After years of anticipation, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service recently unveiled a plan for grizzly bears to remain listed as “threatened” on the endangered species list in the Northern Rockies.
The move is the latest in a decades-long battle between the feds, environmentalists and western states over whether grizzlies have recovered and how they should be managed.
Wyoming, Montana and Idaho have urged the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to delist the bears and return management to the states. Instead, the proposal maintains federal protections for the bears and allows them to move more between ecosystems. It could also give landowners more flexibility around killing bears that threaten livestock.
Since the plan was introduced, the Trump administration has cancelled all in-person public hearings while it reviews the proposal. The USFWS declined to comment on how this will impact the process moving forward, but we do know that Trump’s pick for secretary of interior has supported taking away federal protections.
As of now, anyone can still comment on the proposal online through mid-March, with a final ruling slated for January next year.
In the meantime, the Mountain West News Bureau’s Hanna Merzbach sat down with ecologist Frank Van Manen to get some more context. He leads the Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team, which focuses on the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem.
Editor's Note: This story has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Hanna Merzbach: Thanks for being here today. So you've been researching grizzlies for years. What does your research say about recovery in our region?
Frank van Manen: So if we're specifically talking about the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, all the data indicate that this is a biologically recovered population because of conservation actions that were put in place by partner agencies, federal, state and tribal agencies working together, especially starting in the early ’80s to really enhance habitat security for grizzly bears and reduce mortality. So when you look at the data, this population is a recovered population. It has also met the recovery criteria since the early 2000s.
HM: The population target for the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem was 500 bears, right?
FM: Correct.
HM: And now it's close to double that?
FM: Yeah, so the latest population estimate is from 2023, and the population was 1,030 individual bears within the ecosystem.
HM: About 70 grizzly bears were killed in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem last year, mostly because of humans. We had a very prominent one this last year with the world-famous mama bear, 399. Are these fatalities still falling within the recovery targets?
FM: Yeah, I would say we're beyond those targets, really. Yes, it seems like a high number of mortalities, but keep in mind, this is a population that is much larger than it was a couple of decades ago, and so with a larger population, you can sustain higher levels of mortality. What we're looking at as scientists is really the mortality rates, and they have been sustainable to the point that the population is still actually growing by a couple percent every year. In a way, it's more reflective of the fact that we have so many bears and now increasingly have bears in places where the risk of mortality is simply higher.
HM: Is there any evidence to the contrary that grizzly bears are not recovered? I know some environmentalists really hit on how grizzlies only occupy a slice of their former range.
FM: So grizzly bears currently occupy about 6% of their historic range within the lower 48 states. That is up from probably around 2% decades ago. So, overall, there's positive news there. And it really comes down to what part of the lower 48 you're looking at. For example, in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, there's still room for some growth, but most of the best habitats are currently occupied. What we've seen in recent years is that that range expansion actually might have stalled and that is an indicator that this population has probably expanded and reached the population size that is about all the ecosystem can sustain.
Now, there are people that say, well, we can have bears outside the current boundaries of the ecosystem, but the reality is that the mortality risks for bears in those areas are much higher. You have more roads. You have more places where there's more human activity and where bears can really get into trouble. So, there is a point where I think we can reasonably expect bears to be and where we can also reasonably expect bears not to be in the future.
If you look at it from the perspective of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, this population genetically has a little bit lower diversity than other populations, but it's not at such a low level that we need to be immediately concerned about this. This is not a concern for decades to come, to be honest.
HM: Environmentalists have really been celebrating the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s recent proposal to keep grizzlies classified as threatened, saying it follows the science. But leaders of Montana, Wyoming and Idaho disagree, saying the agency isn't following the science. I still don't quite understand why we're interpreting science so differently. Can you help with that?
FM: I haven't seen any evidence that people are misinterpreting the science. I think the different stakeholders that have looked at this are correctly interpreting the science, but the thing is, science doesn't make decisions for you, right? Science provides information to make decisions on. As scientists, we're not policymakers, we’re not decision makers.
HM: You’re saying we’ve met these recovery targets for the grizzly population. But since those targets were made, we have all these new threats, like climate change and human development. A lot of environmentalists are saying the recovery targets need to change. What do you think about that?
FM: Well, yes, of course other stakeholders might say that is moving the goalposts. And so, for me, the question always comes back to what is the goal of the Endangered Species Act? And the goal is to remove the threat to this population. And so for the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, and I think you could justifiably say that for the Northern Continental Divide as well, those threats have been removed.
In all these discussions, I think we sometimes forget the remarkable conservation success story. This is a prime example of what can be done when agencies and a lot of different stakeholders work together towards a common goal. I don't think anyone involved in grizzly bear conservation in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystems in the ’70s or ’80s would have even dreamed of a population of this size and having bears in the places that we have them now, and I'm afraid sometimes that is lost in all this.
When you think of an animal like grizzly bears, there's a lot of challenges to its recovery, right? Because it's a species that can be potentially dangerous to people and sometimes can wreak havoc on cattle through depredation. We have to find that right balance of population size versus the ability of people living, working and recreating in grizzly bear country to manage that.
This story was produced by the Mountain West News Bureau, a collaboration between Wyoming Public Media, Nevada Public Radio, Boise State Public Radio in Idaho, KUNR in Nevada, KUNC in Colorado and KANW in New Mexico, with support from affiliate stations across the region. Funding for the Mountain West News Bureau is provided in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
