FILE - In this May 17, 2015, file photo, a Louisiana Black Bear, sub-species of the black bear that is protected under the Endangered Species Act, sits in a water oak tree in Marksville, La. U.S. Interior... (Associated Press) 
 
 NEW ORLEANS (AP) — The Louisiana black bear, the animal behind the "teddy's bear" inspired by President Theodore Roosevelt, has rebounded enough to pull it off the list of federally protected species, the government says. 
 
 U.S. Interior Secretary Sally Jewell heralded the "recovery of a species" Thursday, though groups that have worked for decades to protect the bears disagreed or had doubts. 
 
 The black bear, which once roamed Texas, Mississippi and Louisiana, is now found in two parts of eastern Louisiana and in one place along the coast. Its removal from the federal list means the state will now take over work to protect it. 
 
 Jewell spoke at the Tallulah office of the Tensas River National Wildlife Refuge, where Louisiana's biggest black bear population is found. Reporters elsewhere listened by phone as she described how Roosevelt's refusal to shoot a tied-up Louisiana black bear for a hunt trophy in 1902 inspired teddy bears. 
 
 Jewell said she got to hold a rescued 7-week-old cub that morning. 
 
 "The work's not over," she said. "The work's really just beginning to bring back more of these hardwoods so Louisiana can help enjoy the kinds of animals that Teddy Roosevelt saw when he was here at the turn of the century." 
 
 Michael J. Robinson, a conservation advocate for the Center for Biological Diversity, said one of the groups being counted as Louisiana black bears may not be that subspecies at all, but descendants of black bears imported from Minnesota in the 1960s. 
 
 The group was initially excited by the bear's progress but more recently became aware of a former U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist's opposition because the upper Atchafalaya Basin area northwest of Baton Rouge, where the smaller eastern group is found, had no black bears until the Minnesota bears were brought in. 
 
 "Rather than contributing to the black bear population, they threaten to hybridize it," and probably should be sterilized or moved back to Minnesota, Robinson said. 
 
 Deborah Fuller, a federal biologist based in Louisiana, said the most recent genetic study indicates "the upper Atachafalaya bear comes out as its own thing. Not as Minnesota," though it may have Minnesota genes. 
 
 Local Sierra Club chairman Harold Schoeffler, who sued in 1987 to get the bears listed, said he will be talking on Friday with an attorney for Defenders of Wildlife, which handled the earlier lawsuit. 
 
 However, Defenders of Wildlife spokeswoman Cindy Hoffman said in an email that the group was not involved. 
 
 Schoeffler said he thinks there just aren't enough bears to consider recovered. He estimated numbers around 700. 
 
 The estimated total was once below 100. Schoeffler said it was 300 to 350 when he went to court in 1987. 
 
 A years-long DNA census released in 2014 estimated the number at 350 to 600 north of Interstate 10 in Louisiana. Those south of U.S. 90 in south-central Louisiana — the "lower Atchafalaya basin" have not yet been counted. 
 
 "When we delisted alligators, we probably had 50,000. When we delisted pelicans, we had 28,000 or 30,000," he said. 
 
 Fuller said new research indicates there may be nearly 700 bears just in northeast Louisiana. And, while numbers are important, so is whether they can thrive. Biologists think that answer is yes, she said. 
 
 Paul Davidson, executive director of the Black Bear Conservation Coalition, said one of the recovery plan's required objectives — creating a corridor between the two populations above Interstate 10 — has not been met because forests don't link the areas where they live. 
 
 University of Tennessee biologists said genetics show there is such a corridor, since some bears from those groups have mated. 
 
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 Online: 
 
 http://www.fws.gov/southeast/wildlife/mammal/louisiana-black-bear/ 
 
 http://www.wlf.louisiana.gov/louisiana-black-bear-status-range 
 
 Theodore Roosevelt Association about teddy bears: http://bit.ly/1oWpyrl ||||| After decades of recovery, the Louisiana black bear – the furry beast that inspired the creation of teddy bears – is now officially off the lists for threatened and endangered species under the Endangered Species Act. 
 
 The US Department of Interior Secretary Sally Jewell attributed the good news to partnerships with private landowners and their work to preserve forestland vital to the survival of the bears during her announcement at the Tensas River National Wildlife Refuge in northeast Louisiana, in the heart of black bear territory. She was there to “to celebrate a successful conservation partnership to protect and recover the Louisiana black bear from the brink of extinction," the department said. 
 
 Landowners as well as state and federal agencies, nonprofits, and universities all played a part in the bears’ population recovery, according to US Fish and Wildlife Services. Aggressive restoration programs and new regulations helped mitigate habitat loss enough to enable the iconic bear's population to rebound. 
 
 Similar efforts, on the part of both regulatory bodies and individuals, have helped restore habitats for numerous birds, mammals, and other creatures that once faced grave risk. 
 
 “There is a rewilding of America going on, which is extraordinarily heartening,” says Andrew Wetzler, the director of the Land and Wildlife Program at the Natural Resources Defense Council, told the Monitor last May, when FWS began the process of de-listing the bear. 
 
