15 November 2005Christine Hauser
The Department of Interior said today that the grizzly bear population that lives in the Yellowstone area had recovered and no longer needed protection under the Endangered Species Act, but that four other grizzly populations in the United States were still at risk and would continue to be listed as threatened species.
Some conservationists criticized the announcement, saying the proposal to remove the bear from the list opened up its habitat to encroachment and industry, and made it likely that its numbers could go down again with regulated hunting. Others said it was a success story for the Endangered Species Act.
In a statement announcing the proposal, Interior Secretary Gale A. Norton said three decades of conservation efforts had paid off. More than 600 grizzlies now live in the Yellowstone ecosystem, she said.
"With a comprehensive conservation strategy ready to be put into place upon delisting, we are confident that the future of the grizzly bear in Yellowstone is bright," she said. "Our grandchildren's grandchildren will see grizzly bears roaming Yellowstone."
When the species was listed in 1975, only 220 to 320 bears remained in the ecosystem. The animals were endangered by loss of habitat and high mortality from conflict with humans, the statement said.
Since the mid-1990's, the Yellowstone population has grown at a rate of 4 percent to 7 percent a year. Grizzlies have occupied 48 percent more habitat since they were listed, and biologists have sighted bears more than 60 miles from what was once thought to be the outer limits of their range, the department said.
Grizzly bears are generally larger and more heavily built than other bears. The males tend to weigh 400 to 600, and the females 250 to 350 pounds.
The Sierra Club conservation group said that the decision was premature, and that the grizzly needed the continued protection of the Endangered Species Act to ensure it thrives in the long term.
"Taking away these protections will put the last remnants of wild places grizzlies need to fully recover and raise their young at risk from irresponsible oil drilling, unsustainable logging and sprawling development - all of which helped drive the grizzly to the brink of extinction in the first place," the executive director of the Sierra Club, Carl Pope, said in a statement on the group's Web site.
The proposal to take the Yellowstone grizzly bear population off the Endangered Species List will be published in the Federal Register on Thursday. A period of public comment will run through Feb. 15.
The statement said management plans for the Yellowstone area had yet to be finalized.
The Sierra Club's associate regional representative for its Grizzly Bear Project, Heidi Godwin, said , that there has been enormous political pressure in Wyoming, Montana and Idaho for the bear to be taken off the list.
"There can be a hunt, which brings in a lot of money," she said from Bozeman, Mont. "They are getting a lot of pressure from politicians, backed by industry, to open a lot of land to logging, and then oil and gas drilling."
She said there was also a lot of pressure from off-road-vehicle users and businesses associated with that industry to have access to the land that the grizzlies have been relying on. The problem, she said, is not simply whether "a bear can cross the road."
"It's the fact that they bring people into the heart of the back country, and with them come guns and picnics," she said. "When there is a conflict between people and a bear, the bear usually does not win."
The Sierra Club has been working on projects to educate people in the use of pepper spray and bear-resistant garbage cans.
"If they are taken off the endangered species list they will be given zero tolerance," Ms. Godwin said.
The National Wildlife Federation's senior vice president for conservation programs, Jim Lyon, said today that the species act had worked, charting the path for the bears recovery.
A spokesman for the federation, Ben McNitt, said: "It is anticipated that at some time the capacity of the land for grizzly bears will be such that hunting will be appropriate to a limited extent. However, the way these plans are written will require that there is a ceiling to the allowable grizzly bear mortality." A spokesman for the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, Hugh Vickery, said that comprehensive plan for state management saying how the species would be managed had been completed. The guideline "guarantees that the species will not decline," he said. "It is designed to keep the species population increasing, or at least so that it would never become threatened again."
He added that the states had now taken over responsibility for the species, and that there could be hunting, within a maximum mortality rate set each year.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/15/national/15cnd-grizzly.html
