Greater Yellowstone’s grizzly bear population has grown by at least two this spring.
Federal and state biologists count grizzlies every year, although they don’t usually get this granular. But when a Wyoming Game and Fish wildlife monitoring flight on March 27 brought back the photo of Grizzly 1126F outside her Teton Wilderness hibernation den with two cubs clearly tussling beside her, the discovery checked some special scientific and legal boxes.
“She’s clearly in great shape, for a young mother coming out of the den,” said Quentin Kujala, Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks Chief of Conservation Policy. “That’s the gold standard to the point of cub production.”
And by “gold standard,” Kujala meant not just a successful breeding attempt, but a successful multi-state effort to artificially connect an isolated grizzly population to a larger community of bears. The Lower 48’s two most successful grizzly recovery areas, the Greater Yellowstone and Northern Continental Divide ecosystems, are only separated by about 35 miles. Yet there has not been any natural genetic interchange between them for at least 100 years. Sow 1126F was moved by truck from Montana’s Bob Marshall Wilderness into Wyoming’s Yellowstone National Park in 2024 to stir up what was becoming a stagnant DNA pool.
That lack of biological connectivity has been a key sticking point in the five-decade-long effort to recover grizzlies from possible extirpation in the Lower 48 states and get them off the federal Endangered Species List. When a 2018 federal court decision blocked delisting of Greater Yellowstone grizzlies from the ESA, one reason was that low genetic diversity was too much of an inbreeding risk for the bear’s continued survival without federal protection. The ruling prompted wildlife officials in Montana and Wyoming to attempt transplanting bears between the Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem and Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem recovery areas.
The Trump administration has signaled 2026 is the year grizzlies should be delisted. Beyond 1126F’s possible resolution of the population connection problem, a long list of other challenges remain to meet the requirements of ending the bears’ Endangered Species Act protection. Some are legal, such as whether states have “adequate regulatory mechanisms” in place to keep grizzly numbers strong after federal oversight ends. Others are biological. A recent court decision found federal wildlife managers needed much more research about how logging roads damage grizzly habitat before a Forest Service project near Yellowstone Park can go forward.
Last January, in the final days of President Joe Biden’s administration, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service released an updated grizzly management plan that kept the bears under federal protection but compressed their population designation from the entire Lower 48 to a smaller zone encompassing Montana, Wyoming, Idaho and parts of Washington. One of the main reasons it denied state petitions for local grizzly management was the lack of those adequate regulatory mechanisms.
That has spurred wildlife managers in Montana, Idaho and Wyoming to develop those tools. But much of that work takes place in the Interagency Grizzly Bear Committee, which has seen its workflow upended due to federal budget standoffs. The IGBC Yellowstone subcommittee usually meets in April, but now has a meeting tentatively scheduled for May 6. The NCDE Subcommittee’s routine May meeting has not yet been announced, nor has the executive committee meeting in June: the IGBC calendar page reads “watch this space for dates as they are scheduled.”
The Trump administration has called for several reductions to the overall power of the Endangered Species Act, as well as more targeted changes to its grizzly bear protection. However, it missed a January 31 process deadline for its anticipated grizzly bear final rule that “revises or removes the entire ESA listing of grizzly bears in the Lower-48 United States.” FWS now plans to have that final rule ready by December 18. FWS blamed the delay on the 43-day federal government shutdown late last year, according to the agency’s acting Assistant Director Gina Shultz.
Meanwhile, Yellowstone National Park officials reported spotting their first grizzly of 2026 on March 9 in the northern part of the park. That’s a few days later than past years, although the date depends as much on when a human patrols the backcountry as when a bear leaves its hibernation den. And at least one grizzly was spotted making a January walkabout in Yellowstone during the abnormally mild winter.
Wildlife managers will have plenty of other interesting updates to cover when they do convene. They’ll receive a recently completed mortality study which found grizzly bears did atypically well in 2025, evading poachers, conflict management euthanizations and natural cause deaths. Other science committee reports detail the latest maps displaying where grizzlies are, and what new places they’re exploring.
