NO LONGER ABLE TO BLAME THE FEDS
Grizzly Delisting Will Test States, Forest Service
By Bill Schneider, 5-03-07
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If you’ve ever been in charge of a big, complicated project and a lot of people, you probably know being in charge is overrated. That’s why they say be careful what you wish for.
The federal government tells us that the Yellowstone grizzly population, the most famous bears on the planet, has recovered from the edge of extinction. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) has officially removed the Yellowstone grizzly population form the protection of the Endangered Species Act--assuming the agency wins a lawsuit or two, of course.
Like most people I get a warm feeling about a big W for conservation, especially such a charismatic species, but at the same time, I’m nervous and have lingering questions, such as: Does Old Ephraim, the king of our mountains, really have a secure future?
My main concern is isolation. The Yellowstone ecosystem is one of six isolated grizzly populations south of Canada. Island populations are more vulnerable, especially without viable travel corridors to other populations to foster genetic diversity and to supplement low numbers.
In most cases, wildlife scientists reject the idea of institutionalizing an island population. The same agency, even some of the same people in fact, have rejected the idea of delisting the wolf in the Yellowstone area only, insisting we should wait and remove the species in the entire recovery area (Idaho, Montana and Wyoming) at one time. At this point, we do not have safe travel corridors for grizzlies to travel from northwestern Montana to the Yellowstone ecosystem, but this has not delayed delisting.
The need for secure travel corridors puts pressure on the state agencies and the Forest Service (FS) to protect the habitat and security of these corridors from human activities that could prevent movement of grizzlies from one ecosystem to the other. Will this happen?
Everybody agrees that the viability of the Yellowstone grizzly population depends on maintenance of key habitat outside of the national park, primarily in the surrounding national forests. The FS has woeful track record of protecting wildlife habitat, but in this case the agency has made commitments to protect critical bear habitat near the park. To meet this commitment, the agency must come through with the new policies required to make this a reality, such as realistic limits on motorized use of grizzly habitat. Will this really happen?
State wildlife agencies have been lusting for control of grizzly management for 32 years, since 1975 when the bear was listed as a threatened species, and now they have it. They’ve finally wrestled it away from the evil feds. But now, they can no longer blame the feds for management problems. The states must carefully manage this critical species. Will we see the same insanity we’ve seen on the wolf issue?
The majority, it seems, accepts the fact that sooner or later we will once again have sport hunting of grizzly bears in the northern Rockies, but state wildlife agencies must tread lightly, and politically, on this sensitive issue. Coming right out of the chute later this year or next with a big pitch for grizzly hunting would not be political brilliance.
Both the state wildlife agencies and the FS must also keep close track of the big bear’s threatened food supplies. Four of the grizzly’s major food sources (whitebark pine seeds, army cutworms, cutthroat trout and winterkilled elk and bison) are currently threatened and declining. The FWS should watch this, too, and if bear numbers start to decline, we should act quickly to relist the bear before the population declines dramatically.
The grizzly is a remarkable adaptable animal. The Yellowstone bears, also the most studied bears in the world, lost a major food source, garbage, once before and adapted. Perhaps the bear can do it again. Many biologists seem to think this is possible if not likely. But will we monitor this closely?
Known to all of us, the privately-owned valleys around Yellowstone continue to fill up with vacation homes. Human-caused deaths account for 75 percent of the mortality, and this conflict often results from rural homeowners allowing bears to become food conditioned by eating pet food, garbage, fruit from misplaced trees, or birdfeed. This sets up a change of events almost always leading to a dead bear. Will we learn to live with grizzlies or continue to sign their death warrants by allowing bears to get food rewards from us? Can people living in the Yellowstone ecosystem truly accept grizzlies living in their backyard?
All the above questions make me nervous, but what concerns me most of all is what we will do if something bad happens to cause the population to decline again. Will we have the political courage and climate to relist the Yellowstone grizzly under the Endangered Species Act?
