Wyoming Wildlife magazine - 16

or the Wyoming Game and Fish Department,
August used to mark the beginning of grizzly
bear conflict season. It's when the phone
typically erupted with calls for help - dead
cattle, bears on the road, a handful of hiker attacks.
Nowadays, Wyomingites are calling nearly all
months of the year with various grizzly conflicts
and the only reprieve is when bears are hibernating.
It's not that people are merely calling in conflicts
more frequently; there are more grizzlies and therefore
more conflicts. Today, more bears roam within the
Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem (GYE) than imagined
in recent history. By some modern estimates, more
than 1,000 grizzlies live in the GYE. That's more than
quadruple the initial recovery goal set after they were
first listed as " threatened " under the federal Endangered Species Act (ESA) in 1975.
This increased density and distribution of bears
highlights two impactful realities - grizzly bear
recovery has been overwhelmingly successful, and
without state management, they will continue to be

GRIZZLY BEAR RECOVERY HAS BEEN OVERWHELMINGLY
SUCCESSFUL, AND WITHOUT STATE MANAGEMENT,
THEY WILL CONTINUE TO BE AN INCREASING CHALLENGE
FOR ALL WHO LIVE, RECREATE AND WORK IN WYOMING.
an increasing challenge for all who live, recreate and
work in Wyoming. It's a landmark for species recovery,
particularly for Wyoming that has invested significant
time, research and money into grizzly bears at a level
rivalling any other species in history. The booming
population is an equally-weary reminder the potential
16 | December 2020

for bear conflicts continues to be
high. As the population grows,
so does the griz's range, putting
bears in backyards, private lands
and corn fields - all places that
were never planned as suitable
grizzly bear habitat and places
where they cannot live without
conflict.
That's where the trouble lies.
By all scientific measures, the grizzly bear population
has reached recovery goals multiple times over the
last 40 years, being successfully delisted twice, yet
they remain protected under the ESA and under the
management of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
(USFWS) due to litigation. This puts bear management decisions outside Wyoming's control despite
decades of achievement and proven readiness to assume
the task. Instead, legal challenges from environmental
groups on technicalities unrelated to the science and
on-the-ground conditions continually move delisting
further from reality. That leaves Wyoming, bears and
everyone who contributed to recovery losing with
each passing year.
HOW WE GOT HERE
The central reason grizzly bears were listed was due
to population declines. By the early 1900s, Wyoming
grizzly bears primarily inhabited the GYE, which
includes the northwest corner of Wyoming and portions of Montana and Idaho. As the wilderness was
converted to settlements and agriculture, habitat and
space where bears could thrive shrunk. Roads degraded
bear habitat, too, depleting food sources and displacing
populations.
Humans had a more direct role in grizzly reductions midcentury. Interactions between dueling alpha
groups inevitably occurred within the newly-shared
landscape. Dan Thompson, Game and Fish large carnivore supervisor who has been involved in recovery
and conflict mitigation efforts in Wyoming, recalls a
time when grizzly bears were actively pursued.
" Bears were considered game animals on national
forest land and predators elsewhere. Hunters were
permitted by Game and Fish to take grizzly and black

Wyoming Wildlife magazine

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