A court order to reconsider plans for transplanting grizzly bears along the Montana-Idaho border has withstood appeals from Idaho and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Thursday accepted Idaho’s and FWS’ request to dismiss their joint appeal of a lower-court decision that the transplant plan had been improperly stalled.
“After more than two decades of stalling, the government is now under court order to prepare an updated Environmental Impact Statement for the purpose of conserving and recovering grizzly bears in the Bitterroot region as required by the federal Endangered Species Act,” Alliance for the Wild Rockies Executive Director Michael Garrity said in an email. “Our members have been fighting for this for so long — after years of dogged persistence, we have finally prevailed.”
The wildlife management agencies and governors of Montana, Idaho and Wyoming have all petitioned the federal government to delist grizzly bears and return them to state oversight. They cite growing grizzly numbers and conflicts with ranchers and backcountry users as reason for greater lethal control of the bears, including public hunting seasons.
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One wrinkle in the Bitterroot case was the legal status of grizzly bears in the Bitterroot Mountains. Grizzlies throughout the Lower 48 states are protected as a threatened species under the federal Endangered Species Act. Before Lewis and Clark made their voyage of discovery at the turn of the 19th century, an estimated 50,000 grizzlies inhabited the West, from Texas to Montana and all along the Pacific Coast. When the bears received federal protection in 1975, that number had dwindled to around 600 or fewer south of the Canadian border.
The Interagency Grizzly Bear Committee established six recovery areas to concentrate efforts to boost grizzly populations in the Northwest. One of those was the Selway-Bitterroot mountains and forests along the Montana-Idaho border, which historically had large grizzly concentrations, but were hunted and trapped out of existence around the 1940s.
In contrast, the Northern Continental Divide and Greater Yellowstone recovery areas both had struggling but resilient bear populations, which have now grown to around 1,000 grizzlies each.
In the 1990s, IGBC proposed transplanting grizzlies in the 5,800-acre Bitterroot Recovery Area. In the public negotiations over the plan, those bears would be considered an experimental population whose management would be overseen by local citizens advisory boards. Among other things, that meant those grizzlies didn’t have the same ESA protections as bears that naturally or historically inhabited an area. They could be trapped, killed or confronted with much less regulation than non-experimental grizzlies.
But the plan was finalized at the end of the Clinton administration, and the following George W. Bush administration essentially ignored the plan without officially canceling it.
In a court hearing last March, lawyers for the Alliance for the Wild Rockies and Native Ecosystems Council argued that the federal wildlife managers must resume work on the plan they never started, because several grizzly bears have been documented “in the headwaters of the east fork of the Bitterroot River; in the Miller Creek area to the south of Missoula; in the Trail Creek area east of Lost Trail Ski Area; at the Stevensville Golf Course; along the Lolo Creek/Highway 12 just west of Lolo, Montana; and near the Lochsa River in Idaho southeast of Lolo Hot Springs,” according to federal records.
“The service identified grizzly bear reintroduction into the Bitterroot Ecosystem as a priority twenty years ago,” U.S. District Judge Donald Molloy wrote last March. “If that is no longer a priority, the Service cannot simply continue to ignore it. For the past two decades, the Service has acted as though the 2000 ROD (record of decision) and Final Rule never existed in the first instance.”
Because the transplant never took place, and because grizzlies are naturally roaming the Bitterroots, Molloy ruled that simply re-starting the old reintroduction plan was impossible. Instead, he ordered FWS to perform a new supplemental environmental impact statement, with a potential new plan for expanding the grizzly population there.
“The premise that grizzly bears were not present in the Bitterroot Ecosystem when the ROD and Final Rule were published was scientifically accurate at that time,” Molloy wrote. “But the current presence of naturally occurring grizzly bears is a significant change in circumstances that undermines the basic premise on which the ROD and Final Rule were based. It may impact the advisability or feasibility of introducing an experimental population of bears.”
Grizzlies from the Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem have been steadily expanding along the southern edge of that area, including the Missoula and Ninemile valleys just north of the Bitterroot region. In October, a 582-pound male grizzly was killed by a vehicle 3 miles north of Bonner on Highway 200.
“Recovery in the Bitterroot region is the lynchpin to recovery of grizzlies in the lower 48 States because the region connects the grizzly population in the Greater Yellowstone region with the grizzly bear populations in the Northern Continental Divide, Cabinet-Yaak, and Selkirk regions,” Garrity said. “To be recovered we need to once again have one connected population of grizzlies in the Northern Rockies. With this required public process, we will finally see meaningful action that could lead to full recovery of grizzly bears in this country.”