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Comments
All there is, is warm, fuzzy assurances of monitoring and "reviewing the situation" as the lyrics of "Oliver" go, winding up with "I better think it out again!" With adaptive management in play, state and federal agencies can try endless variations of adaptive responses, none of which will arrest or turn around the inevitable slide toward extinction.
Genetic isolation of the Yellowstone bears is handled in the plan with the gimmick of dropping in a few Canadian bears every decade or so, because the idea of meaningful corridors between Yellowstone and Canada is so very threatening to real estate developers and their political servants in state legislatures and Congress.
Meanwhile global warming is rapidly expanding pine beetle activity into higher elevations (where we have white bark pines). Cutthroat trout continue to be in trouble. Army cutworm moths seem to be doing okay, but if we can have a sudden collapse of bees, then no insect species is truely safe from an increasingly toxic environment.
One potential bright spot is that people seem to be learning how to live in bear country, thanks to programs like "Bear Wise" in Wyoming, though similar programs in Idaho and Montana have far to go, to catch up with Wyoming.
If the agencies and land owners and industries would respect the constraints of the ESA for "recovered species", perhaps it would make less nervous. That..and the fact it is the Interior Department under the pathetic Bush administration making the decision raises my skepticism. This administration hasn't seen a science report it hasn't sought to alter for political reasons, so why should we trust the FWS data now? Julie McDonald is the latest casualty of corruption. I keep wondering when someone will come out with a history of the Interior Department over the last 6 years...has to be one of the most corrupt, inept periods of governance in the history of this country
Brown bear mauls trapper on bear-hunt
By MEGAN HOLLAND
Anchorage Daily News
(Published: April 17, 2007)
A brown bear mauled an Anchorage man who was hunting near Glennallen, Alaska State Troopers said Tuesday.
Lynn Keogh, a 43-year-old professional trapper and hunting guide, was expected to recover from injuries to his scalp, leg and hand, troopers said.
Troopers credit Keogh’s hunting partner with saving his life. He shot the bear dead with a .220 Swift, a small caliber gun meant to kill vermin, as it was chewing on Keogh’s head.
Troopers say Keogh was hunting for brown bear Friday in the Oshetna River valley when he shot and killed one and approached its den. Keogh didn’t know a second bear was inside. When he approached and was turning the carcass over, the second bear leapt from the den. He was able to fire one round with his rifle but it didn’t stop the bear. It landed on him.
Keogh’s hunting partner, whose name has not been confirmed, got closer to the scene and from 40 yards away shot the bear as it clawed and chewed his friend. The bear died on top of Keogh.
The pair used a satellite phone to call for help. Keogh was taken by helicopter to Providence Alaska Medical Center where he was treated for his injuries.
Daily News reporter Megan Holland can be reached at or 257-4343.
I still never cease to be amazed at the armchair experts, whose resume includes photography, writing, philosophers, etc., and who know more than any bear biologist around. One thing they have in common, whether saving a mouse or a grizzly, they need to confiscate someone else's private property, or at least the use of it, to make everything perfect. Interestingly enough, what they might own is never needed for anything, just what others own.
How do you explain the great comeback of these bears following another feel good policy of closing all of the dumps simultaneously, if this corridor is so necessary?
There is no doubt that the bears will continue to expand into unoccupied territory, but large numbers of grizzly are not compatible with large numbers of humans, except in controlled situations like Katmai and Yellowstone. This isn't storyland, this is real life and there are real live people living on their private property in this country.
It seems to me that we would be far better off encouraging populations of healthy robust grizzlies that are able to thrive within their environment than trying to artificially raise them into huge populations always in trouble.
Grizzly bears are omnivorous and will adjust to changing food supplies. The biggest challenge may come from another feel good control it all policy, the wolf introduction. The one food supply hardest to replace may well be the early spring winter killed carcass. The wolves have not been asleep all winter and they are cleaning up the landscape pretty thoroughly.
"When I see the worsening degeneracy in our politicians, our media, our educators, and our intelligentsia, I can’t help wondering if the day may yet come when the only thing that can save this country is a military coup."
