Montana Free Press: Grizzly bear plan calls for hunting against tribal wishes

Montana unveils its grizzly bear management plan

The plan comes at a crucial time for grizzly bear management as the federal government weighs the state’s petition to delist the iconic species.

Monday, October 21, 2024

By Amanda Eggert

Montana Free Press

Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks has finalized its plan for dealing with grizzly bears, which the agency calls one of Montana’s most “vulnerable” and “conflict-prone” species.

Late last month, FWP Director Dustin Temple formally approved a 326-page blueprint for how the state will address bear-human conflicts, address eventual trophy hunting and respond to the state’s growing – and dispersing – grizzly population.

The statewide Grizzly Bear Management Plan represents the agency’s attempt to pull a thin line. With this plan, FWP wants to reassure state wildlife managers that it will be a responsible steward of a species that was hunted to near extinction in the not-too-distant past, while showing that it is sensitive to the concerns of Montanans who live with grizzly bears , enters into it – some more readily than others.

At stake, as U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Director Martha Williams has suggested, is something Montana has long sought but not experienced in nearly 50 years: full management authority over the grizzly bears, which was granted in 1975 were placed under federal protection under the Endangered Species Act.

Chris Servheen, a retired wildlife biologist who led the USFWS recovery effort to save the grizzly bear from 1981 to 2016, recently told the Montana Free Press that he does not welcome the state’s management of the iconic species – which would be the case if the USFWS approved Montana’s petition to delete the bear species – because he doesn’t trust FWP to “take the high road”.

Servheen described the state’s grizzly management plan as a missed opportunity to address a variety of concerns that he and other conservationists highlighted in an earlier draft of the plan.

More specifically, Servheen pointed to components of the plan that he said would increase “voluntary mortality” and thwart a longstanding recovery goal: connectivity between the Northern Continental Divide ecosystem and the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem, which contains the two largest grizzlies -Subpopulations supported in the Lower 48 region.

Servheen said he is particularly concerned about the intentional and unintentional killing of grizzly bears associated with hunting and trapping. Trophy hunting of grizzly bears is unjustified and will only exacerbate human-bear conflict, Servheen said, adding that recently passed state laws will cause grizzly bears to die unnecessarily because of their exposure to wolf traps and snares, as well as hunting dogs Black bears.

“This is a clear issue where they could use the high ground and move these things away from places where there are grizzly bears. Instead, they ignore the problem and insist on locating these sources of mortality in areas where there are grizzly bears and areas of connectivity,” he said. “These things will result in dead bears, and there will be very few reports of those dead bears.”

Servheen and other grizzly advocates focus on connectivity because larger, more geographically dispersed populations of interbreeding bears protect against inbreeding and make the animals more resilient to natural disasters and habitat loss.

Trophy hunting is one of the areas surrounding grizzly bear management where Montanans are most divided. A 2020 poll found that 49% of Montanans support sufficient hunting to meet a population goal, while 17% said grizzlies should never be hunted. Tribes across Montana, including the Crow, Blackfeet, Northern Cheyenne and Confederated Salish and Kootenai tribes, signed a letter in 2018 opposing Wyoming’s proposal to establish a grizzly hunting season when the U.S. government most recently attempted to delist Yellowstone grizzlies. (That effort was ultimately blocked in federal court.)

FWP does not require trophy hunting immediately after delisting. Instead, the department said it would hold off on forwarding a proposal for a grizzly hunting season to the Fish and Wildlife Commission, the governor-appointed body that sets seasons and assigns tags to game species, for at least five years after delisting .

Although he generally opposes grizzly bear hunting, Servheen praised the agency’s change to two points he raised in his extensive comments on the draft plan. He told MTFP he was pleased that hunting of bears in dens and bears in groups – e.g. B. mothers with their young – is expressly prohibited in the new plan. He was also encouraged to see that there is greater tolerance for grizzly bears staying out of trouble when they venture outside existing recovery zones, he said.

Connectivity played a major role in comments made by Hilary Cooley, a USFWS grizzly bear recovery coordinator, in her comments on the draft plan. More specifically, she called on the agency to focus on “demographic connectivity,” that is, helping female bears move from one subpopulation to another and stay there.

Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte and Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon are also keeping an eye on connectivity. In 2021, they submitted separate and pending petitions to the USFWS to delist grizzly bears living in northwest Montana, as well as a resident population in Yellowstone National Park.

In August, Gordon highlighted the governors’ “active management” approach to achieving genetic connectivity, noting that by transporting two grizzly sows from the NCDE to the GYE, they had met the recovery goals mandated by the ESA and the court.

Lisa Upson of People and Carnivores, a nonprofit that promotes the coexistence of predators and humans, criticized this approach, calling it “inadequate.”

“Conflict resolution is the answer to connectivity,” Upson said. “You have to keep bears moving through the landscape, and you do that by keeping them alive by either removing or protecting attractants so the bears can move on.”

However, for other key stakeholders, connectivity should not be a goal. Trina Jo Bradley, chair of the Endangered Species Act subcommittee of the Montana Stockgrowers Association, said there were already too many bears living in established recovery areas and she would prefer not to see increased movement among them.

Bradley told MTFP she is dismayed that the final plan includes greater tolerance for prairie bears, or grizzly bears, migrating from mountainous public lands to flatter areas dominated by private lands.

“I don’t think grizzly bears belong anywhere, but I suspect they probably had to change that to avoid lawsuits and other problems,” Bradley said. “I think they will manage these bears very closely, and if they even think about getting into a conflict, they will be relocated or killed.”

Aside from that and the lack of a maximum population target in the plan — which the FWP said “wouldn’t make sense” — Bradley said she was happy with the final plan.

Bradley said she appreciates that it recognizes the role that managed ranchlands play in supporting habitat and connectivity goals for grizzlies, particularly because they bear some of the greatest burdens associated with grizzly presence. Wildlife managers estimate that grizzly bears were responsible for 82 livestock deaths last year.

Bradley, a rancher in the rural Rocky Mountain Front community of Valier, said she was also pleased that the plan incorporated many of the recommendations she and her colleagues on the Grizzly Bear Advisory Committee made to then-Gov. Steve Bullock 2020.

For his part, FWP Director Temple describes Montana’s role in grizzly bear recovery as part of an “amazing conservation success story” that deserves recognition.

“This success story also demonstrates once again that FWP is committed to maintaining healthy wildlife populations across our diverse landscape,” he said in a news release announcing the plan’s adoption.

It’s an opinion Williams, whose background is in natural resources law, would probably be happy to share. Before taking the helm of USFWS, Williams held Temple’s position at FWP, where in 2017 she called the grizzly bear recovery a “success story.”

Whether she and her colleagues at the USFWS find that Montana has created a framework to sustain this performance remains to be seen. In any case, those involved shouldn’t have to wait long to find out: the USFWS is widely expected to make a decision on the delisting applications from Wyoming and Montana in January.

Note: This story originally appeared on Montana Free Press. It is published under a Creative Commons license.