Canadians Balk At Shared Bears 43 Conservation Groups Oppose Sending Grizzlies For Transplanting In Bitterroots

Canadian environmental groups are mounting serious opposition to transplanting Canadian grizzly bears in Idaho and Montana.

This could delay or derail the favored option for resolving the 20-year struggle to bring back grizzlies in the continental United States. The giant bruins have been on the edge of extinction for decades because of everything from natural resource extraction to habitat loss, hunting and poaching, and adding new bears seems the critical boost.

Opposing that option makes U.S. environmental groups hopping mad at their Canadian cousins.

“I’m very disappointed,” said Mike Roy, a Missoula-based wildlife biologist for the National Wildlife Federation. “This is the kind of missive you don’t need to get at the end of the day.”

A letter, mailed to top government officials on both sides of the border, says 43 Canadian environmental and conservation groups oppose pulling grizzlies from British Columbia and Alberta and sending them south.

It comes months before the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service will issue its proposal for grizzly bear recovery. Everyone suspects Fish and Wildlife will choose to take as many as 20 grizzlies from Canada and put them in the Bitterroot Mountains in Idaho and Western Montana.

Canadian conservationists say their country isn’t a vast wilderness with ample bears to spare.

“The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service says those (Canadian) populations are great,” said Mike Sawyer of the Rocky Mountain Ecosystem Coalition in Calgary. “They have no data to support that.”

Several Canadian wildlife biologists support that contention.

Sawyer details other concerns. Grizzlies are hunted in British Columbia and Alberta. Some also are killed by poachers, or are killed because they allegedly damage farms. No one has a firm idea of how much these threats are depleting the number of Canadian grizzlies.

British Columbia and Alberta also are losing significant swaths of grizzly bear habitat to logging, oil and gas exploration, mining, agriculture and urban expansion, Sawyer argues. That also means fewer Canadian grizzlies and a population less able to sustain losing bears to transplants, the Canadians say. “Without some certainty about the long-term viability of our population, it doesn’t make sense for us to serve as a source of reintroduction,” said Lesley Giroday of the East Kootenay Environmental Society.

Moreover, Canadian groups aren’t satisfied that there’s enough secure habitat or the right political climate to ensure the grizzlies will survive in Idaho. As it stands, “essentially we are sending the bears to their death,” Sawyer said. “You should protect what’s left (in Canada) and then you worry about restoration (elsewhere).”

Some of the Canadian opponents point to almost failing efforts to transplant woodland caribou from Canada into North Idaho. In the late 1980s, 60 Canadian woodland caribou were sent to North Idaho. Only 13 are still alive.

The Canadian groups want the Fish and Wildlife Service to get a handle on Canadian bear numbers and give Canadian citizens a chance to express their opinion on the transplant before taking any bears south.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is surprised by the opposition to grizzly transplants considering no official plan has been made public.

“I think it’s remarkable they have an opinion on something that hasn’t even been released,” said Chris Servheen, grizzly recovery chief for the Fish and Wildlife Service. “There’s no published alternatives and there’s no information available on anything they are taking a position on.”

Bear transplants won’t be discussed until the environmental impact statement is out, sometime next year. In any case, “we certainly are not interested in negatively impacting any bear population in any way,” Servheen said.

U.S. environmental groups acknowledge that some sort of transplant scheme, involving Canadian bears, is likely going to be the bruin restoration effort of choice. But they can’t imagine it causing a dispute.

“Hunting in both provinces would be reduced” in order to provide Idaho with bears, said Hank Fischer of the Defenders of Wildlife. “Better to be part of a founding population than to be on somebody’s wall.”

Roy, of the National Wildlife Federation, finds the opposition “incredibly narrow and shortsighted.”

“It’s baffling to me, with the concerns about bear habitat, that they are focusing on this,” Roy said. “We are looking at taking 20 bears and expanding it many, many times.

“That’s an opportunity that would be tragic to lose in bickering over policy concerns.” Idaho bears would have 15 million acres to roam, including 4 million acres of designated wilderness - much more secure habitat than some of the Canadian places where grizzlies roam.

Wayne McCrory, who runs a Canadian wildlife consulting firm, shares the enthusiasm. “I personally support bringing grizzlies from British Columbia, where we kill 400 annually,” McCrory said. “We blow away 90 grizzlies a year in problem situations, often for minor infractions like getting into orchards or people’s compost bins.”

That seems a more appropriate concern for the coalition of environmental groups wanting to stop the transfer of Canadian bears, McCrory said.

Sawyer says this all is beside the point. “‘The fact that they claim to take them out of the (hunting) quota doesn’t bring us any comfort,” he said.

“There isn’t the data to support hunting or transplanting bears,” he said.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color Photo