to those incidents and growing bear numbers as evidence the grizzly is recovered, and therefore should be managed by their respective state wildlife agencies like other big game animals. “You look at the numbers, grizzly bears are over twice their recovery target as an endangered species,” Montana Senator Steve Daines said in a video celebrating Burgum’s new grizzly rules. “They’re no longer endangered. What’s endangered right now are people and livestock.”
Grizzly protection advocates counter the bears do relatively little damage compared to their value in a self-sustaining wild ecosystem like Greater Yellowstone. Grizzlies are also the slowest-breeding land mammal in North America. Their numbers are easy to collapse and hard to build back. That justifies continued recovery efforts until the populations are more resilient to human pressure, according to groups like the Center for Biological Diversity.
The grizzly has also been the poster-critter in a larger debate over the Endangered Species Act. Rules for the bear’s protection have blocked logging projects, halted mining and stalled energy development. President Donald Trump singled out the law in several executive orders and policy shifts as an impediment to his “Energy Dominance Agenda.” The ESA’s power to prioritize wild creatures over economic progress has been a regular congressional flashpoint.
So on Tuesday, Burgum and the governors touted a new set of management rules that gives state wildlife agencies more independence to control or kill grizzlies that are in conflict with humans, and more leniency to excuse the deaths of grizzlies killed by traps set for other animals such as wolves. The week before, Burgum had released a new policy redefining the word “harm” in the ESA so that it no longer prohibited indirect damage to a protected species’ habitat. And on Friday, the Interior Department gave notice that it had eliminated the “blanket rule,” which extended extra protections to threatened species while their recovery plans were under development, and OK’d using economic concerns when deciding what critical habitat should be set aside for a species.
The new rules weren’t available on July 14 when the officials gathered south of Big Sky for their announcement. At the time, Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks Director Christy Clark told Mountain Journal “we haven’t read it or studied it.” A 62-page draft version of the rules, released the next day, “consider[s] strategies, including nonlethal and lethal methods, to increase human safety and reduce human-bear conflicts and thereby promote conservation of the grizzly bear.”
Burgum’s announcement did not mention possible grizzly hunting seasons, something all three state leaders have called for in recent years. Nor did it include a plan for removing the grizzly from protections under the Endangered Species Act. Delisting a creature under the ESA is a difficult procedure, which the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service attempted unsuccessfully twice in 2007 and 2017. Last year, FWS reaffirmed that grizzlies have not recovered enough to lose federal protection.
Martha Williams had Christy Clark’s FWP director job from 2017 to 2020, and later became director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service under President Joe Biden. Her staff issued the 2025 continuation of the grizzly’s continued protection just weeks before Donald Trump became president for a second term. The bear’s status has been a challenge for most of her career.
“I have always, for 30 years, wondered why we look at grizzly bears with this binary question: are they listed or delisted?,” Williams told Mountain Journal. “Why such a fixation on delisting when the real question is what does long-term recovery of bears mean? How do you support the people living with bears? How do you allow them to be on the landscape and people be there too?”
Big Sky, a remote town of roughly 3,600 permanent residents, sits squarely in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem and Grizzly Recovery Area. The GYE, as it’s known, today holds about 1,000 grizzlies. In 2023, one of those bears tore the jaw off a local resident who was searching for another hunter’s deer carcass. Hotel housekeepers at Big Sky Resort occasionally pack bear spray as they move between buildings. Nevertheless, seeing a grizzly bear remains one of the top reasons tourists flock to the region.
Tuesday’s announcement site was a ridgeline away from the Yellowstone Club where Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce reportedly spent part of their honeymoon and Burgum has a $22 million vacation home. The resort community is one of the fastest developing spots in Montana and one of the wealthiest in the nation. During peak vacation months, residency balloons to more than 15,000. That development gobbles up the habitat grizzlies depend on to survive.
As both grizzlies and people expand their influence across a shared landscape, their fates may either braid or tangle. It’s useful to look back at how we got here.
Long Road to Recovery
In 1872, when President Ulysses Grant designated Yellowstone National Park as the nation’s “pleasuring-ground,” its early managers considered predators a defect and worked hard to shoot or trap all the wolves, mountain lions and coyotes they could find. But not the bears; grizzly or black. A superintendent’s report from 1895 mentioned “bears had increased notably” after park workers started leaving garbage out for them to eat. Tourists loved it, thronging the grandstands erected around the dumps to watch bears come to feed.
