Relegating Grizzly bears to the national parks?

What will it take to recover Yellowstone grizzlies? Well, most everyone agrees the main thing is to provide bears with access to secure habitat and food. Scientists and wildlife managers have also long agreed that there isn't enough of either inside the confines of Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks; bears need to be able to use lands outside the parks. For bears to thrive and truly recover, we will need to learn how to live with them in new places. This is especially true given that the location of high quality bear foods is changing as the climate changes; the climate-driven collapse of whitebark pine, once a key bear staple, is one factor that is prompting bears to forage more widely in the Greater Yellowstone.

Yet accommodating bears in different areas may be an uphill battle with some. Take this quote from a December 4, 2011 article in the Missoulian where Idaho Fish and Game Director Jim Unsworth said, “They (the public) won’t tolerate being afraid of having a bear on your elk when you’re hunting.” What he did not say was that the only places where elk hunting is not allowed in grizzly bear habitat is inside the parks. Relegating grizzly bears to the parks just won't work.

Such a drastic measure is also unnecessary because: 1. many hunters are hunting successfully in grizzly bear habitat and having no conflicts with bears, and 2. hunters can chose whether they want to hunt in grizzly bear habitat. There are plenty of places in the Northern Rockies to hunt big game where there are no grizzly bears.

I have personally spoken to a number of hunters who said they opt not to hunt in bear habitat because they don’t want the added worry – and that is fine because it is their choice. I have also reviewed the thousands of comments submitted to the US Fish and Wildlife Service on the Yellowstone grizzly bear delisting rule and related state plans. In these documents, I read the comments of many hunters who opposed premature delisting of Yellowstone’s grizzly bears, and those of a number of hunters who said they actually enjoyed the thrill of hunting in a place where grizzly bears still roam. Unsworth seems to think that many or most hunters are afraid of grizzly bears or of hunting in their midst -- and that is simply not the case. 

If Unsworth’s stated desires were implemented in policy, it would mean that no grizzly bear population would ever be recovered, because there would only be bears protected inside the parks, and the numbers would be so small that they would always be imperiled under the terms of the Endangered Species Act (ESA).

The purpose of the ESA is to recover imperiled species. All the involved agencies, except now perhaps Idaho Fish and Game, have operated for decades under the assumption that in order to be recovered,  grizzly bears need access to habitat outside national parks – which means they need to be able to forage in places where elk hunting is allowed. Idaho could help the current situation by expanding research on where bears are, especially on the periphery of the ecosystem, and by communicating that information to hunters, so they know whether or not they need to prepare for an encounter with a grizzly – or whether they might prefer to hunt where grizzly bears are not present. Simply shooting bears outside the parks is an approach that no one will support.