Anti-Grizzly hunting column

[Oak]

Nice opinion piece in the Denver paper.

Plan trucks grizzlies in for the kill

By Diane Carman
Denver Post Staff Columnist

Doug Honnold pulled over on the side of the road and peered through his binoculars. It was around dusk on a September evening last year. Off in the distance, a grizzly bear was defending a fresh carcass from a pack of hungry wolves.

As darkness descended on Yellowstone National Park, Honnold watched the real-life version of the Discovery Channel unfolding before him and reminded himself how lucky he was.

The grizzlies, meanwhile, had no idea how lucky they were to have him watching over them.

Fifteen years ago, Honnold left Denver and moved to Montana, where he has studied the grizzlies, hiked all over their rugged habitat and represented them in court ever since.

The managing attorney for the Bozeman office of Earthjustice has seen their numbers in the area near Yellowstone National Park rise from the wild guess of 100 to 250 made by wildlife biologists in 1975, when they were designated as "threatened," to their recent ballpark estimate of between 400 and 600.

Last week, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced that the Yellowstone grizzly bear officially will be removed from the Endangered Species List. The agency has been trying for years to delist the bears to allow logging and oil-and-gas drilling in their habitat, and to permit hunters to take home what used to be the biggest North American game prize of all.

Honnold knew it was coming. Still, that didn't make it any easier for him.
"I think it's wrong-headed," he said.

While the grizzly population in Yellowstone has doubled or tripled in 30 years, as a species it's hardly out of the woods.

Two centuries ago, more than 50,000 grizzlies lived in an area stretching from the Great Plains to the West Coast. What's left of the population now is confined to five islands of remaining habitat.

Most of the bears are in Yellowstone and Glacier national parks. Three tiny populations also exist in northwest Montana, Idaho and Washington state.
Controversy still rages over whether any grizzlies remain in Colorado. The last sighting occurred in the 1980s. While suspicious-looking piles of scat occasionally are found in the San Juans, nobody has confirmed a grizzly here in two decades.

Honnold said the survival of the powerful creature is extremely fragile.
Grizzly bears reproduce slowly. Females don't breed until they are at least 3 years old; the average litter is only two cubs; and they only breed every three years.

If food is scarce because of drought, small fish populations or insect infestations that reduce their food supply, the bears won't breed for much longer periods. Drought and the pine-beetle epidemic destroying the supply of seed cones that the bears depend on for nutrition in Yellowstone have compromised their health and their breeding prospects in recent years.

So the last thing they need is to be hunted and squeezed out of the forests.

Interior Deputy Secretary Lynn Scarlett sees it differently.
The bears' comeback is "extraordinary," she said in announcing the delisting. Removing federal protection of them is "an amazing accomplishment."

Honnold calls it "a travesty" and said the details of the plan betray the grim reality for the species.

Survival of the grizzlies is so delicate the Fish and Wildlife Service is expected to ask for more money to monitor the bear populations to make sure the extraordinary comeback isn't short-lived.

The agency also has said that to maintain the bear population, every decade it will truck in enough bears to make sure that at least two are capable of surviving, reproducing and maintaining the genetic viability of the Yellowstone grizzlies.

Think about that for a minute.

What that means is that after 30 years of protection, Fish and Wildlife will begin driving grizzly bears from Glacier to Yellowstone at taxpayers' expense so that hunters can kill them more conveniently.

As Interior Department accomplishments go, convincing Americans that this is a good idea has to be by far the most amazing feat of all.

 

[Bambistew]

I think Bozeman will be giving Boulder a run for its money in a few years. That place is full of bunny huggin' hippies anymore.

 

[BigHornRam]

With a tree hugger mainstream press like that, actually getting the bears delisted will be the "most amazing feat of all".