By Jake Bolster, Inside Climate News
Mountain West communities are split over the USFWS’ decision to manage isolated bear populations as one. But many agree that things may soon get worse for large predators.
For over a quarter century, a female grizzly bear roamed the terrain around Grand Teton National Park, giving visitors a spectacular look at the life of one of the most charismatic and revered mammals in the United States. She lived to the age of 28, one of the 12 oldest grizzlies ever documented in the region, and produced at least 18 offspring. “Grizzly 399,” as the the tag assigned to her by researchers named her, died the night of October 22 after being struck by a car near Jackson, Wyoming.
Her death devastated locals and those who work in the park. She had become habituated to areas around roads, and each spring people would look forward to seeing how many cubs she brought with her from her den. Her offspring were practically raised in front of the public.
“She inspired, effectively, millions of people,” said Justin Schwabedissen, a wildlife biologist with the National Park Service in Grand Teton.
But the bears have also inspired ongoing controversy in the states they inhabit.
In January, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) determined grizzlies should remain classified as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) after a reevaluation in response to delisting petitions from Idaho, Montana and Wyoming, which hold most of the nation’s grizzly bears and have long sought more state-level control over their management. That led senators from Idaho, Montana and Wyoming to introduce a bill on Jan. 30 that would delist the bears from ESA protections.
Yellowstone and its surrounding mountains and valleys are home to one of the six “distinct population segments” of ursus arctos horribilis (grizzly bears) managed by state and federal agencies as a threatened species in the lower 48 states. Other pockets of grizzlies live in Idaho and Montana and a small number have been documented in Washington, likely after migrating over from Idaho or down from Canada. Each population relies on bears like Grizzly 399, whose prolific mating and successful mothering help their species grow its numbers and range.
Grizzlies in the Yellowstone ecosystem of northwest Wyoming, southwest Montana and a sliver of southeast Idaho have rebounded with such success from population nadirs in the early 1900s that they have begun revisiting old territory, migrating to points south of Lander, Wyoming, and north to areas near Bozeman, Montana, a range larger than the landmass of Vermont, New Hampshire and Massachusetts combined. But the bears are also experiencing more fatal encounters with humans.
In 2024, preliminary data from the Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team, a group of scientists from tribal, federal and state agencies, showed that 42 of the 43 grizzly bear deaths in the Yellowstone area were “human caused,” as were all 27 of their deaths in areas beyond where wildlife biologists typically monitor their activity.
Despite those deaths, the Yellowstone and North Continental Divide grizzlies are considered by many to be thriving populations that have successfully recovered by the standards set for the bears under the ESA. Their growing population numbers have increased pressure on the USFWS to delist them from the ESA, which has, since 1975, shielded grizzlies from, among other harms, loss of habitat, disease or predation—including man-made threats—or insufficient regulations to ensure their long-term survival. But delisting a species, with the USFWS evaluating the animal’s progress under its management plan, can be as much an art as a science.
In its decision that the species should remain classified as threatened under the ESA, the agency grouped the six populations into one “metapopulation” of bears to be managed under federal law with the states’ help.
“This reclassification will facilitate recovery of grizzly bears and provide a stronger foundation for eventual delisting,” said Martha Williams, former President Joe Biden’s U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service director, in a statement accompanying the decision. New rules would also give agencies and landowners more flexibility when handling grizzly conflicts, the statement noted.
Human development, habitat destruction and fatal encounters with people, along with grizzlies’ isolated nature, means the bears are “likely to become an endangered species within the foreseeable future,” the agency wrote in its rule. Climate change, while not deemed an imminent threat to grizzlies, could increase human-bear conflicts and intensify habitat change, and the service found no existing laws in the Mountain West that would facilitate connectivity between the distinct populations, which could help all of them endure the increasing pressures they face.
Grizzlies in the lower 48 “need to be able to move across the landscape,” said Chris Servheen, a retired grizzly bear recovery coordinator for the USFWS. “That’s why the idea of managing a functional metapopulation is so important.”
Idaho, Montana and Wyoming, which proposed coordinated state control of the Yellowstone ecosystem’s grizzlies in January 2024, each expressed frustration over the USFWS proposal as they look to implement their own management plans for the bears.
“The USFWS’s decision not to delist the [greater Yellowstone ecosystem] grizzly bear is extremely disappointing and frustrating,” said Wyoming’s Game and Fish Department in a statement responding to the news. “The science is clear on grizzly bears: They are recovered in the [greater Yellowstone ecosystem], and their recovery is a conservation success.”