The 1963 Leopold Report outlining wildlife-management guidelines warned that national parks were becoming dependent on artificial manipulations of nature, and Yellowstone leaders began shutting down the dumps. That only led to more hungry bears approaching humans for food. At least 229 grizzlies were killed there between 1967 and 1972 — usually in conflict with people. When the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service placed grizzlies on the Endangered Species List in 1975, an optimistic estimate put the remaining population at about 600 animals south of the Canadian border.
As part of its 1993 grizzly recovery plan, FWS drew up six ecosystems where grizzlies were either holding on or potentially could create strongholds. It spent the next five decades protecting and studying the bears in hopes of restoring viable populations.
Two of those recovery areas were successful: The Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem around Yellowstone National Park and the Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem between Glacier National Park and the Bob Marshall Wilderness Complex each sustain about 1,000 grizzlies today.
However, the Cabinet-Yaak and Selkirk ecosystems of northwest Montana and northern Idaho only have about 50 grizzlies each. And the Bitterroot Ecosystem along the Montana-Idaho border and the North Cascades Ecosystem in northern Washington have no long-term resident grizzlies.
The 1993 plan set numeric targets for grizzly populations, which the NCDE and GYE met around 2000. Along with those bigger populations came more frequent livestock killings, grizzly encounters and publicity. But the population numbers weren’t the only criteria for success. Bear biologists wanted to confirm grizzlies from outside the GYE were moving in and remedying its genetic isolation. The states needed to show they had “adequate regulatory mechanisms” in place to keep grizzlies off a future Endangered Species List – something made harder by Idaho and Montana wolf-trapping policies that risked killing grizzlies by mistake.
FWS attempted to delist Greater Yellowstone grizzlies in 2007 and 2017. Both efforts failed after court challenges. That reflects the dynamic nature of the ecosystems grizzlies depend on. The 2007 delisting foundered when critics pointed out the recovery plan made no allowance for a sudden disappearance of two important grizzly food sources: whitebark pine seeds lost to disease and bug damage and cutthroat trout devoured by invasive lake trout.
Biologists with the Interagency Grizzly Bear Committee spent most of a decade learning bears had replaced those calories with a greater concentration on meat – especially carcasses and gut piles left behind by big-game hunters (which created another conflict factor). But when FWS attempted to use the new food studies as justification for another delisting attempt, the 2017 court challenge won by showing FWS hadn’t considered how removing federal protections from Greater Yellowstone bears would affect the recovery of grizzlies in other ecosystems. It also found FWS wasn’t adequately considering the bears’ long-term genetic diversity and population monitoring methods.
Let’s interrupt here to explain a core part of any endangered species management: the distinct population segment or DPS. Its official definition is “The smallest division of a taxonomic species that can be listed under the Endangered Species Act.” In practice, it’s the geographic habitat used by a particular group of animals protected under the law.
Grizzly bears currently roam North America between Wyoming and the Arctic Circle; Alaska alone has about 30,000 of them.. But the ESA only applies to the bears in the Lower 48 states. The 2025 proposed rule would shrink that DPS down to just Washington, Idaho and parts of Montana and Wyoming. The 2017 delisting case collapsed in part because FWS tried to create a separate DPS for Greater Yellowstone grizzlies, but couldn’t explain how delisting bears there would affect the success of the other five recovery areas.
While the recovery areas were an effective way to concentrate protections and research on specific landscapes and bear communities, they left unconsidered the status of the lands between them. As the overarching goal was to restore grizzlies to their historic territory, a crucial factor was their ability to safely travel between, say, the Greater Yellowstone and Northern Continental Divide ecosystems. Although grizzlies in both have stretched their respective boundaries to the point that only 35 miles separate them, those 35 miles are filled with human cities, ranches, freeways and other barriers.
Biology vs. politics
Before the Declaration of Independence in 1776, an estimated 50,000 grizzly bears inhabited the American West between Canada and Mexico. In 1975, just before the United States’ Bicentennial, the grizzly bear became the eighth creature to receive protection from the Endangered Species Act. At the time, Greater Yellowstone had perhaps 100 grizzlies left alive.
