With the Yellowstone population of grizzlies on the verge of being removed from the federal threatened and endangered list, the folks charged with leading recovery efforts are looking to refocus on bears that call the northern Continental Divide ecosystem home.
On Wednesday, the Interagency Grizzly Bear Committee heard about the challenges it and a growing team of biologists and researchers will face in duplicating the success story now occurring in the Yellowstone ecosystem.
The Yellowstone population of grizzlies is the most studied population of bears in the world. An interagency team of researchers has published more than 178 studies on the population since 1974.
That's not the situation in northwest Montana, Smith said.
Researchers are in the midst of gathering information about the bears and their habitat, but there's still a lot to learn, he said.
Illegal killings are another major challenge facing the recovery effort.
“There are a lot more illegal killings in the NCDE than in Yellowstone,” said Chris Servheen, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service grizzly bear recovery coordinator. “Some people are poisoning bears in the NCDE. There's no doubt about that.”
Last year, officials counted 10 grizzly bears that were killed illegally. So far this year, there have been 11.
“Illegal killings are just killing us,” Servheen said. “A few unscrupulous people can spoil a whole lot of effort by a lot of people.”
One way to slow the killings would be a high-profile enforcement case, he said. There's been talk about raising the reward from $5,000 to $10,000 for information about illegal killings.
At the same time, Cathy Barbouletos, supervisor of the Flathead National Forest, said there are people trying to do the right thing. For instance, she said, in the Swan Valley an organization has created a program to loan people bear-proof products. People can give those a try and, if they like them, buy their own.
More than half of the people who've participated have purchased products after the trial period, Barbouletos said.
“They're operating on a shoestring budget, but they're getting the products out,” she said. “It's making a difference.”
Barbouletos said a number of people were interested in the results of a telemetry flight that located bears near their homes.
“They responded by saying we've got a bear in our backyard and I want to make sure it's OK,” she said. “I wish we could get other communities as interested in bears as the Swan is. I wish we could get Whitefish interested.”
Smith said that change in attitude is encouraging.
“It seems that some people in the northwest part of the state are starting to see that shoveling sand against the wind isn't going to change the future,” he said. “The only way to make the lives of people better there will be to recover that population and get out from under the Endangered Species Act.”
To get there, everyone needs to have a better understanding of what grizzly bears need to survive.
Researchers are working to uncover some of the bear's secrets.
Kate Kendall, a U.S. Geological Survey research biologist, and her crews have collected nearly 34,000 hair samples over the last few years from rub trees and sampling sites. After analyzing the DNA of a little more than half of those samples, she's identified 289 different bears.
Using that information, Rick Mace, a Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks research biologist, is working on project that will track grizzlies to uncover population and habitat trends.
“Yellowstone has 30 years of research to go on - they're a long ways ahead of us,” Mace said. “We have no large-scale ecosystem habitat or population studies in the NCDE.”
The goal is to monitor a minimum of 25 females in this country and four in Canada. The grizzly bear population in northwest Montana often bounces from one side of the border to the other. Right now, Mace's team is tracking 21 females.
Mace is hoping that eventually most of the collared bears will be carrying the latest in GPS technology, which allows researchers to track the bears without having to take to the air.
The collars are expensive - about $5,000 apiece. By comparison, the older telemetry collars cost about $300.
But in the long run, Mace said, they're a bargain, considering the cost of flight time and the real-time information they provide. For instance, when one of the bears popped the collar off after sticking its head in an old pit toilet near one of the chalets in Glacier National Park, Mace knew almost immediately.
He contacted the National Park Service, a ranger retrieved the collar and Mace had it in his office in a matter of hours.
“It just speeds everything up,” he said.
Reporter Perry Backus can be reached at 523-5259 or at pbackus@missoulian.com
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