Regarding Dr. Sowell perhaps something other than a cherry pick would be more enlightening. See: http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=YmU0NGQ0ZTQzZTU4Zjk4MjdjZWMzYTM4Nzk2MzQ0MGI=
Here are some other cherries from his musings:
>>>>>>
The people who are scariest to me are the people who don’t even know enough to realize how little they know.
A reader sent the following message, quoting his nephew: “Calling an illegal alien an ‘undocumented worker’ is like calling a drug dealer an ‘unlicensed pharmacist.’“
Some of the biggest cases of mistaken identity are among intellectuals who have trouble remembering that they are not God.
Our education system, our media, and our intelligentsia have all been unrelentingly undermining the values, the traditions, and the unity of this country for generations and, at the same time, portraying as “understandable” all kinds of deviance, from prostitution to drugs to riots.
The home run records that made Babe Ruth famous have been broken but one of his records will probably never be broken — pitching the longest shutout in World Series history, 14 innings. Few pitchers go even nine innings these days.
“Global warming” seems to be joining “diversity,” “gun control,” “open space,” and a growing list of other subjects where rational discussion has become impossible — and where you are considered a bad person even for wanting to discuss it rationally.
<<<<<<<<<
Meanwhile, the bears have the look of "What's for dinner?"
Has anyone asserted that grizzlies are harmless? If not, then why the mania for posting articles about maulings?
And on the related topics of "corridors" and "how many bears should we have": let's all [this especially includes the so-called experts with the environmental groups] devote a little time to learning about the field of POPULATION VIABILITY. Having a common terminology for discussion would help, and Population Viability could provide that terminology.
There was time when Population Viability practitioners thought they could render an "objective" definition of a viable population of organisms. They called this threshold size a "Minimum Viable Population."
Wasn't too long before people realized that the MVP concept depended on a lot of subjective assessments:
how long a time frame were we looking at for survival of the population,
what level of risk of were we willing to tolerate that we could be wrong and lose the population,
how did we factor in unforeseen events like droughts, fires, changes in habitat, or disease.
So, the MVP notion underwent a lot of modification, in part because the term itself implied that we could objectively determine a minimum number of individuals that needed to be in a population in order for it to be "viable."
"Viable" is pretty much as slippery and situational as "wealthy." How much money you believe you need is subjective, depending on a lot of factors like how long you think you'll live, how lavish a lifestyle you want to have, and how much you need socked away in sound investments to feel secure. Pretty much every one of those parameters has an analog in population viability.
So, when people fret about the future of the Yellowstone grizzly population, they are fretting about its viability.
Academically, viability is usually expressed as a selected probability of persistence over a selected time frame (95 percent chance of persistence for 200 years, for example). Depending on the level of security you want and for how long, you may end up needing a fairly large population to meet your goals (hence the calls for 2,000 bears and such).
So, when people say we need more bears, they are worried that there will be too much risk that this population will disappear. I suppose, with 600-odd grizzlies, that that may strike some people as ludicrous. [Or, that grizzly advocates have ulterior motives is the next accusation]
One could argue that a carefully managed population of 600 has little to fear . . . BUT . . . the plot thickens, and again, it relates to VALUES:
Grizzlies are wildlife. They are not dairy goats or Yorkshire hogs. Wildlife Conservation is, conceptually, at the opposite end of the spectrum from Animal Husbandry. With wildlife, we often don't have a precise idea of how many there are, where they're going to be, what they're going to be eating, &c;.
With domestic animals, we closely monitor and control their numbers, their birth and death rates, and critical inputs like food, water, and thermal cover. There's nothing wrong with Animal Husbandry, it's just a totally different paradigm and has very different objectives from Wildlife Conservation.
In practice, the management of some particular population of animals may be a blend of Animal Husbandry and Wildlife Conservation. Domestic bison, the Jackson Hole elk herd, wild cattle in the southwest, and the "soft release" period of the wolf reintroduction are all examples of blended approaches.
