Grizzly delisting now in sight

The first step in removing grizzly bears from the Endangered Species Act listing in much of Northwest Montana likely will begin late this summer.

That's when a grizzly bear conservation strategy for the Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem is expected to be released to the public, according to Chris Servheen, the grizzly bear recovery coordinator for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

The document is the blueprint for grizzly bear management after delisting. It will go out for public review in late August or September, Servheen said last week. The federal rule to actually delist grizzlies will still take some time, perhaps happening in 2014, Servheen noted.

The NCDE is a broad swath of land extending from the Canada border to the Blackfoot River, including all of Glacier National Park and the Bob Marshall Wilderness complex. All told, it encompasses about 8 million acres.

The NCDE does not include the Cabinet-Yaak region, where biologists are still trying to recover grizzly bear populations on the Montana-Idaho border by bringing in grizzlies from the NCDE.

Research under way by Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks biologist Rick Mace indicates the NCDE bear population is growing by about 3 percent annually and the estimated population is about 970 bears. That seems to corroborate current bear reports and bear activity.

More and more bears are being sighted well away from the Rocky Mountain Front - in some cases 35 to 40 miles away. Before white men came to the West, grizzly bears were a plains animal as much as a mountain creature.

The Fish and Wildlife Service estimates that 50,000 grizzly bears roamed between the Pacific Ocean and the Great Plains when Lewis and Clark explored the West.

Just a fraction of that number remain today. But since 1975, when grizzly bears were listed as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act, regional grizzly populations have slowly but surely recovered. Today, it's not unusual for someone to spot a grizzly bear. One local landowner recently told an FWP biologist that he saw nine different grizzlies on his property.

While bear sightings are not uncommon, bear threats still loom large. Bear managers say they still receive a nearly constant stream of calls about bear conflicts with humans. One of the more recent problems has been chickens.

Raising chickens for meat and eggs is increasing in popularity, and bears are not only attracted to chickens, they're also attracted to the feed.

FWP biologists have started a public information campaign to educate the public about chickens and bears. A simple deterrent, they say, is to put an electric fence around the chicken coop.

A few zaps of electricity on a bear's wet nose seems to do the trick, they note.