Grizzlies: Double Vision

For a creature that can’t speak, words matter to a grizzly bear.

The word “science” especially has different meanings when spoken by those wishing to prolong federal protections for grizzlies, and those asking for more freedom to manage the bear as a trophy or a pest. Both sides point to the same body of facts, history and statistics to argue the other side is wrong.

On February 20, a coalition of grizzly protection advocates published its plan for how grizzly bears and people can coexist: “A New Vision for Grizzly Bear Recovery.”

“It’s a pro-science document when science is being removed from within,” said Rick Bass of the Yaak Valley Forest Council, one of the supporting organizations of the document. “It’s citizens acting where the government is not.”

The coalition released the plan a month after the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced its proposed rule to retain Endangered Species Act protection for Ursus arctos horribilis in all or parts of four states: Montana, Wyoming, Idaho and Washington. It came with an “independently peer-reviewed updated species status assessment that compiles the best available scientific information, which helps to inform decision-making.”

Proponents of state management and hunting of grizzlies largely disagreed with the service’s claims of strong science.

“For decades, Montana has followed the science and as a result, the bear has more than recovered in the Greater Yellowstone and the Northern Continental Divide Ecosystems,” Montana Sen. Steve Daines wrote after the FWS protection rule was released on January 8. “Continuing to move the goalposts on recovery is only harming the bear and putting our Montanan communities at risk.”

The science within all three of these statements shares some starting points: Grizzly bears were a dominant predator throughout most of the western United States before the 1849 Gold Rush and then the Civil War unleashed a continent-spanning wave of human development toward the Pacific Ocean. By 1910, government predator removal programs, habitat development and conflicts with ranchers and farmers had extirpated all but about 4,400 grizzlies from a pre-settlement estimate of almost 50,000.

The Endangered Species Act passed with overwhelming congressional support in 1973 and was signed into law by President Richard Nixon. Grizzly bears became the eighth animal on the Endangered Species List two years later, at which time fewer than 700 remained in the Lower 48.

That led to decades of effort by state, federal and private stakeholders. Led by the Interagency Grizzly Bear Committee, they developed six recovery zones in large, remote public lands known for past grizzly occupation. They ended hunting seasons and restricted other ways of killing grizzlies without federal permission or approval. They restricted private business and recreation activity that could harm bears, from logging to long-distance running races. And they encouraged ways of co-existing with grizzlies, such as the use of bear spray and electric fencing of livestock.

Since then, grizzly bear numbers have exceeded expectations in the Northern Continental Divide and Greater Yellowstone recovery areas, barely hung on in the Cabinet-Yaak and Selkirk recovery areas, and remained essentially zero in the Bitterroot and North Cascade recovery areas. About 2,100 grizzlies now inhabit the Lower 48.

“A New Vision for Grizzly Bear Recovery” credits a list of wildlife protection groups from around the Rocky Mountain West, including Wyoming Wildlife Advocates, Friends of the Clearwater, Save the Yellowstone Grizzly, and Yaak Valley Forest Council, as well as national organizations such as WildEarth Guardians and Wilderness Watch.

Its baseline claim: “Grizzly bears have an inherent right to exist and thrive in biologically suitable habitat on public lands and private land areas with dedicated conservation easements.” Its goal: “A future where grizzly bears will forever be free from the threat of hunting.”

In more detail, the Vision document calls for emphasizing non-lethal ways of reducing human-grizzly conflict, improving and protecting grizzly habitat, incentivizing private landowners to tolerate grizzlies, requiring state and federal agencies to favor bear preservation over human development, and paying more attention to the growing impact of climate change on the landscape shared by grizzlies and people.

The proposal comes as former Wyoming Game and Fish director Brian Nesvik takes the helm at U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Nesvik has supported delisting grizzly bears from ESA protection while in his state post. Wyoming Game and Fish considers grizzly bears as a “trophy game animal,” despite lacking state management or hunting authority.

During the Senate confirmation hearing for Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, Sen. Daines asked if Burgum agreed that the “data shows the recovery of these two populations, and [if Bergum would] commit to working with me to delist them?”

Burgum replied: “I’m with you. We should be celebrating when species come off the endangered species list as opposed to fighting every way we can to try and keep them on that list.”

Defining the goal posts in grizzly bear recovery is even harder than finding a grizzly bear when you’re looking for one. In their petition to FWS for grizzly delisting, Idaho state officials noted that an estimated 60,000 grizzlies currently live on 60 percent of their historic North American range, if you count the populations in Canada and Alaska. And the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources — keeper of the “Red List” of global species risk — considers Ursus arctos a “species of least concern” with “stable” worldwide populations exceeding 110,000 animals.