Back in the good/bad ol' days of the garbage dumps, Yellowstone grizzlies were a little more toward the Animal Husbandry end of the scale. They were still wild and dangerous, but we provided massive inputs of food to them. Because they congregated in a predictable location, our ability to count them was far better than today.
And there was something wrong with that. Call it a "feel good" plan if you want, but many Americans value the wildness and mystery of grizzlies, and having them belly-deep in garbage half the year took a lot of that away. They're not fryers or fat cattle; we want them to run themselves and not live of the leavings of industrial civilization.
[And Marion, the dumps weren't closed simultaneously. Look it up in John and Frank Craighead's books. Yellowstone began reducing the amount of garbage at Trout Creek in 1968, and closed the other dumps by 1971.]
So, we get down to another subjective judgment call: how wild do we want these bears to be? "Wild" is in the eye of the beholder, to some extent. I'm sure we would notice the difference if we went back to feeding bears garbage. Would we notice, in any meaningful way, if we solve the genetics problems in the future with translocated bears from a different population? Other than knowing that it happened, would translocations detract from the wildness of Yellowstone grizzlies?
I can't answer that yet. I know I feel a special thrill at seeing a Yellowstone grizzly, and it's a thrill I don't get from seeing a Yellowstone wolf. Because the bears have always been here, and have been running themselves, rather than being carried in by Bruce Babbitt.
Maybe some logistical or practical arguments could tip the balance in favor of naturally reconnecting Yellowstone to other grizzly populations. Do we really want to rely on the government to carry out the translocation plan? What if President Jenna Bush, in 2035, cuts funding for that program? What if the shuffled bears fail to breed down here? Might it be cheaper, in the end, to let the bears do their own thing?
Finally, on the question of delisting, it's anybody's guess whether the end of ESA protection means no chance for reconnecting Yellowstone grizzlies to other bears. Some argue that ending ESA protection IMPROVES the chances of that happening. Montana does have an excellent state plan, and it doesn't draw lines on the map saying where bears can and can't be. So, there's hope for reconnection even without ESA protections.
If you're worried about maintaining a large enough population to meet a specific (and value-laden, remember) threshold of viability, with the added constraint of it being a "wild" population with minimal intrusion from people, then we ought to be concerned about the trends in habitat, and maybe be concerned about ending ESA protection.
That's why we don't just say, well, the habitat's declining, so let's just choose to have a smaller population.
People are just arguing from a different set of VALUES. VALUES VALUES VALUES. Not Science. Science is just a procedure for obtaining reliable knowledge and does not dictate our values to us.
So, if we VALUE wild populations of grizzlies that have very little risk of disappearing, we get concerned about trends in habitat and key foods.
Sure, they're intelligent, adaptive omnivores, and I doubt anyone of repute is arguing that ALL of the grizzlies in Greater Yellowstone will die without whitebark pine. But the long-term (200-500 years) prospects for this population of grizzlies as a wild, running-itself-with-minimal-husbandry phenomenon, may be in jeopardy if declining habitat drops the population substantially.
As another wrinkle, the ESA does not define any threshold for viability, nor does it address the concept of "wild." Wouldn't it be nice if it clarified some of those values? Shouldn't it? Of course, the first step is for us, We the People, to have intelligent, informed discussions about those values. The worst thing going on in all these species debates is people pretending that their VALUES are somehow mandated by SCIENCE.
Hiking in the great outdoors in the "Last Frontier" and coming across a brown bear (Griz and brown are all the same species) is anything but boring!
If you are hiking here, a must have is a firearm, in fact if you fly in Alaska you are required by state law to have a gun on your aircraft.
I think the issue of bears for tourists and ranchers alike is a real issue of concern. Tourist want to see Yogi bear and the rancher has concerns over his live stock. In Alaska we have actually started a bear control program in some areas because they, along with wolves are decimating stocks of moose and caribou. In some areas there are 100% calve kills.