NCDE grizzly-occupied range is expanding, now at 62,287 square kilometers (about 1.5 million acres) in the mountainous country between Glacier National Park and Missoula. That space has increased 12 percent between 2008 and 2022, and now includes “maybe present” areas north and east of Great Falls extending as far as Havre. It also has significant expansion throughout the Beaverhead Deerlodge National Forest and the Lower Clark Fork River drainage west of Missoula. More than 1,000 bears live there, although precise numbers are not available.
The Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem has an estimated 1,050 grizzlies, and has an occupied range of 67,608 square kilometers (about 1.7 million acres). That area has remained fairly stable in size for the past few years.
The Greater Yellowstone and Northern Continental Divide ecosystems are only separated by about 35 miles. Yet there has not been any natural genetic interchange between them for at least 100 years.
GYE bears have roamed beyond their estimated occupied range in almost all directions, especially south of Grand Teton National Park and eastward toward the Bighorn Mountains of Wyoming. They’re also spilling across Interstate 90 to the north.
Since the grizzly’s ESA listing in 1975, recovery efforts have concentrated on six remote regions in the Pacific Northwest. Only two of those, the NCDE and GYE, have experienced strong population recovery. They haven’t yet begun sharing bears naturally, although NCDE grizzlies have made long forays through the Bitterroot Recovery Area along the Montana-Idaho border and at least one has successfully bred cubs in the Cabinet-Yaak Recovery Area in northwest Montana.
Transplanted grizzlies 1126F and 1129M received intense monitoring because of their potential to show genetic interchange between recovery areas. That baseline science helps biologists explain how the bears are thriving, which in turn drives state management policy decisions.
“It represents genetic diversity added to that system,” Kujala said in a FWP video release about 1126F’s new cubs. “It also represents a real milestone of success in collaboration between two states and Yellowstone National Park. It’s a hint of the effectiveness of our monitoring protocols.”
Both NCDE bears settled in their new GYE homes, although in somewhat atypical fashion. The boar stayed close to its release site, although male grizzlies tend to roam large territories. In contrast, the sow cruised in and out of the park before finally denning above the Buffalo River in the Teton Wilderness east of the park boundary, confounding the usual female habit of staying in a small home ground.
“Grizzly bears in these populations usually give birth for the first time at 5 or 6 years old, so it’s not surprising from an age standpoint,” FWP grizzly bear researcher Cecily Costello said in a Wednesday press release. “It is more surprising because last year she was still very mobile and made many large, wandering movements. We wondered if that energy expenditure might reduce her chances of reproducing, but, from the photo, she appears to be in great condition.”
Costello co-leads the grizzly monitoring efforts for Montana’s Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks. One of her big projects is building a computer simulation program that forecasts how grizzlies might move into a new country. Using data from radio-collared bears showing how they select habitat and move across rivers, roads and mountains, the computer program tries to predict the pathway a grizzly might choose when traveling between ecosystems.
“They kind of ramble around,” Costello told Mountain Journal. “But this is indicative of how their range might expand in the near future. And that’s a starting point for all of us to plan for conflict response.”
In other words, knowing where a grizzly bear moves might explain why it went there. Even if grizzly bears are released from federal ESA protection in December, state wildlife managers will still need to monitor grizzly activity, respond to problems like livestock killing or property damage, and ensure that enough bears stay alive and healthy to avoid slipping back toward extinction.
Much of that work happens through “Bear Smart” or “Bear Aware” community programs that help people avoid bear issues before they start. Those include adaptations such as bear-secure garbage handling, outreach to tourists at campsites and recreation areas, and changes to livestock and farming activity that discourages bear predation.
There will also be hard work if states decide to offer grizzly bear hunting seasons after federal protection fades. Recent public opinion surveys show grizzlies are extremely popular, and somewhat surprisingly, that many Montana residents would support some kind of hunting season.
All those management concerns require basic biological research, such as the monitoring of Yellowstone Park’s two new NCDE grizzlies. Costello said the male has apparently settled well in the southern portion of the park. Boars don’t help sows raise cubs (and in fact often kill them), so determining 1129M’s reproductive success will depend on genetic analysis of other captured grizzlies, to see if he shows up in their family tree. And the average survival rate for new cubs is only 50 percent, especially for first-time mothers.
“So, we do have to wait and see about the survival of this litter,” Costello said. “Even if this litter does not survive, we expect she will be successful in the future.”
