Boundary County Minding Its Bears County Wants To Know If Selkirk, Cabinet-Yaak Grizzlies Are Candidates For Bitterroot Reintroduction Program
Plans to take grizzly bears from British Columbia to repopulate the Bitterroot Mountains have Boundary County commissioners concerned.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is expected to ask British Columbia to provide bears over a five-year period for the reintroduction effort.
The most likely candidates will come from the Kootenay Region, which is in southeastern British Columbia.
Because both the Selkirk and the Cabinet-Yaak grizzly bear recovery zones extend into southeastern British Columbia, those plans have commissioners nervous.
“We said, `Wait a minute, that’s our recovery zone,”’ Commissioner Murreleen Skeen said at a meeting this week held by U.S. Rep. Helen Chenoweth-Hage. “If Fish and Wildlife has enough bears to send to the Bitterroots, we want our bears delisted.”
The commissioners are filing a Freedom of Information Act request with the agency asking them to provide scientific data to prove that the bears they’re taking from Canada are not related to the Selkirk and Cabinet-Yaak grizzlies.
“We want to successfully recover the bears,” said Kevin Lederhos, commission chairman. “That will allow for more interaction, road openings.”
About three-quarters of Boundary County’s land is publicly owned. Grizzly bear management has resulted in the closure of several forest roads to reduce the chance of conflict between humans and bears.
But wildlife officials in both countries said Thursday they won’t do anything to jeopardize recovery efforts in North Idaho and northwestern Montana.
In fact, the environmental impact statement for the Bitterroot recovery effort says as much, said Johnna Roy, a member of the Fish and Wildlife Service’s reintroduction team.
“We said we wouldn’t take any bears from any ecosystem if taking those bears would negatively impact the health of those populations,” Roy said.
Wayne Kasworm, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service bear biologist who specializes in the Cabinet-Yaak and Selkirk grizzlies, agreed.
“We’re not interested in taking bears directly north of the Cabinet-Yaak and Selkirks, and I don’t think the Canadians are interested in that either,” Kasworm said.
Bears from the Rocky Mountains of southeastern British Columbia are the likely candidates because they are best adapted to going to the Bitterroots, said Bob Forbes, the regional wildlife section head for the B.C. Ministry of Environment.
There are an estimated 660 bears in the Flathead and north Continental Divide ecosystem to Highway 93, Forbes said.
Those bears are separated from the Selkirk and Cabinet-Yaak bears by the Columbia Valley.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service got bears in the past from the Canadian Rockies to reintroduce into the Cabinet-Yaak ecosystem, Kasworm said.
Instead of sharing territory with U.S. bears in the Selkirks or Cabinets, some of those bears wander out of that area into Waterton Lakes and Glacier National Park, Forbes said.
Canadian environmental groups are concerned, however, that Canadian grizzlies are facing the same development pressures that U.S. bears face.
The Castle-Crown Wilderness Coalition, for instance, is trying to preserve wild lands north of Waterton as a corridor for grizzlies and other wildlife.
“The area is being pinched off, mostly by human development: roads, towns, industrial activity,” said Michael Sawyer of the coalition.
“A lot of Americans think of Canada as being pristine, with a lot of wilderness,” he said. “The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has relied heavily on Canadian bears to support your reintroduction efforts, … but many of bears in the Glacier-Waterton area, they spend time in Canada and they’re dying at a very high rate in Canada.”
But they’re not dying so fast that there aren’t a few to spare, according to Forbes, who’s trapping bears now in the Flathead system, near the Castle-Crown area.
“There are some people who are convinced that there’s no bears out there,” Forbes said. “There’s tons of them out there this year.”