Wildlife Officers Search For Female Grizzly’s Killer

It’s extremely unlikely that a grizzly bear killed in the Selkirk Mountains in May was shot in self-defense, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said Tuesday.

The 95-pound female yearling is far too small to be much of a threat to humans, said Roger Parker, special agent with the Fish and Wildlife Service. “My (dog) is almost that big,” Parker said.

In addition, “in the United States, they’ve never found self-defense to be a legitimate claim” in grizzly incidents, said Greg Johnson, an Idaho Fish and Game Department officer investigating the poaching.

Still, the perpetrator is much better off coming forward “than waiting for us to come to them,” Johnson said.

If the shooter doesn’t turn himself in, officers are hoping that a $3,500 reward will unearth a tip. That program has worked fairly well, said Fish and Wildlife’s Parker. Between 50 and 60 percent of the grizzly poachings are solved, he said.

The female grizzly was found by two Idaho Fish and Game officers May 10 near a Kaniksu National Forest road and about a mile from the Canadian border. Nothing had been removed from the carcass, though parts of grizzlies are prized on the black market as aphrodisiacs.

Investigators assume the mother and possibly a sibling were in the neighborhood at the time of the killing.

After an extensive search, it appears no other bears were harmed, Parker said.

The news of the bear’s poaching was kept quiet for two months in hopes of catching the killer unaware, Parker said.

There are tradeoffs with such a delay, he acknowledged. Reaching potential witnesses often becomes more difficult.

But “we want to catch them cold” so they don’t have time to prepare a story, Parker said.

Since the early 1980s, 10 radio-collared grizzlies and seven untagged grizzlies have been shot in the Selkirk recovery area.

That does not include bears taken legally in Canada.

This spring’s poaching, the second in two years, is a setback for the Selkirk grizzly bear recovery program, officials say.

The 2,000 square-mile recovery area, split between British Columbia, Idaho and Washington, has perhaps 50 of the threatened bears.

The fact that the last two poachings have been females is especially serious.

There are probably only 10 females left in the entire ecosystem, estimated Wayne Wakkinen, an Idaho Fish and Game biologist.

Female grizzlies don’t breed until they are 6 or 7 years old and then only have cubs about every three years.

“These young females are the future of the population,” Wakkinen said.

The maximum penalty for taking a grizzly, a violation of the Endangered Species Act, is a year in jail and a $100,000 fine.

That maximum is almost never imposed for killing a single animal.

This summer, a Spokane man was fined $21,000, put on a year’s probation and ordered not to hunt for five years for killing a 15-year-old female grizzly.

The bear, nicknamed Sy by researchers, had two cubs that Robert C. Wenger, 49, left to die.

Anyone with information about the latest killing is asked to contact the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service or Idaho Fish and Game Department.

, DataTimes