“It is very clear that grizzly bears should be under state and tribal management,” said Idaho Gov. Brad Little, a Republican.
Wyoming’s Republican governor, Mark Gordon, echoed the Game and Fish department’s disappointment in a statement of his own, and said the USFWS decision was “driven by politics and not biology.” Montana’s Gov. Greg Gianforte, also a Republican, compared the decision to President Biden’s pardon of his son Hunter and his move to restrict offshore drilling in the U.S.
Leaders in all three states complain that federal protections for the bears needlessly interfere with their preferred management approaches, which they say are steered by state biologists and rooted in the priorities of those living in grizzly country, including hunting, a popular form of recreation and small source of revenue in the Mountain West.
“This is a day and age where everybody says the federal government is bad,” said Servheen, who spent 35 years as the grizzly bear recovery coordinator for the USFWS. From his perspective, the states’ position feels like, “if we take over the bear, that’s one more way we can express ourselves as against the feds.”
For some, the USFWS decision compounded the perception that “when we delist an animal, it loses protections because it goes to state management,” said Jess Johnson, head of government affairs for Wyoming Wildlife Federation, a wildlife and sportsman advocacy organization. “That is so blatantly false…They do not lose protections. It just changes on whose authority that protection is under.”
The USFWS rule was published in the Federal Register on January 15, but its path to adoption is murky. Tens of thousands are likely to weigh in by the end of the 60-day comment period. And with the USFWS now under the direction of the Trump administration, which tried to delist greater Yellowstone grizzlies in 2017 during his first presidency, a lot could happen in the coming two months—let alone the year that is expected to pass before the final rule is published. No one is ruling out Congressional involvement. In addition to the Senate bill, another introduced in the House by Harriet Hageman (R-WY) and cosponsored by members of the Idaho, Montana and Minnesota delegations would delist grizzlies around Yellowstone. Environmentalists, who are split over the USFWS decision, fear similar bills that fundamentally alter the ESA could follow.
No matter how they feel about the decision, wildlife organizations and other observers are concerned for the future of the grizzly bear. Many agree that the increasingly political disagreements about the species’ management harms the animal, and Servheen argues the primary reason grizzlies need to remain under ESA protection is because politicians are not willing to ensure the population expansion necessary for a full recovery. Others left open the possibility that the backlash to this decision would be so fierce that it would deepen resentment toward other large carnivores, particularly wolves.
Freedom of Movement
There are some 2,200 grizzly bears in the lower 48 states, down from an estimate of 50,000 at the bear’s peak prior to 1800, according to recent USFWS estimates. Almost all those bears live in either the Yellowstone region, or in the North Continental Divide area of Montana. Both populations’ recoveries have progressed under the ESA.
But in the early 21st century, Yellowstone grizzly population growth rates began to level off. “You cannot expect to fit a whole lot more bears into this ecosystem,” said Frank van Manen, a wildlife biologist with the United States Geological Service who has been the leader of the Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team since 2012.
In its proposed rule, the USFWS acknowledged that the greater Yellowstone and North Continental Divide grizzlies have likely met the population targets laid out by their management plans. “As a nation, to be able to recover a population within an area where there is quite a bit of human influence is pretty remarkable,” said van Manen, who lives in proximity to the expanding grizzly range in Bozeman, Montana.
Across their six population zones, grizzly bears occupy about six percent of their historical range, and their current range is fractured.
Between the boundaries of these islands of recovery lies a sea of ever-encroaching human development and a rapidly changing natural landscape. More people are living and recreating in more places grizzlies have historically roamed, an area once reaching from California up to Alaska and covering all or parts of states as far east as Minnesota. As trees in the Mountain West face higher temperatures and more pressure from insects, both of which scientists have linked to climate change, grizzly bears’ traditional sources of food and habitat have become scrambled. All of this makes human and bear encounters—while still rare—more likely.
The USFWS’ new recovery zone would span all of Washington and huge portions of Idaho, Montana and Wyoming. In its rule, the USFWS said it had documented bears from the Yellowstone and North Continental Divide populations as close as 61 miles apart from each other. “Recovery zones are no longer discrete,” meaning grizzly populations across the Mountain West should be considered a single population, the USFWS said in its statement explaining the decision.
Fostering the burgeoning connection between populations could be important for grizzlies. “From a scientific standpoint, there is no doubt that connectivity is beneficial to any of these populations,” particularly the ones with only a few dozen bears, said van Manen, whose research was cited throughout the USFWS’ decision.
