FWS Releases Draft Grizzly Bear Habitat Criteria

by Caroline Byrd

In 1994, WOC joined a number of other conservation groups in a successful lawsuit challenging the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s (FWS’s) Grizzly Bear Recovery Plan. We based part of our challenge on the FWS’s failure to develop habitat protection criteria. This July, the FWS released draft habitat-based recovery criteria for the grizzly bear in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. Unfortunately, just like the FWS’s flawed recovery plan, the proposed habitat protections fall far short of insuring the continued survival of the grizzly bear.

No one disputes that grizzly survival in the lower 48 states depends on protecting sufficient habitat for the wide-ranging, long-lived, slowly reproducing bears.

Grizzly bears were listed as a threatened species in 1975. Since then, their numbers and distribution have fluctuated, but the bear population now seems to be recovering from its all-time low. However, threats to grizzlies and their most important food sources, including whitebark pine nuts, cutworm moths, bison and Yellowstone cutthroat trout, have increased and intensified. Combined pressures from dwindling food sources, roads, logging, mining, oil and gas exploration, rural sprawl, highway reconstruction and off-road vehicles have made stronger habitat protection an absolute necessity.

Despite the need for real, enforceable, guaranteed habitat protection to insure the survival of Yellowstone’s bears, the FWS plan would:

• Confine grizzly habitat protections within a recovery zone whose boundaries were drawn when bears were at precariously low numbers. Many bears now living outside that boundary would receive no habitat protection on public land slated for road building, oil and gas development and logging. (See Frontlinesarticle "Let's Not Fence Yellowstone")

• Sanction further habitat loss. Even within the government’s insufficient grizzly bear recovery area, the plan would allow continued incremental habitat loss, jeopardizing key food sources and the bears that depend on them. The plan’s habitat-loss loopholes would permit a one-percent loss of much of the remaining bear habitat. This translates to an additional loss of more than 25,000 acres of habitat within the current recovery zone.

The FWS plan fails to:
• Protect lifelines. Wildlife corridors from the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem north and west to grizzly populations in Montana are vital to the long-term survival of grizzlies in the lower 48 states. Unfortunately, the government’s plan proposes only to "study" these links and provides no guaranteed protection, even on an interim basis.

• Restore degraded habitat. The current plan identifies important grizzly bear areas in the recovery zone where habitat is already degraded. However, it does not set any goals that agencies must meet to restore this degraded habitat; it only states that these areas need "improvement."

In September, we sent out an alert asking for your comments on the FWS’s plan. The FWS has extended the comment period until October 30. If you haven’t already, please send your comments to:

Grizzly Bear Recovery Coordinator
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
University Hall, Room 309
University of Montana
Missoula, MT 59812