On Wednesday afternoon, in a move supporting the notion that the species needs more time to recover, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced that it would not prematurely remove Endangered Species Act protections from grizzly bears living in the Greater Yellowstone and Northern Continental Divide ecosystems—the two largest populations in the continental U.S. Wyoming and Montana had petitioned the agency to delist grizzly bears and turn the management of the animals over to the states.
Had the federal government delisted bears living near Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks, it would have essentially imposed an “open season” on them, igniting a trophy-hunting spree that could decimate their fragile populations. This is an all too familiar threat: In 2017, when the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service removed protections from grizzly bears in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, both Idaho and Wyoming swiftly organized trophy hunts.
Grizzly bears once ranged from northern Mexico to Alaska, and in the lower 48 states they numbered well over 50,000 individuals in the early 1800s. By the 1930s, unregulated killing, bounties and fragmentation and destruction of habitat nearly wiped them out. Listing grizzly bears under the federal Endangered Species Act in 1975 helped to bring the population back from an estimated 135 remaining bears, effectively snatching this species from the brink of extinction. The current estimate of their population in the lower 48 states stands at about 2,000.
This number does not mean that all is well, and the reality is that the species is just beginning its recovery. And that is why we and approximately 100,000 of our supporters urged the agency to reject Wyoming and Montana’s petitions and retain protections for grizzly bears in the face of this persistent threat.