As co-chair of the North American Bears Expert Team for the International Union for Conservation of Nature, Servheen, who authored the 1993 recovery plan that laid out the original distinct population zones, sent the USFWS a revised grizzly recovery plan that included a metapopulation management strategy. The service never responded to his document, he said. “I was happily shocked that that’s what they came out with.”
Putting grizzly populations together in one management zone shocked other observers, too. “My first reaction was surprise at how extreme it was,” said Johnson. She had hoped that the bears around Yellowstone would be delisted, while populations just beginning to recover would remain under ESA protection.
Massing grizzly populations together is “holding [the greater Yellowstone bears] hostage to the timetable of four other recovery zones that, you know, frankly, haven’t even gotten off the ground,” she said.
An incredible amount of work went into bringing Yellowstone grizzlies back from the brink, she continued. The USFWS plan disregards “the science and the research done around these recovered populations that has proven over and over again that these populations are recovered,” and it disregards “the people on the ground that are working really hard to continue to build collaboration and bridges around conflict to keep these bears there.”
The service acknowledged that the Yellowstone and North Continental Divide populations were further along in their recovery than the others, and said managing the six groups as one would help speed up the maturation of smaller grizzly populations.
Because the Yellowstone and North Continental Divide grizzlies have likely met population thresholds necessary for delisting, van Manen said that determining what comes next solely based on the science is not as straightforward as people would like. “Even if everyone agrees on the same scientific data, you could come to different policy decisions depending on what guides you,” he said. “That’s kind of what’s happened here.”
Playing Politics
Under the ESA, which Congress has amended sparingly throughout its history, grizzlies are managed through a combination of federal and state decision making. Once an animal is delisted, state legislatures gain primary control over the laws dictating how a species’s recovery is managed.
Servheen lives in Montana, and when he wanted to speak with a colleague during his time with the USFWS, he could often do so face-to-face with a good friend. He has written grizzly delisting decisions if he felt the science warranted it, like in 2007, when Yellowstone grizzlies were delisted under the George W. Bush administration. Environmentalists sued to block that motion, and the case, which eventually overturned the administration’s decision, was called “Greater Yellowstone Coalition vs. Servheen.”
Even with federal involvement, states have flexibility to deal with bears in a way that makes sense on the ground, including killing ones that repeatedly get into conflicts, Servheen said. He could recall almost no disagreements between state and federal wildlife managers over how to handle problematic grizzlies. “It’s a joint decision,” he said.
There “has always been a team approach to grizzly bear conservation in the Greater Yellowstone,” said Angi Bruce, Wyoming Game and Fish Department director. Collaboration between her department and the USFWS over grizzlies usually proceeds well, mainly because the federal employee “used to work for our agency and because she is very smart, practical and field-savvy,” she said, in an email. She remained frustrated with the USFWS’ apparent unwillingness to delist the bear, and pointed out that it was the only federal agency with a stake in grizzly management not to sign a 2024 conservation plan for the Yellowstone grizzlies.
Neither the USFWS nor Montana’s Department of Fish, Wildlife & Parks returned interview requests for this story.
A spirit of collaboration between federal and state employees is not how the pecking order is perceived or described by some in Wyoming and Montana.
“When you look at populations that are fully recovered—and exceeded fully recovered—keeping the bears on the list doesn’t make any sense,” said Tony Schoonen, chief executive officer of the Boone and Crockett Club, a conservation and hunting organization headquartered in Missoula, Montana. “I think [grizzlies belong] in the hands of state management.”
Johnson, an experienced hunter—she spends a week the Absaroka Mountains near Yellowstone hunting mule deer and elk each year and takes precautions when she is in grizzly country so she can safely coexist with the animal—comes “at this with a deep love of the bear,” she said. The USFWS keeping grizzlies listed “does not build any kind of tolerance or bridge, in fact it erodes it—and that makes me fear for the future of the bear because it’s at the whims of administration changes. The backlash to something like this might be equally as bad in the other direction.”
Some are open to the possibility of political involvement, particularly at the federal level. Jim Magagna, executive vice president of the Wyoming Stock Growers Association, a trade group representing the state’s cattle industry, was dismayed by the USFWS’ grizzly decision, and worried bears roaming new territory would hurt ranchers’ business in Wyoming. “I’m not to the point that I think congressional action is the only answer, but I think having bills such as what Hageman’s introduced can be helpful in putting pressure for some appropriate regulatory actions,” Magagna said. “It’s unfortunate that’s become necessary.”
In its updated rule, the USFWS said it would, on a case-by-case basis and only for a limited time, authorize ranchers on public and private land outside of recovery zones to use lethal action to remove bears that had preyed on their livestock or represented “a demonstrable and ongoing threat” as outlined by the agency.
