contiguous blocks of public land in the lower 48 and includes the Frank Church-River of No Return and the Selway-Bitterroots wilderness areas. The 5,600 square mile ecosystem is considered by the Fish and Wildlife Service to be prime habitat for grizzly bears. There are currently no known grizzlies.
The Fish and Wildlife Service’s current policy of recovering grizzly bears by separate populations rather than connecting the existing metapopulation is counter to warnings the agency issued in 2000.
“Wildlife species, like grizzly bear, are most vulnerable when confined to small portions of their historical range and limited to a few small populations,” the agency stated in its failed attempt in 2000 to reintroduce grizzlies to the Bitterroot Ecosystem.
That effort went nowhere because of strong opposition from Idaho, whose former Gov. Dirk Kempthorne famously stated in 2000: “I oppose bringing these massive, flesh-eating carnivores into Idaho.” Kempthorne later served as Secretary of Interior, which oversees the Fish and Wildlife Service, under President George W. Bush.
Grizzly bear advocates now hope that dispersing Yellowstone and Northern Continental Divide grizzlies will eventually end up in the Bitterroot Ecosystem, on their own.
“The biggest available unoccupied habitat that we have for them is the great wilderness areas of Central Idaho,” says Byrd of the Greater Yellowstone Coalition. “The Frank Church, The River of No Return, the Bitterroot Selways — that’s our biggest wilderness area in the lower 48 and they don’t have any bears in them.”
She hopes that over time the bears will migrate there, which will give her group the opportunity “to keep building social tolerance, keep working with the land owners and ranchers and livestock operators to say, ‘We are here to help you with conflicts with bears and wolves.’”
The Fish and Wildlife Service policy, however, is creating obstacles that may be impossible to overcome.
The agency’s policy of removing individual ecosystems from the endangered species list, creating a no death-count zone around the bears’ conservation area and turning over management to the states with game and fish commissions strongly biased against predators, supporting elk and deer populations and emphasizing predator trophy hunting may end dispersal, Mattson and others say.
“Watching them (the Idaho, Montana and Wyoming game and fish commissions) on what they have done with black bears, what they have done with mountains lions, and what they have done with wolves, is that to the extent that they perceive these predators to have negative impacts on harvestable surplus of large herbivores, they will kill these large carnivores,” says Mattson, who is sharply critical of the scientific methods employed by government scientists claiming they are biased to support political agendas.
“And to the extent that these large carnivores are a pest for ranchers and agricultural interests, they will kill predators,” he adds.
Raising the Stakes
To legally justify its decision to remove the Yellowstone grizzly population from Endangered Species Act protections before the rest of the grizzly population is no longer threatened, the Fish and Wildlife Service determined the Yellowstone grizzlies constitute a “Distinct Population Segment” that has reached the carrying capacity of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem and therefore should be removed from the endangered species list.
Multiple lawsuits potentially to be filed later this summer are expected to argue, in part, that the use of a Distinct Population Segment was primarily intended to allow the Fish and Wildlife Service to list isolated populations under the Endangered Species Act, not as a mechanism to delist an isolated population like the Yellowstone grizzlies without first assessing the overall impact of removing the Yellowstone population on the remaining bears.
The Washington, D.C. circuit court of appeals issued a decision Aug. 1 that could undercut the government’s Distinct Population Segment approach to removing grizzly bears from the endangered species list. 