Group seeks to expand grizzly range across the entire West

An environmental group says it wants grizzly bear recovery not only in Montana but across its historic range — including New Mexico and California.

The Center for Biological Diversity submitted a petition to Interior Secretary Sally Jewell and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service director Dan Ashe asking that the 1993 recovery plan for grizzlies be updated “to ensure full recovery of the species across its native range in the United States.”

Grizzlies once roamed vast swaths of the American West, including much of California, Oregon, Washington, Wyoming, Montana, North and South Dakota, Idaho, Colorado, New Mexico, parts of Arizona and even into Texas and Mexico.

Today, grizzlies are largely confined to the mountains of Montana, Idaho and northern Wyoming, with a small population in the Cascades of Washington state. Bears in many areas were hunted to extirpations in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

The grizzly bear is currently listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act, although an effort is underway to delist them in the Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem and the Yellowstone Ecosystem.

Between 630 and 730 bears inhabit the Yellowstone Ecosystem, near Yellowstone National Park, and about 1,000 bears inhabit the NCDE, which includes Glacier National Park and the Bob Marshall Wilderness.

The Center for Biological Diversity, which claims more than 775,000 members, wants the government to go further and develop grizzly populations in the Grand Canyon and the Sierra Nevada in California, among other places. The group claims the total population across the West should be between 4,000 and 6,000 when the bears are fully recovered.

“Grizzly bears are one of the true icons of the American West, yet today they live in a paltry 4 percent of the lands where they used to roam,” said Noah Greenwald, the group’s endangered species director. “We shouldn’t be closing the book on grizzly recovery but beginning a new chapter — one where these amazing animals live wherever there’s good habitat for them across the West.”

The bears, meanwhile, seem to be expanding on their own, at least in Montana. Each year, bear managers have found grizzlies farther and farther away from the Rocky Mountain Front. The bears follow river drainages out onto the plains where food sources along river bottoms is plentiful.