Gianforte, FWP say grizzly translocations shows Montana ready for delisting

After announcing on Friday that two grizzly bears from an ecosystem in northwest Montana had been translocated to Yellowstone National Park and Wyoming, Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte and several others said at a news conference Monday they believe states have done enough to show the federal government that grizzlies are ready to be delisted from Endangered Species Act protections.

That decision will come by the end of January 2025, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service official said in a court filing a week-and-a-half ago and the agency confirmed, when the agency finalizes its decisions on whether to delist grizzly bears in the Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem, Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, and all lower 48 states following requests to do so from Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho, respectively, during the past several years.

“Working with the state of Wyoming and our partners, we achieved the goals set for us, and we’ve shown the ability to manage bears, protect habitat, and population numbers,” Gianforte said outside the state Capitol in Helena Monday morning. “It’s time for the state to take over management of these iconic animals. It’s time to have full authority for grizzly bears in Montana returned back to Montana.”

On Friday, Gianforte and Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon – both Republicans – announced their administrations had successfully translocated two subadult grizzly bears from remote areas of the North Fork Flathead River to Wyoming.

Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks Wildlife Biologist Dr. Cecily Costello said at Monday’s news conference that one bear was a 3-to-4-year-old female that was moved about 35 miles northwest of Dubois, Wyoming, and the other was a 4-to-5-year-old male that was translocated to an area southwest of Yellowstone Lake in Yellowstone National Park.

Costello said FWP biologists had spent about two months searching for the right candidates – subadult bears who had no prior contact with humans, had not yet established a home range, and will be tracked to see if they are reproducing – before capturing the two bears that were moved within two days of one another.

She, Gianforte and FWP Director Dustin Temple said the effort by Montana, Wyoming and Idaho under a three-state agreement to translocate bears between the two ecosystems is a step toward ensuring there is genetic connectivity between the two populations by introducing new genes into the pool in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, where Costello said diversity is not as strong as in the NCDE because of how long the grizzly population there has been isolated from others.

“Both of those populations have met their recovery goals or exceed them, really. Each population has over 1,000 bears in them,” Costello said. “And they are getting closer all the time, so that natural movement between these two ecosystems might happen in the future. This basically gave a head start to that process.”

WyoFile first reported the plans to translocate bears from the NCDE to the GYE, which are separated by a roughly 35-mile gap on certain edges, in January, writing at the time officials hoped to have the first translocation done no later than mid-August.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has been analyzing whether the two grizzly populations have met the necessary requirements to be taken off the threatened species list under the Endangered Species Act, and whether Montana and Wyoming in particular are ready to manage the animals without winnowing down their populations through hunting and other management strategies, for more than a year.

The Gianforte administration and other Montana Republican officials have grown wary, however, that what was to be a 12-month review by the federal government for grizzlies in the NCDE and GYE has now been going on for more than a year and a half.

In early July, Temple threatened to sue the Department of Interior and Fish and Wildlife Service within 60 days if the Fish and Wildlife Service did not make a final determination on delisting the bears in the NCDE within that timeframe.

But along with accounting for whether grizzlies are truly recovered in the two ecosystems, their future outlook, and numerous other factors that go into a delisting decision, the Fish and Wildlife Service must also account for the management strategies of the states that would take over control of the grizzlies if they are delisted, and the agency has previously expressed concerns about some of Montana’s.

In February 2023, just as the 12-month assessment got underway, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Director Martha Williams said a bill signed into law that allowed for grizzly bears to be killed if they were killing a person’s livestock conflicted with federal law and that other recently passed laws surrounding wolf snaring and trapping could result in the illegal take of a grizzly bear.

Last November, a U.S. District Court judge in Montana limited Montana’s wolf trapping season in the regions where grizzly bears are present to just six weeks when the grizzlies were most likely to be inside of their dens to ensure they did not get incidentally trapped.

In March 2023, Christopher Servheen, the President of the Montana Wildlife Federation and the retired Fish and Wildlife Service Grizzly Bear Recovery Coordinator, submitted Congressional testimony explaining that grizzlies reaching a certain population target was not the only criteria for delisting. Rather, he said, states have to show they have adequate mortality management strategies in place to be sure grizzly populations do not start to go backward, and he believed Montana and Idaho’s strategies would do just that.

“If state politicians are going to ignore science-based wildlife management and prescribe how many predators should be killed and the specific methods to be used to kill them, it will be difficult to ever manage most carnivore populations sustainably, ever achieve grizzly bear recovery, and have in place the adequate state regulatory mechanisms necessary for state agencies to credibly managed recovered grizzly bears and wolves,” Servheen wrote.

Last week, when the Fish and Wildlife Service announced it would make all three delisting decisions at once said they were concerned that delisting grizzlies in either of the ecosystems or across all the lower 48 states would be a setback for the recovery already made and a threat to interconnectivity between the two populations that even biologists for FWP have said is inevitable.

“As one of the slowest-reproducing mammals on the planet, grizzly bears will always be sensitive to mortality, and thus will require continuous, strong conservation measures,” six regional environmental and conservation groups said in a statement last week. “We need to keep Endangered Species Act safeguards in place until the science shows grizzly bears are fully recovered, and until the states have adequate rules in place to ensure grizzly bears will thrive for future generations.”

Montana has been developing a grizzly bear management plan since 2022 in the event they are delisted in the two ecosystems, which was open for public comment through March. The legislature passed a bill last year providing the state authority to come up with plans ahead of a decision from the Fish and Wildlife Service.

The Fish and Wildlife Commission also developed administrative rules late last year, but drew opposition from conservation groups over when bears could be killed to protect livestock. The plans include allowing no hunting of grizzly bears within the first five years they are delisted.

The Fish and Wildlife Commission is set to meet again on Aug. 16 to set furbearer and wolf trapping quotas that could provide more insight into exactly where state officials stand in preparation for a possible delisting.

Temple, the FWP director, said Monday he believes the translocation, though not a natural interconnectivity between the two ecosystems, shows the state’s commitment to ongoing recovery between the two ecosystems.

“This ensures robust genetic health for the previously isolated Yellowstone population. We’ve added a certainty to the recovered status of this population,” he said. “…This illustrates the state’s capacity and commitment to manage these bears without federal oversight.”

But Gianforte also made clear he believes the Endangered Species Act was not aimed at providing limitless growth of animal populations into the future.

“The bottom line is this: The Endangered Species Act was designed to keep species from going extinct, not manage a robust population that’s growing,” he said.

When asked about his confidence in whether the Fish and Wildlife Service will agree with Montana and Wyoming and decide to delist either population, he said the states had presented the agency with all the latest scientific information they have that he said shows the bears are recovered.

“If the U.S. (Fish and) Wildlife Service looked at the facts and the scientific data, these animals would be delisted today,” Gianforte said. “I don’t know what their agenda is, but they need to do their job.”

Blair Miller is a Helena-based reporter. The Daily Montanan is a nonprofit newsroom.