 The Monitor’s Patrik Jonsson reported at the time: 
 
 A potent combination of collaborative wildlife management techniques, cultural shifts in how Americans view large birds and mammals, the tenacity of the species themselves, and a cleaner overall environment have resulted in a record number of species being taken off the endangered species list in the Obama era, even as lawmakers start coming to terms with what it means to manage a country where raw, fanged wilderness now sniffs and grunts at the city limit.” 
 
 There are now between 500 and 750 Louisiana black bears in the United States, FWS says on its website – twice the population size two decades ago. 
 
 But estimates vary. Former Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) said the total was about 1,000 last May. A DNA census report released in 2014 projected the number to be between 350 and 600 in the region north of Interstate 10 in Louisiana. Those to the South have yet to be counted. 
 
 Some conservation experts say it may be too early to celebrate, and that the black bears still need federal protection. 
 
 The Center for Biological Diversity, for instance, says it’s skeptical that the bear is entirely ready for “delisting.” A spokesman said the group will be looking into the specific qualifications. 
 
 The local Sierra Club chairman Harold Schoeffler also casts doubt on whether the Louisiana Black Bear should be off the list. He said he's ready to sue if the bears are taken off. Mr. Schoeffler was the one who went to court in 1987 and attained protection for the bears under the Endangered Species Act. 
 
 Back then, he said, the population was 300 to 350. At one point, their numbers were down to 100. 
 
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 "I think the important point is that we've done very little to re-establish the bear in places where they traditionally resided,” he added, such as forests in western Mississippi and the Kisatchie National Forest in Louisiana. 
 
 This report contains material from the Associated Press. ||||| FILE - In this Sept. 25, 2013, file photo, a grizzly bear cub searches for fallen fruit beneath an apple tree a few miles from the north entrance to Yellowstone National Park in Gardiner, Mont. On Monday,... (Associated Press) 
 
 BILLINGS, Mont. (AP) — A U.S. judge ordered federal protections restored for grizzly bears in the Northern Rocky Mountains on Monday, a move that blocks the first grizzly hunts planned in the Lower 48 states in almost three decades. 
 
 Wyoming and Idaho had been on the cusp of allowing hunters to kill up to 23 bears this fall. U.S. District Judge Dana Christensen had twice delayed the hunts, and the latest order blocking them was due to expire later this week. The hunts would have been the first in U.S. outside Alaska since 1991. 
 
 Christensen wrote in his ruling that the case was "not about the ethics of hunting." Rather, he said, it was about whether federal officials adequately considered threats to the species' long-term recovery when they lifted protections for more than 700 bears living around Yellowstone National Park. 
 
 In the judge's view, the answer was no. 
 
 He noted that an estimated 50,000 bears once roamed the contiguous U.S. and said it would be "simplistic at best and disingenuous at worst" not to consider the status of grizzlies outside the Yellowstone region, one of the few areas where they have bounced back. 
 
 State and federal officials reacted with disappointment. Wyoming Gov. Matt Mead said the ruling provided further evidence of flaws in the Endangered Species Act and the need for Congress to make changes. 
 
 "Grizzly bear recovery should be viewed as a conservation success story," Mead said in a statement. 
 
 A bid to remove protections for the region's gray wolves ran into similar legal problems last decade. In that case, Congress intervened in 2011 to strip safeguards from the animals through legislation, opening the way to public wolf hunts. 
 
 Pressure to lift protections on bears and allow hunting has increased in recent years as the number of conflicts between bears and people increased. Most of those conflicts involve attacks on livestock but occasionally bears attack people, such as a Wyoming hunting guide killed earlier this month by a pair of grizzly bears. 
 
 The ruling marks a victory for wildlife advocates and Native American tribes that sued when the Interior Department last year revoked federal protections. They argued that the animals face continued threats from climate change and loss of habitat. 
 
 Tim Preso, an attorney with EarthJustice who represented many of the plaintiffs, said Christensen's ruling made clear that the government had moved too hastily to remove protections because bears are absent from much of their historical range. 
 
 "Putting the blinders on to everything other than Yellowstone grizzlies was illegal," he said. "We tried to get them to put on the brakes, but they refused to do that." 
 
 Hunting and agriculture groups and the National Rifle Association had intervened in the case seeking to keep management of grizzlies under state control. 
 
 Restoring protections will allow the grizzly population to grow unchecked, "endangering the lives and livelihoods of westerners who settled the region long ago," said Cody Wisniewski, representing the Wyoming Farm Bureau. 
 
 The grizzlies living in and around Yellowstone were classified as a threatened species in 1975 after most bears had been killed off early last century and the population was down to just 136 animals. 
 
 Government biologists contend Yellowstone's grizzlies are now thriving, have adapted to changes in their diet and are among the best-managed bears in the world. 
 
 U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service spokeswoman Jennifer Strickland said the agency was reviewing Monday's ruling but stood behind its decision to lift protections. 
 
 The agency initially declared a successful recovery for the Yellowstone population in 2007, but a federal judge ordered protections to remain while wildlife officials studied whether the decline of a major food source — whitebark pine seeds — could threaten the bears' survival. 
 
