Groups Announce Plan To Challenge Delisting Of Grizzlies In Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem

Rising grizzly bear deaths, climate change, and the biological island that is the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem all were cited Friday when a coalition of groups announced plans to sue the Trump administration to prevent the removal from the Endangered Species List of grizzly bears in the ecosystem.

When Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke last week announced plans to remove the grizzly from the list, he said the bear's recovery "stands as one of America’s great conservation successes."

But on Friday groups ranging from the Northern Cheyenne Tribe and the National Parks Conservation Association to the Sierra Club and the Center for Biological Diversity called the move premature.

“With grizzly deaths spiking, now is not the time to declare the great bear recovered and federal protections unnecessary,” said Earthjustice attorney Timothy Preso. “The grizzly is a major part of what makes the region in and around Yellowstone National Park so special and unique. We should not be taking a gamble with the grizzly’s future.”

What Mr. Preso was referring to was a "record-high 61 grizzly deaths in 2015 and 58 in 2016, with the majority of those caused by people."

At the same time, climate change's impact on whitebark pine trees is reducing a key protein source -- pine nuts -- grizzlies have relied upon, leading to more bear-human conflicts as grizzlies turn more to meat for nourishment, and the administration has not developed a strategy for connecting grizzlies in the Yellowstone ecosystem with those in the Crown of the Continent ecosystem of northern Montana and southern Canada, the groups said.

Their announcement Friday gave notice that they would formally sue to halt the delisting in two months if the administration did not reverse course.

Yellowstone officials note on their website that "the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem and northwest Montana are the only areas south of Canada that still have large grizzly bear (Ursus arctos horribilis) populations. Grizzly bears were federally listed in the lower 48 states as a threatened species in 1975 due to unsustainable levels of human-caused mortality, habitat loss, and significant habitat alteration."

Estimates in 2016 put the grizzly population in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem at nearly 700 individuals, up from 136 in 1975. Movement of bears south and out of Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Park into the Wind River and Wyoming ranges of Wyoming are pointed to by proponents of delisting as proof that the ecosystem's grizzly population is healthy.

If the delisting goes through, the states of Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming would govern hunting regulations for bears outside Yellowstone and Grand Teton.

Yellowstone Superintendent Dan Wenk had opposed the grizzly bear conservation strategy supported by the Yellowstone Ecosystem Subcommittee of the Interagency Grizzly Bear Committee last fall.

The superintendent told the Traveler at the time that he had concerns about the "ambiguity" of the conservation strategy's intent to continue to base grizzly bear populations on the so-called "Chao2" estimator, which factors in numbers of grizzly sows not observed by researchers working on estimates. While the conservation strategy said the Chao2 methodology would be used for the "foreseeable future," Superintendent Wenk wanted greater assurance that Chao2 would remain in the plan.

Some see the Chao2 method as being too conservative, and that the grizzly bear population could be substantially higher than the nearly 700 bears thought to be in the ecosystem. If the population is, for example, actually 1,100 bears, then quotas for hunters in the three surrounding states could be higher. As a result, there could be pressure down the line to move to a more liberal estimator that could allow Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho to sell more bear hunting licenses.

What wasn't in the conservation strategy was not only whether hunting of grizzlies would be allowed within the John D. Rockefeller Parkway sandwiched by Yellowstone and Grand Teton, but also whether grizzly bears could be hunted on private and state inholdings that lie within Grand Teton's boundaries.

“The rule removing federal protections for America’s beloved Yellowstone grizzly bears is a political decision that is deeply flawed and will reverse so much of the progress that has been made to recover these bears,” said Andrea Santarsiere, a senior attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity. “We are ready to fight to ensure these bears don’t end up dead at the hands of trophy hunters.”

At the Sierra Club's Our Wild America campaign, Bonnie Rice said the "decision to prematurely strip grizzly bears of endangered species protections is an affront to Tribal Nations and their repeated calls for consultation. If allowed to move forward, this decision to once again put politics before science could set grizzly bear recovery back by decades. People and bears can co-exist, but only if given the chance.” 

NPCA officials agreed, saying "(T)he stakes are too high to rush removing important protections for Yellowstone grizzly bears.”

“The process has been fraught and common sense concerns have been ignored," said Stephanie Adams, NPCA's Yellowstone program manager. "There’s no legally-binding agreement to prevent hunting within the National Park Service-managed John D. Rockefeller Parkway. This and other issues raised by the National Park Service, the agency responsible for managing the core of the grizzly population in Yellowstone and Grand Teton, have been ignored in the final rule.”

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service previously moved to delist the Yellowstone grizzly population in 2007, but that decision was overturned by a federal district court in Montana along with the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals on the basis that the Service ignored the impacts of the whitebark pine loss on the grizzly population. In rejecting the Service’s 2007 grizzly delisting decision, the 9th Circuit admonished the agency that “the Service cannot take a full-speed ahead, damn-the-torpedoes approach to delisting—especially given the ESA’s ‘policy of institutionalized caution,’” the conservation groups noted.