In the 1800, Brown Bears were killed on site as if they were varmints. A little misguided, yes I think so. But through science, not emotion, the brown bear and really all bears can make a come back. Maybe not like they were in the early 1800 and for those who want that are foolish and misguided because their ideas are based on emotion and not science. Through science a sustainable population can be gained.
I agree with Mr. de Toq on the sensationalism of the news reports. And the "hunter" in the Anchorage story was hunting GRIZZLY BEARS. What kind of pansy-ass hunter complains about being mauled by a grizzly bear when he is hunting grizzly bears?? WTF . . . if you are gonna hunt bears, be prepared to be hunted.
I specifically remember the two 1967 deadly events in Glacier Park. It was a bad year for berries. Then in Europe there was the the Russian bear invasion of Czechoslovakia. It was a bad year for freedom
It was put to me something like this: "If scientists allow their values to override the science, then their science loses its value."
And the value conflict between the urbanites who value bears over people, and the ruralites who value people over bears, is real.
I find it interesting and annoying that, in general, the level of support for a large and increasing bear population declines the closer you get to the bears. It seems the level of "charisma" one can attribute to bears depends on the distance you are from bears in your daily doings or your longer life experiences.
As for a wild versus husbanded population, the simple fact is that we are too far along to go with pure "wild" landscapes or populations. There needs to be management, both removal and attenuation. In fact, when it comes to vegetative management, the anthropological record shows that the vegetation was managed by Indians from the very beginning (meaning the withdrawal of the glaciers) through active and deliberate fire use, wherever possible and desirable from a human standpoint.
A human hand on the "wild" has been heavy on this continent for the entire existence of this particular regime of climate.
So, you bet I support insertions of genetic stock from other populations, rather than hoping for a yearling with wanderlust that may or may not get roadkilled or trashcanned along the way. And you bet I support vegetative management, or access management, or control of populations in a societally-appropriate manner as long as the appropriateness is determined by those living with the consequences, not fantasizing from Manhattan.
I don't entirely agree with your characterization about people who value bears over people. There are some of those out there, but for the most part, people aren't so easily pigeon holed.
And good points about the influence of people on this landscape for thousands of years. I am reminded of that every time I find a stone tool here in southwest Montana. A lot of the tools are some sort of grinding implement, which makes me think that people have been working hard here for a long, long time. If they were grinding acorns or some sort of grain . . . well, that indicates that it was a LONG time ago, when the climate was quite a bit different.
Like I said, it's a continuum, and not a toggle switch, from "WILD" to "HUSBANDRY." Some movement in the direction of husbandry is, as you point out, inevitable and some desirable. Population reductions through hunting, targeted removal of problematic individuals, and -- as you mention -- vegetation manipulation are all valid.
In fact, the veg manipulation (through fire, logging, and deliberate cultivation) may be really important in coming decades. We HAVE altered a lot of landscapes in the past 150 years. Some closed canopy forests are now devoid of anything a bear would eat. There's a lot of potential win-win projects that folks could pursue. Unfortunately, the ideologues are running the show for now.
I'd still like to hold out hope that we could re-connect these populations of grizzlies. The only way I see it working is to have bears re-colonize the in-between mountain ranges, since the current gaps are way beyond normal dispersal distances.
As you point out, there are risks to bears (and to people) in those gaps. But that historic habitat in between -- if we can work proactively to minimize conflicts in ways that WORK for local people* -- could give grizzlies the space they need to adapt to what may be a very different world in coming years.
*In fact, I'd say the management needs to be DESIGNED BY local people, following on from your point about making it work from the on-the-ground view, instead of the Park Avenue/Malibu cartoon.
Cody, and work in the mountains all fall. It amazes me that any given day, the tracks on the trails are 70% to 80% grizzly tracks. I probably only see two or three Black bears during the course of a fall, but I usually see a grizzly, or multiply grizzlies every three to five days. We manage to have a huntable population of black bears with only 20% to 30% of our total bear population being black bears (if tracks are any indication of numbers).
