Ten months after ordered to do so, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has returned "threatened" status to grizzly bears in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem/NPS

Paperwork sometimes can take awhile. To that point, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service just this week completed work to relist grizzly bears in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem as "threatened" under the Endangered Species Act, a listing a federal judge called for last September. 

In August 2017, the Fish and Wildlife Service removed the Yellowstone-region grizzly bear population from the federal endangered and threatened species list, even though the area’s grizzly population had suffered high levels of human-caused deaths in recent years. That decision prompted lawsuits; in all, six lawsuits challenging the decision were filed in federal courts in Missoula, Montana, and Chicago, Illinois.

The Chicago lawsuit was transferred to Missoula, and the lawsuits were consolidated as Crow Indian Tribe, et al. v. United States, et al., case no. CV 17-89-M-DLC.

The plaintiffs’ allegations focused primarily on violations of the ESA and the Administrative Procedure Act.

Last September, U.S. District Judge Dana L. Christensen agreed that the federal agency had failed to thoroughly review the bears' status and how delisting would affect other grizzly populations in the lower 48 states. Furthermore, he said Fish and Wildlife had acted arbitrarily and capriciously by refusing to commit that any future approach to estimating grizzly numbers in the ecosystem is "calibrated" to the approach to justify delisting.

This past Tuesday the Fish and Wildlife Service officially relisted Yellowstone area grizzlies as threatened.

U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney, a Wyoming Republican and daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, said the judge's ruling was unwarranted.

"The court-ordered relisting of the grizzly was not based on science or facts, but was rather the result of excessive litigation pursued by radical environmentalists intent on destroying our Western way of life,” she said in a statement. "The thriving grizzly population within the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem should be celebrated as a conservation success, with Wyoming investing significant resources in grizzly bear recovery and management since 2003.”

Cheney said she would work in Congress to legislate the species' removal from the Endangered Species List.

Grizzly bears in the United States and outside of Alaska are primarily found in six ecosystems: the Greater Yellowstone, the Northern Cascades, the Bitterroot, the Northern Continental Divide, and the Cabinet-Yaak. Fish and Wildlife Service biologists, upon reviewing the best available scientific and commercial data, concluded that grizzly bears in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem had experienced robust population growth; state and federal agencies were cooperating to manage bear mortality and habitat; and appropriate regulatory mechanisms were put in place to ensure recovery.