Of the more than 1,700 animals and plants given protection under the ESA since 1973, 39 have been declared fully recovered. That could be considered a 2-percent success rate, a figure the law’s critics cite as a wasteful failure. ESA advocates reverse that perspective, saying the law has saved 99 percent of the creatures it covered, and prevented extinction for at least 291 species.
By the early 2000s, state wildlife agencies in Montana, Wyoming and Idaho had all petitioned FWS to turn grizzlies over to their local management. Burgum’s new rule would allow states to work out agreements for greater independence from FWS oversight on grizzly management.
“I have always, for 30 years, wondered why we look at grizzly bears with this binary question: are they listed or delisted? Why such a fixation on delisting when the real question is what does long-term recovery of bears mean?
Martha williams, former director of Montana Fish, Wildlife and parks, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
The move is also potentially a “backdoor delisting,” according to Earthjustice attorney Jenny Harbine, who was involved in the previous federal lawsuits to keep grizzlies protected. While ESA listing and management rules are typically developed through public comment and review, these new rules may evade that scrutiny.
“All the hard questions are shifted to bilateral negotiations behind closed doors between the states and the Fish and Wildlife Service,” Harbine told Mountain Journal. “The public won’t know what that looks like, or how enforceable it is.”
The draft version of the new rules provide many exemptions for state agents or private individuals to kill grizzly bears without consulting with FWS first. The specifics aren’t spelled out, and would await those state-by-state negotiations. FWS justified the move by arguing the public would feel greater comfort with grizzlies when it had greater local control.
“By excepting take [killing or harassing] from deterring bears away from human-occupied areas, this exception furthers the conservation of the species by reducing the likelihood of human-bear conflicts and resulting management actions, such as removals,” the draft reads. That tracks with a recent University of Montana opinion survey that showed people in bear country both loved having grizzlies around and also overwhelmingly supported active management and even hunting.
Williams the former FWP and FWS director, recalled that dichotomy in both her state and federal jobs.
“I never ran across somebody who hated bears,” Williams said. “But they didn’t like losing their autonomy, or being told what to do. There was genuine fascination and awe at grizzly bears and what they meant and their recovery. And there was also concern for safety and livelihoods. On the Rocky Mountain Front, you wouldn’t just send the kids out to the brushy creek to go fishing with no bear spray and say ‘go have fun.’ It’s changed the way people live in Red Lodge, and the Gravelly Mountains. But for the most part, people who had genuine concerns were willing to work through that.”
One stakeholder Williams called a “red herring” distraction was the hunting community. In the 2017 delisting lawsuit, groups such as the Safari Club International filed briefs claiming hunters needed the right to kill grizzlies that threatened their safety in the field, and that grizzlies ought to be considered trophy wildlife similar to bull elk. Both those arguments foundered on the lack of evidence that hunting has any effective management impact on grizzly behavior or presence.
Instead, most of the lobbying for grizzly delisting has come from livestock and energy groups. Grizzlies do eat cattle and sheep, and their habitat protections do often prevent development in wild country. But preserving them also keeps wild ecosystems intact. According to Chris Servheen, who oversaw grizzly bear recovery at the Fish and Wildlife Service for 35 years, that’s more important.
“If we surrender to this energy dominance agenda, this goal of maximum profit for the energy industry, we’ll end up with a landscape devoid of life,” Servheen told Mountain Journal. “Everthing will be gone except for really resilient species. Energy dominance is totally adverse to fundamentals that the climate is being changed by humans. That affects cold-water fisheries and sensitive species across the landscape. It will make life miserable for a lot of humans. Do we have to do that? No. It’s only because certain politicians decided it’s politically lucrative for them.”
Tuesday’s state-management plan will get a 30-day comment period ending August 17. That’s a much faster schedule than the 2025 Biden-era rule update, which had a 60-day window and then was extended another 60 days. And it won’t be the last federal change grizzly bears will face this year.
“In addition,” the FWS draft rule states, “we are providing notice that we are considering issuing separate final rules for our final determinations on the revision to the grizzly bear listing and the revision to the 4(d) rule.”