We've learned to live with the bears, of all kinds, but the wolves are going to be another story. What are the bears going to eat when the wolves kill the last of the elk, or chase them out onto the plains and farmlands. At this point it's been five or six years since I've seen a 10% calf crop going into winter, so with winter mortality, and wolf kills, that doesn't leave many up and coming calves to keep our herds young and healthy. Our herds are growing old in the general population, and one bad freezing spring storm is going to decimate them. (Perhaps global warming will prevent that though, what do you think?) Then the wolves and bears can eat cattle and sheep. Perhaps we should feed them a few overweight armchair bearhugger's pets, afterall, at least that wouldn't be people's livelyhoods that they're surviving on.
Meanwhile, the States with Grizz habitat are those with a preponderance of the land in federal ownership, but no way to either tax or receive revenue from the lands. Since the end of logging on USFS lands, most states with a large USFS presence have had problems replacing the shared revenue from logging. Rural logging towns have rotted in place, schools are way under funded, and local governments are without resources to govern in a way that urban locales enjoy and legislatures require. If we can't give basic aid to fellow humans, why would we think we can for animals? Adding Grizz responsibility would just mean that hunters and fishermen would pay more fees at a time game to hunt is being decimated by wolves, and interest in hunting for ghost animals is waning. The law of diminishing returns is setting in with the wolf reintroduction.
That leaves large private ownerships. Publicly held timber companies have been unfriendly takeover targets for the last thirty years. No conservative timber management is practiced today by publicly held outfits because every company with long rotation forestry goals was taken over, the timber all cut to pay dividends to stockholders, and then the mills sold at auction and the land re-sold, most to insurance companies who have long term investments as a matter of course, and timberland is not a large enough portion of the portfolio to attract the takeover artists. No part of that scenario has been good for Grizz. Without USFS timber, private timber has been a lot more profitable, and private timber lands are under tremendous pressure to produce logs. And all this at a time when most lumber used in the West is from British Columbia, which cuts more timber than the whole of the US west of the Mississippi River. Will the corridor and connectivity of habitat be impacted by BC logging? Bears don't know borders. But, this is the US, and we couldn't keep a person in or out, let alone a bear.
I would suggest that large private ranches and privately held timber owners have the structural ability to protect habitat, if they can keep the USFS wildland fire use mentality from ruining their lands. If a way could be found to benefit, financially, private ownerships who maintain and develop suitable, used Grizz habitat, that would go a long way to keep the critter around in numbers. Private folks are competitive, and given a reason to be Grizz friendly, will have the best habitat available. And, by not allowing public trespass, a lot of security for animals. I have a feeling the public would not buy this idea, but trespass protected large ownerships are right now providing refuge and security that publicly owned lands by their nature cannot. And it is the animals we are concerned about, is it not? If that is the case, then pay people who have or could improve bear habitat on private land, to maintain it. Bear Credits. How many Bear Credits does your ranch have? Your timberland? And in winter, when bears are hibernating, a timberland owner could cut a few trees to make sunlight hit the ground, slow a future fire, and sell the wood as Bear Friendly...Grizz Wood. Or sell Bear Beef. My beef lives with Grizz.
That brings us to the other big problem, single species management. That is a recipe for disaster, no species lives in a vacuum, increasing the population of one by artificial means impacts other species, sometimes very negatively. Yellowstone is a case in point, the only impact by the wolves that is studied is the northern Yellowstone elk herd. Even those numbers when we do get them do not match what has been previously reported, so we don't really know the effect at all. Certainly no one is counting black bears, who are undoubtedly affected by both griz and wolves. All of the other elk herds are ignored, as are the moose and antelope. We are told all is well the wolves will not eat all of their food supply. That is ridiculous, they are going to eat as long as they can catch anything to eat, when it is gone, they head for ranches.
Most ranches are small family owned ranches and support a family. Take a few thousand dollars away to feed wolves and grizzlies and you have families in trouble.