Biden administration keeps grizzly protections in place, teeing fight with Trump

The Biden administration announced Wednesday that it will keep the grizzly bear as a threatened species through much of the western United States, teeing up a fight with the incoming Trump administration over the iconic animal’s status.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has rejected pleas from western states to remove the bears from the Endangered Species Act list. Grizzlies have rebounded in recent years from historic lows in the Lower 48, with their numbers nearly tripling since the mid-1970s. But the agency said its best available science indicates the bears need more time to fully recover.

The decision “will facilitate recovery of grizzly bears and provide a stronger foundation for eventual delisting,” Fish and Wildlife Service Director Martha Williams said in a statement.

But for many ranchers and elected Republican officials, federal protections for grizzlies have run their course. Bear populations are robust enough to survive on their own, they say, and current rules impede their ability to deal with bears that prey on livestock and run into conflict with people.

It’s time, they say, to let the states manage the bears and reinstitute hunts.

The agency’s decision “endangers communities, especially farmers and ranchers, who live under the threat of grizzly bear attacks,” said Bruce Westerman (R-Arkansas), who chairs the House Natural Resources Committee.

The Biden administration’s move amounts to a last-ditch effort to protect grizzlies before President-elect Donald Trump enters office later this month. The first Trump administration tried to remove protections for grizzlies around Yellowstone National Park in 2017 only to be reversed a year later, causing western states to cancel planned hunts.

The incoming Trump administration may try to delist protections again - or, with full control of the House and Senate, Republicans may be able to remove protections for grizzlies through Congress.

“The committee will be looking to use all tools in the toolbox to reverse this decision and delist the recovered species,” Westerman said.

The big question hanging over the long back-and-forth debate on the grizzly is: How can humans learn to live alongside these huge predators?

When this American West icon was added to the Endangered Species Act list in 1975, only 700 to 800 grizzlies roamed the Lower 48. Generations of settlers who wagoned out west had nearly succeeded in hunting the bears off the map. Since receiving those protections, the bears have made gains, with at least 2,100 living in the contiguous United States as of 2023, mostly in and around Yellowstone and Glacier national parks.

Today, grizzlies in the Lower 48 persist in isolated pockets of the Rockies. But scientists say a wide-ranging population connected over multiple states would help ensure bears remain genetically robust and insulate them from the effects of climate change, allowing them to range widely for berry-producing shrubs and other food sources that may threatened by rising temperatures.

Grizzlies are doing so well that they are spilling out of parklands, where they are encountering an increasing number of people and roads, farms, ranches and towns being built in a growing region. One of Yellowstone ecosystem’s most famous bears, a prolific mother called Grizzly 399, was struck by a driver last year in Wyoming.

In 2021, Montana petitioned the Fish and Wildlife Service to remove protections for grizzlies around Glacier. Wyoming followed suit with its own petition to delist bears around Yellowstone.

“If grizzly bears are delisted, we’re going to see the states, especially Wyoming and probably Idaho, rush forward again with hunting seasons,” said Andrea Zaccardi, carnivore conservation legal director at the Center for Biological Diversity, a conservation group.

The Fish and Wildlife Service’s announcement Wednesday found neither petition warranted taking the animals off of the Endangered Species Act list. But the agency is proposing to get ranchers more flexibility to protect livestock from bears.

Under the proposal, private landowners will be able to obtain permits to kill bears harassing their cattle and other livestock - and even shoot bears on sight without a permit if they catch them in the act of eating their farm animals.

For biologists and other bear lovers, these pioneering grizzlies are good news, as they wish to see separate populations around Yellowstone and Glacier connect.

Recognizing that once-separate grizzly populations are close to connecting, the Fish and Wildlife said it will manage grizzlies in Idaho, Montana, Washington state and Wyoming as a single population going forward. Still, today’s population is a far cry from the 50,000 bears that once roamed the American West.

“We don’t want to wait until the problem occurs because then it’s too late,” said Chris Servheen, a retired Fish and Wildlife Service biologist who coordinated grizzly recovery for 35 years. “One of the things we can do to buffer the effects is to allow the animals to move across the landscape.”