 The Fish and Wildlife Service concluded last year it had addressed that and all other threats and said the grizzlies were no longer a threatened species requiring restrictive federal protections for them and their habitat. 
 
 That decision turned management of the bears over to the states, which agreed on a plan that set hunting quotas based on the number of deaths each year to ensure the population stays above 600 animals. 
 
 The federal agency has been moving toward lifting federal protections for another group of about 1,000 bears living in Montana's Glacier National Park and the Bob Marshall Wilderness, but it first wanted to see how Christensen ruled on the Yellowstone case. 
 
 Plaintiffs' attorney Matthew Bishop with the Western Environmental Law Center said the agency should reconsider those plans in light of Christensen's ruling. 
 
 "The idea of recovering grizzly bears in the Lower 48 should still be on the table. They shouldn't get away with this piecemeal delisting approach," Bishop said. 
 
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 Associated Press writers Matt Volz in Helena and Mead Gruver in Cheyenne, Wyoming contributed to this story. 
 
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 Follow Matthew Brown on Twitter at https://twitter.com/MatthewBrownAP . ||||| (Reuters) - The Trump administration has proposed rescinding Obama-era rules barring sport hunters from using bait to lure and kill grizzly bears in Alaska’s national preserves, as is allowed in other parts of the state, the National Park Service said on Monday. 
 
 FILE PHOTO: A coastal brown bear walks along the banks of the Chilkoot River near Haines, Alaska October 7, 2014. REUTERS/Bob Strong/File Photo 
 
 The plan, pushed by Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke and assailed by environmentalists as inhumane, would give state wildlife managers the discretion to decide what kinds of bear-hunting methods are permitted across 20 million acres (8 million hectares) of national preserve lands in Alaska. 
 
 Alaska in 2005 began allowing grizzly-baiting for the first time since statehood as part of a predator-control program to boost populations of big-game animals popular with hunters such as moose in the state’s vast interior. 
 
 The practice of using anything from stale doughnuts and lard to honey-drenched dog food to attract grizzlies into the open for hunters to more easily shoot them was banned in Alaska’s preserves in 2015 by the Park Service under then-President Barack Obama. 
 
 The agency determined then that bear-baiting was biologically unsound, potentially unsafe and “inconsistent with federal law authorizing sport hunting in national preserves in Alaska.” 
 
 The 2015 rule also prohibited sport hunters, for similar reasons, from using artificial lighting to enter black bear dens as a way of surprising adult animals and their cubs inside, and barred the trapping of gray wolves during their denning season. 
 
 The Zinke proposal would likewise lift those restrictions to allow the state Department of Fish and Game to set hunting and trapping rules as its deems appropriate within national preserves, according to Park Service spokesman Peter Christian. 
 
 Grizzly bears are believed to number about 30,000 throughout Alaska, while an estimated 100,000 black bears roam the state, according to Fish and Game data. 
 
 Alaska officials have said that increased killing of predators such as grizzlies was necessary to increase opportunities for successful hunting of moose and other game creatures favored by sportsmen. 
 
 Environmental groups denounced the proposal as unethical and cruel, and said the hunting and trapping practices at issue are also disruptive to the natural predator-prey dynamic. 
 
 “The Department of Interior under Secretary Zinke is enabling Alaska’s war on bears and wolves in national preserves,” said Jim Adams of the National Parks Conservation Association. 
 
 Veteran hunting guide Thor Stacey, director of government affairs for the Alaska Professional Hunter Association, said his group strongly backs the move to abolish existing restrictions. 
 
 “This was a case of the federal government overstepping and trying to usurp the state’s authority to manage its wildlife,” Stacey said. 
 
 The proposed rule change, to be published in the Federal Register on Tuesday, marks the latest Obama-era environmental regulation that the Republican administration of his successor, President Donald Trump, had sought to roll back since taking office in January 2017.
– After decades of barely clinging on as a species, the bear that inspired teddy bears has bounced back. Interior Secretary Sally Jewell announced on Thursday that the Louisiana black bear—which appeared in the famous "Teddy's bear" political cartoon after Teddy Roosevelt refused to shoot a tied-up one in 1902—has been taken off both the threatened and endangered species list after a population increase from as few as 80 in 1959 to up to 750 today, the Christian Science Monitor reports. In what authorities say should serve as an example to other areas, the bear rebounded with the help of habitat restoration and wildlife corridors that connected different populations of the bear subspecies, which once ranged all the way from eastern Texas to eastern Mississippi. Jewell praised the "recovery of a species," though the AP notes that some groups think the move is premature. "The work's not over," Jewell told reporters. "The work's really just beginning to bring back more of these hardwoods so Louisiana can help enjoy the kinds of animals that Teddy Roosevelt saw when he was here at the turn of the century." There hasn't been a legal bear hunt in the state since 1988, and the New Orleans Advocate reports that state authorities, who will now take over work to protect the species, say it's far too early to talk about holding one now. (This has also been a great month for grizzly bears.)