Tag Archives: Cabinet-Yaak Grizzly Bear Project

Yaak-to-Cabinet migration good news for grizzly recovery

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Bear Checkup near Libby - courtesy Montana FWP

A big, mature grizzly migrated from the Yaak Mountains to the Cabinet Range, a major cause for celebration among the bear recovery folks . . .

Finally, there’s some good news out of bear country. Following a spate of bear-human conflicts in Northwest Montana… one recent grizzly encounter has prompted some cause for celebration.

On Oct. 5, a 500-pound male bruin was captured south of Libby after it cleared a non-functioning electric fence that was fortifying a beekeeper’s honey supply.

And while being caught with its paw in the honey jar is classic bad bear behavior, this 6.5-year-old grizzly’s journey to get to the Cabinet Mountains makes him special. It makes him the first documented bear to cross from the Yaak Mountains to the Cabinets in history, which is a boon for bolstering the isolated and relatively scant Cabinet Mountain grizzly population and promoting better genetic diversity there.

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Cabinet-Yaak grizzly recovery slow

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Grizzly bear recovery in the Cabinet-Yaak region is proceeding slowly . . .

Despite the robust recovery of grizzly bears in the forested mountains of Glacier National Park, the Bob Marshall Wilderness Complex and the surrounding landscape, the great bear’s future across the region remains far from certain.

The recovery zone spanning the Cabinet Mountains Wilderness, Yaak River basin and areas in between— about one quarter of the size of the Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem — has about one 20th of the grizzly population, growing at about half the rate.

The Cabinet-Yaak grizzly bear population contained 45 bears in 2012 when the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service last conducted a population estimate. Wayne Kasworm, a grizzly bear biologist for the agency, estimates that population at about 50 today, half of the 100-bear recovery target identified after the population’s 1975 listing as “threatened” under the federal Endangered Species Act.

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Cabinet-Yaak grizzly numbers small, but rising

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Scientists continue to struggle to establish a good population of grizzly bears in the Cabinet-Yaak Ecosystem . . .

Spring has brought bears back into action, and it’s also energized biologists overseeing the remote population of grizzlies in the Cabinet-Yaak mountains of northwest Montana.

“We were in negative territory, but as of this year, after several years of low mortality we’re seeing some improvement,” said Wayne Kasworm, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service recovery coordinator in Libby. “Now we have a projected growth rate of 1.4 percent. That’s compared to the Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem and Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, where it’s roughly 3 percent.”

While those two huge areas each have close to 1,000 grizzlies, the Cabinet-Yaak Ecosystem struggles to stay around 50. It does so with about a quarter of the NCDE’s territory, which stretches from the southern tip of the Rattlesnake Wilderness north of Missoula up to Glacier National Park.

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Feds decide not to upgrade protections for Cabinet-Yaak grizzlies

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The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Alliance for the Wild Rockies are butting heads over the status of the grizzly bear population in the Cabinet-Yaak region . . .

Federal wildlife officials last week declined to upgrade protections for a small population of grizzly bears in the Cabinet Mountains and Yaak River drainage in Northwest Montana, sparking outcry from a conservation organization that claims the population is nearing extinction.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service published a decision in the Federal Register on Dec. 5 that said grizzlies living in the Cabinet-Yaak ecosystem are stable and likely to reach a recovery goal of 100 without changing their status from threatened to endangered under the Endangered Species Act…

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More than just good data needed to delist Yellowstone grizzlies

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Rob Chaney of the Missoulian posted a good summary of the state of the grizzly bear recovery effort.

Recommended reading . . .

Since the grizzly bear was listed as a federally threatened species in 1975, it’s made a remarkable comeback.

Decades of active hunting and poisoning, habitat destruction, isolation and manipulation pushed it to the brink of extinction in the lower 48 United States. California used to have the most, even putting it on its state flag. Californians killed their last grizzly in 1922. It was erased from its native prairie grasslands by the 1880s, just eight decades after the Lewis and Clark journals gave urban Americans their first account of the great bear.

By 1940, after heavy use of strychnine poisoning by farmers and ranchers, wildlife managers estimated the United States had perhaps 300 grizzlies (not counting Alaska). Today, about 1,850 roam the mountains of Montana, Idaho, Wyoming and Washington.

“There’s been a real evolution of attitudes that got us to this point,” said Chris Servheen, the grizzly recovery manager for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Missoula. “We used to be all about killing predators. Now we’re concerned about predators.

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A ‘rock-solid minimum’ of 42 grizzlies in Cabinet-Yaak

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Solid data on the population of grizzly bears in the Cabinet-Yaak region . . .

How many hairs does it take to make a grizzly bear?

About 11,000 tufts, snagged in special barbed-wire snares scattered throughout the Cabinet and Yaak regions of northwest Montana, cooked down to evidence of roughly 42 grizzlies in 2012. The groundbreaking research unveiled at the winter gathering of the Interagency Grizzly Bear Committee in Missoula marked the first time that area has had a solid population number for the rare bears.

“That’s the rock-solid minimum count we detected,” research leader Kate Kendall told the committee Tuesday. The number includes 38 grizzlies identified by their unique DNA plus four more known, collared bears that didn’t show up in the hair samples. When some tentative data about visiting bears or bears that died during the study gets added in, the figure could grow to 54.

The number’s important because the fate of grizzlies in the Cabinet-Yaak area influences everything from logging and mining to hiking and hunting…

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Yellowstone regional grizzly bear population on the upswing

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The Missoulian reports that the grizzly population centered on Yellowstone Park appears to be doing well.  The article also discusses the Cabinet-Yaak Grizzly Bear Project in this corner of Montana . . .

The grizzly bear population around Yellowstone National Park appears to be stable and growing, according to experts in Wyoming.

A story in the Casper Star-Tribune reports that an estimated 608 grizzlies live in the Yellowstone ecosystem, an increase over last year’s estimated population of 593.

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