Image copyright Reuters Image caption There are currently more than 700 grizzlies in the Yellowstone area 
 
 A US judge has ordered protection to be restored to grizzly bears in and around Yellowstone National Park, blocking plans for the first hunts there in nearly 30 years. 
 
 The Montana judge's ruling overturns the Trump administration's policy. 
 
 The judge sided with wildlife groups, who say grizzlies are under threat from climate change and loss of habitat. 
 
 Local ranchers argue the animals are killing their livestock and point to a growing number of attacks on people. 
 
 Grizzly numbers in the Yellowstone area have increased from 136 in 1975 to more than 700 today - in large part because of wildlife conservation measures, costing millions of dollars. 
 
 What did the judge say? 
 
 In his ruling on Monday, Judge Dana Christensen stated that the case was "not about the ethics of hunting". 
 
 This was, the judge continued, about whether the Fish and Wildlife Service considered threats to grizzlies' recovery in the long-term when it stripped the animals of their threatened species status in June 2017. 
 
 Jude Christensen said that in his view the answer was clearly "no". 
 
 How did state and federal officials react? 
 
 Wyoming Governor Matt Mead expressed disappointment. 
 
 "Grizzly bear recovery should be viewed as a conservation success story," he was quoted as saying by the Associated Press. 
 
 He added that the Endangered Species Act had a number of flaws, urging Congress to intervene and make changes. 
 
 Meanwhile, the Fish and Wildlife Service said it was reviewing the ruling and considering what steps to take. 
 
 Hunters in the states of Wyoming and Idaho had been planning to kill up to 23 grizzlies over the next few months. 
 
 It would have involved the first such hunts outside Alaska since 1991. 
 
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 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 . ||||| Montana’s Fish and Wildlife Commission decided Thursday to skip a 2018 grizzly bear hunting season, citing pending lawsuits and a wish to move cautiously as the species nears recovery. 
 
 “Montana has proven itself a leader in how it manages these species,” commission chairman Dan Vermillion said on Thursday. “This is not a decision to not ever have a hunting season. There are a lot of issues that need to be resolved before our department spends a significant amount of resources setting up a season. This retains maximum flexibility moving forward into an increasingly difficult situation.” 
 
 Grizzly bears in the Lower 48 States have been under federal Endangered Species Act protection since 1975. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service declared Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem grizzly bears recovered in 2017. That allowed wildlife managers in Montana, Idaho and Wyoming to consider those grizzlies as big-game animals in a demographic monitoring area outside Yellowstone National Park. 
 
 In January, representatives from the three states reviewed grizzly population estimates and the number of bears killed in 2017. They concluded that with a population of 718 bears, there was a possible quota of 17 male grizzlies and 2.5 females available for hunting. 
 
 The states have an agreement to divide that total by their percentage of the geographic area. Montana’s hunting share would have been one female grizzly and six males. 
 
 Montana wildlife managers had three options. One was to authorize a hunt for fall 2018 with that limit of one female and six males. The second was to skip a season but allow Idaho and Wyoming hunters to kill Montana’s share of the population. Option 3 was to skip starting a season and also withhold its allocation of bears. 
 
 But the FWS delisting decision already faces six lawsuits claiming grizzlies remain threatened. The states’ agreement says that when the female quota is reached, all grizzly hunting should end for the season. 
 
 The allowable annual mortality for sow grizzlies is 9 percent, compared to 20 percent for boars. Given the difficulty of telling a bear’s gender through a rifle scope, having a single female available for hunting was considered too slim of a potential season. 
 
 “Based on that low available mortality and the ongoing litigation, our recommendation would be to not proceed with a hunt this year,” Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks Wildlife Division Administrator Ken McDonald told the commissioners. “We also recommend letting the other states know we maintain our allocation so they don’t get used elsewhere.” 
 
 Idaho and Wyoming officials are still considering whether to launch a grizzly 2018 hunting season. 
 
 Commissioner Shane Colton recalled how Montana set five wolf hunting seasons that got rescinded as gray wolf delisting worked its way through the federal court system. He said rushing into a grizzly hunting season risked wasting state resources. 
 
 “Let the other states go off and tilt at windmills,” Colton said. “We’ll hunker down and do good science and put together a hunt that won’t be subject to injunctions.” 
 
 The commissioners unanimously chose the third option. 
 
 The hunting season issue does not affect roughly 1,000 grizzly bears in the Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem stretching from Missoula to Glacier National Park. A federal proposal to delist those bears is under development and might be released this summer. But any hunting of those bears would go through a separate Montana review. 
 
 Nick Gevock of the Montana Wildlife Federation said his organization supported an eventual grizzly hunt in the Yellowstone area, but he added the commission’s slow approach would build trust with the public. That also gives more time to prepare landowners for grizzly movement. Gevock cited an example of a carcass-collection program that has already paid for removal of 68 dead livestock in the Centennial Mountains to avoid attracting grizzlies. 
 
 “That’s a crucial corridor to get them from the Yellowstone to the Selway-Bitterroot (Wilderness),” Gevock said. “When we do have a grizzly hunt, we want the harvest to be fairly concentrated close to the park. We don’t want to kill the bears that are reinhabiting historic habitat.”
– "This is really momentous, bigger than recovering the bald eagle," an environmental writer tells the Christian Science Monitor after the US Fish and Wildlife Service on Thursday proposed removing grizzly bears in and around Yellowstone from the endangered species list. When grizzlies were added to the list in 1975, there were just 136 bears remaining in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem (which includes both the park and surrounding lands) as a result of hunting. Today, there are an estimated 700 to 1,000 bears. "There is robust agreement that this population has recovered," Service Director Dan Ashe says. "It's now our obligation to delist the population and return management to the state." A final decision is expected later this year, reports Reuters. Grizzlies have also doubled their range to occupy more than 22,500 square miles of the Yellowstone region, but wildlife advocates fear they're still at risk. A record 59 Yellowstone grizzlies died last year as food sources, including white bark pine and cutthroat trout, dwindled. The proposal comes "a couple years too early," says one advocate, who fears that Wyoming, Idaho, and Montana will resume grizzly hunts, not held since 1974, on bears who stray beyond the park's boundaries. A scientist with the National Resources Defense Council tells CNN that the bears could see genetic problems if they don't interact with bears outside the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. Ashe says a five-year plan will be put in place to "ensure healthy grizzly populations persist across the Yellowstone ecosystem long into the future."