The only time Servheen could ever recall conflict around grizzly management was when politicians started “making statements like ‘it’s the state’s decision to manage the bears, not the federal guys.’” He believes the posture state legislators in Idaho, Montana and Wyoming have adopted towards other large carnivores, like wolves, disqualifies grizzlies from delisting consideration.
An absence of sufficient regulations to safeguard grizzly populations in the areas between population segments appeared to factor into the USFWS’ decision.
“There are no regulatory mechanisms to facilitate natural connectivity between grizzly bear populations, which could reduce the potential to improve long-term genetic health of small or isolated populations and natural recolonization of the unoccupied ecosystems,” the agency wrote in its rule. “Without adequate conservation measures, human-caused mortality would continue to be a threat to the grizzly bear.”
As long as state wildlife biologists are the ones determining the number of grizzlies that can be hunted annually, “the notion that these things are going to be wandering around just getting shot—that’s not realistic,” said Schoonen, at the Boone and Crockett Club. Keeping grizzlies under ESA protection would increase the likelihood that state legislators would try to play politics with the animal as retribution for not gaining control, he added. “I think keeping recovered species in the hands of the feds is going to add salt to the wound.”
Lawmakers in Wyoming introduced a bill in late January that would direct the state’s Game and Fish Department to cease managing grizzlies with the USFWS only to voluntarily withdraw it days later after hearing testimony from Bruce that the “stars are aligned” for delisting, given the makeup of the Department of Interior under a second Trump administration and federal bills that would remove Yellowstone grizzlies from ESA protections.
Idaho, Montana and Wyoming have outlined plans for limited grizzly hunting if the bear was delisted, according to a memorandum of agreement they drafted last year, but only within certain monitoring areas smaller than grizzlies’ increasing range. The conservation plan approved by all but the USFWS would permit “regulated hunting when and where appropriate.”
In Montana’s draft grizzly management plan, the document that would govern grizzlies potentially moving between Yellowstone and the Northern Continental ecosystems, Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks acknowledged the importance of connectivity and said hunting could occur in low-connectivity, high-human-conflict areas.
Servheen does not think hunting is necessary to manage grizzlies—though he is not against hunting as a sport—and worries that methods for taking wolves in Idaho and Montana could clandestinely impact bear population numbers. If hunters were allowed to trap wolves in grizzly country, for instance, a form of hunting where animals are caught in baited devices left by humans, there would be no incentive for someone who stumbled upon a grizzly in one of its traps to report the incident, Servheen said.
Hunting would do little to reduce human-bear conflicts, he added. “The only way it will is if you take all the bears.”
Last January, the Montana Fish and Wildlife Commission, made up of seven citizens appointed by the governor and responsible for Montana’s Department of Fish, Wildlife & Parks’ policy and regulations, issued an administrative rule saying hunting is “the most desirable” way to manage grizzly numbers and minimize conflicts with livestock and humans. Servheen has written to the commission asking them to strike these claims, calling them wrong on every front. In his letter, he cited scientific literature, including a 2023 study in Canada that found adding another season of black bear hunting did not decrease human-bear conflicts, which were primarily driven by food availability. Servheen says he has not received a response from the commission.
Montana law says that its Department of Fish, Wildlife & Parks must manage grizzlies for five years before any hunting is implemented. In its proposed grizzly bear management plan, Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks wrote “hunting is not likely to be an effective tool for conflict prevention or reduction,” while acknowledging that state law gives the commission room to implement a hunting season.
Carnivore management has been under the spotlight in the Mountain West ever since last winter, when a man in Wyoming mauled a wolf with his snowmobile, bound it and dragged the still-living animal to a bar, where he paraded it around before shooting it outside. The story drew international attention and the man’s actions were disavowed in Wyoming. To date, Cody Roberts, the snowmobiler, has paid a $250 fine for illegal possession of warm-blooded wildlife and has served no jail time.
WyoFile, a local newsroom, reported that Wyoming Game and Fish Department law enforcement could have compelled Roberts to appear before a judge, which may have resulted in a fine of up to $1,000 and jail time. There are several bills circulating the state legislature that would attempt to respond to last year’s incident, ranging from requiring anyone who disables or injures a predator with a snowmobile to kill the animal immediately—using a snowmobile to cause injury would remain legal—to outlawing hunting state-managed animals using motorized vehicles. The latter passed a committee vote towards the end of January.