For grizzly advocate Adam Rissien of WildEarth Guardians, the way the 1993 recovery plan measured success doesn’t match what current science shows grizzlies really need.

“The goal posts have been moved, by hostile state policy, climate change, development and recreational pressures,” Rissien said. “It’s lawmakers with a political agenda who refuse to interpret the science correctly and then claim the goal posts moved. Conservationists aren’t moving those goal posts. Current threats are moving them.”

In the January 8 notice, the Fish and Wildlife Service’s top-line decision was to keep grizzly bears on the Endangered Species List as a threatened species for the foreseeable future. It rejected the Idaho petition for total delisting. And it found claims by Montana and Wyoming to delist grizzlies in the two successful recovery zones “not warranted [because] those two ecosystems do not, on their own, represent valid [Distinct Population Segments].”

That last sentence may hold the crux of future grizzly bear science. The 1993 grizzly recovery plan, which still largely governs how bears are managed, envisioned each recovery area reaching a successful population level and then being released from the plan. 

The Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem and Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem both have reached populations of roughly 1,000 grizzly bears, which have begun to explore new country far beyond their original recovery zones. Montana and Wyoming officials asked the federal government to delist the bears in those areas, according to the standards outlined in that 1993 recovery plan.

But FWS has no clear way to carve one DPS out of the larger listing. A federal court ruling on the service’s proposed 2017 grizzly delisting spotlighted the problem: How would the unsuccessful recovery areas progress if the successful ones were under very different management? For example, what should happen if a grizzly from a still-protected federal area wanders into a state-managed area that allows trophy hunting? 

Here, the cooperative spirit that unified the Interagency Grizzly Bear Committee stakeholders for 40 years started to crack. State wildlife agencies that thought their years of recovery efforts justified a shift to state management. Instead they got put on hold.

In past court clashes, the Fish and Wildlife Service had directed the IGBC to develop scientific and policy answers to the judge’s challenges. But this time, no such order came. Instead, the service announced a new Distinct Population Segment that swallowed the six recovery areas into a polygon encompassing most of Idaho, Montana and Wyoming and Washington. That gets rid of the successful/unsuccessful recovery area problem. But it creates a new landscape with uncertain rules for success.

In the same timeframe, the National Park Service led a project to transplant grizzlies into the North Cascades Ecosystem in Washington. And a federal judge in 2024 ruled that a similar plan to place an experimental population of grizzlies in the Bitterroot Ecosystem was improperly halted in 2000. He ordered that project to be reconsidered, with a draft environmental impact statement due in summer 2025.

“There have been nine different presidents since the grizzly bear was listed,” said Mike Bader, a grizzly researcher who participated in the Vision drafting. “The grizzly bear should be a non-partisan American effort. What the public and the grizzly needs is the best available science and not political expediency for whatever party is in power at any given time.”

Public statements like the Vision for Grizzly Bear Recovery offer examples for what that success might look like from the perspective of people who welcome grizzlies on the larger landscape. That vision assumes continued federal oversight and state cooperation of a species that could slide back toward extinction if protections aren’t kept in place.

Meanwhile, legislators in Montana, Idaho and Wyoming have put up bills calling for federal delisting of grizzlies. Idaho House Joint Memorial No. 4 claims “a complete delisting of grizzly bears in the lower 48 states would result in a positive outcome from all states that have or may have grizzly bears within their borders [and] the expansion of unmanaged [grizzly] populations into unsuitable habitat has led to loss and harm of livestock and domestic animals, as well as harm and death to humans as demonstrated by several bear-to-human conflicts.”

The new federal proposed rule outlines yet another way grizzlies could be managed, although some of the crucial details are vague. For example, it anticipates a new recovery plan overriding the 1993 edition with new criteria for declaring victory under the Endangered Species Act. “Maintaining all recovery zones together in one DPS will increase the speed of recovery in remaining ecosystems and the overall viability of grizzly bears,” FWS’s policy explanation states, “increasing the likelihood of successfully delisting the entire DPS by addressing the species’ recovery needs as a whole.”

But with an all-of-government restructuring and budgeting revolution underway in Washington, D.C., usual methods of agency progress can’t be assumed. One big question is whether agencies such as the U.S. Geological Survey will have funding to continue monitoring grizzly populations at all. 

The Fish and Wildlife Service’s grizzly bear webpage now has a notice reading “you are viewing ARCHIVED content published online before January 20, 2025. Please note that this content is NOT UPDATED, and links may not work. Additionally, any previously issued diversity, equity, inclusion or gender-related guidance on this webpage should be considered rescinded.” [emphasis in the original]

The page also notes that “in light of the recent transition and the need for this Administration to review the recent grizzly bear proposed rule, the service is cancelling all four of the public meetings and hearings that the agency voluntarily scheduled on this proposal.”

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