Another Wyoming bill, which received 26 votes in the house but failed to advance out of the chamber, would have automatically issued a bear “coupon” to anyone granted an elk tag, allowing them to kill grizzlies anywhere in the state outside the Yellowstone ecosystem. Wyoming issues thousands of elk hunting permits annually.
There are two bills in the Montana state legislature that would expand wolf hunting there.
“These states have become so extreme in their politics,” and it didn’t used to be that way, said Servheen.
If something akin to Wyoming’s predator zone, the area encompassing a vast majority of the state where wolves have no population target and can be taken by any means without a license, were used to manage grizzlies between their distinct population zones, it “would eliminate the possibility of connectivity,” and their recovery would collapse, Servheen said. If grizzly bears were delisted by Congress, “there would be no limit on what they would do to grizzly bears,” and relisting them would probably require passing a new law in the future, he said. Servheen is particularly worried this kind of action could get shoehorned into a defense spending or budget bill.
While Johnson also detests legislators playing politics with wildlife, she doesn’t believe Wyoming would manage grizzlies using a predator zone. When wolves were brought back into Yellowstone in 1995, they started from a population of zero; grizzlies, though severely depleted, have persisted on the landscape. The predator zone “was an olive branch essentially offered so we could even get wolves back into the state,” she said. “We don’t need that olive branch with grizzlies.”
To make sure nothing like Wyoming’s predator zone would get used to manage grizzlies, Johnson implored people concerned for the bear, especially those in conservation organizations who she described as too quick to litigate federal decisions, to “go to your state legislature and figure out how you change the sentiment there.”
The whims of state legislatures are too big a risk for Servheen to accept. He agreed little would change in terms of how the bear is managed if state biologists were the ones making decisions. But state legislators ultimately set policy, and they “may put in place a rule that every grizzly bear that’s outside the recovery zone would be killed,” he said. “That would eliminate the possibility of any resilience for grizzly bears and would begin the doom of grizzly bears.”
A Murky Future
No one knows what will come next for grizzlies. On Tuesday, Doug Burgum, President Trump’s new Secretary of the Interior, ordered the department to review and revise “all relevant critical habitat designations promulgated by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.” His order appeared aimed at species whose habitat tends to conflict with oil and gas drilling, like the West’s iconic sage grouse, rather than animals like grizzlies that prefer mountainous habitats.
Still, any change to the USFWS’ proposed grizzly management plan would almost certainly face lawsuits from the conservation community.
“It’s hard to predict the future, but it is certainly possible that some wildlife species could face a different management regime based on federal priorities,” said Scott Christensen, executive director of the Greater Yellowstone Coalition, in an email. “Hopefully, the new administration will respect the deeply held values so many Americans have for wildlife and wild places.”
In his executive order declaring a “national energy emergency,” Trump ordered the Endangered Species Act Committee, known as the “God Squad” for its ability to overrule the ESA, to convene at least once a quarter. Though designed to review species that may impede economic development from ESA protection, the committee has the power to change an animal’s status under the ESA.
Already, some worry that simmering frustrations with human wildlife politics is boiling over, and that this trend could worsen in the future. In the last four months of 2024, one gray wolf in a newly reintroduced population in Colorado was illegally killed, and another was illegally killed in Washington. Servheen said these kinds of killings happen all the time, and “people feel that there’s not going to be any effort made to track them down.”
The USFWS is offering a reward for information on the wolf killings that advances the investigations or leads to an arrest, conviction or civil penalty.
As the chasm between federal decision-making and local perception about grizzly management widens, Johnson worries about diminishing acceptance of bears on the landscape. Increasingly, people may “shoot, shovel, and shut up,” when it comes to grizzlies, she said. “I imagine you’d see more of those kinds of killings as tolerance erodes.”
Despite her death last October, which was ruled an accident, Grizzly 339’s durability was remarkable. Most of her offspring, however, were not as long-lived. Of her 18 known descendants, 10 have died—some through management removal, others, like their mother, struck by cars. Quite a few perished due to human causes, said Schwabedissen, the Grand Teton National Park wildlife biologist. “As we look at the future, there’s still an awful lot that we could do collectively to secure the long-term persistence of the population,” he said.
The night she died, Grizzly 399’s newest cub, a sturdy yearling born in 2023, was with her. Schwabedissen said that as law enforcement approached the scene, the yearling fled to a nearby hill overlooking the road. Without its mother, the young grizzly was left to fend for itself. Based on its size and age, Schwabedissen felt the animal had a good chance of hunkering down and surviving the winter.
Days later, the bear was again spotted at the place where its mother was struck. The yearling disappeared into the forest, and no one has seen it since.