Female grizzly bear released in Cabinets

TROY, Mont. – With a rambling sprint from a culvert trap, the female grizzly bear moved into the Cabinet Mountains last weekend, becoming the first transplant for a struggling grizzly bear population in more than 10 years.

And she probably won’t be the last, with state and federal agencies planning on several similar transplants from Montana’s largest grizzly bear population – the Northern Continental Divide ecosystem – to its smallest and most threatened, the Cabinet-Yaak ecosystem.

Biologists believe the bear could be pregnant. If so, the transplant to the Spar Lake area in the western Cabinet Mountains could translate to a mother bear with one or two cubs by next spring. That would be a population boom for the Cabinets, where fewer than 15 grizzly bears are thought to exist.

Throughout the 2,600-square-mile Cabinet-Yaak Grizzly Bear Recovery Area, extending all the way to the extreme northwestern corner of the state, the grizzly population estimate is between 30 and 40 bears, said Wayne Kasworm, the area’s lead bear biologist for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

The population’s situation is so precarious that state and federal wildlife officials have proposed augmentation as a means of working toward recovery since the late 1980s.

It was a contentious issue from the start.

But last Sunday, about 15 people tagged along for the bear’s release, most of them regarding it as a significant event that has taken a long time to happen. They included Kootenai National Forest Supervisor Bob Castaneda, who chairs a committee of land and wildlife managers charged with recovering the Cabinet-Yaak grizzly bear population.

“This is great for this population,” Castaneda said. “This is something that has immediate results. Road management and habitat management are important things that we are working on, but this is something that helps now.”

The culvert trap pointed toward a dirt road runway lined with golden thimbleberry and mountain maple. The bear inside the trap swayed and let out deep, rumbling growls and huffing snorts as preparations were made to release her.

“This is not a habituated bear,” said Jim Williams, regional wildlife manager for Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks. “She’s ready to get out of here.”

With all the people safe inside trucks, the gate was lifted and the bear did not hesitate. She was visible only for a few seconds. The bear weighed between 250 and 300 pounds, and is estimated to be between 6 and 8 years old.

She was caught days earlier in a leg snare in the Spruce Creek Drainage of the North Fork Flathead as part of an ongoing research project that involves capturing female bears and fitting them with radio collars for monitoring population trends in the Northern Continental Divide.

It didn’t take long for bear specialist Tim Manley to determine that she might fit the requirements to become a candidate for relocation to the Cabinets.

“She knows how to be on her own,” said Heather Reich, a contracted bear specialist who caught the bear under Manley’s supervision. “We’re thinking that the likelihood of her tearing off for home is not very high.”

The decision to relocate came after a round of calls to Kasworm and Chris Servheen, the service’s grizzly bear recovery coordinator. It was not the first time a bear had been transplanted to the Cabinets. The idea came up in the late 1980s and was met with opposition so fierce that an Idaho senator successfully pushed a legislative rider that banned funding for any grizzly bear augmentation.

But Kasworm said the idea stayed alive through the formation of a citizens advisory group that managed to establish some parameters for an augmentation program.

Bill Martin, one of the original members of that group, was on hand for Sunday’s release. Martin noted that many people were opposed to the original proposal because they were concerned that the Cabinets would become a dumping ground for problem bears. There was also a misperception that the government intended to move as many as 40 bears into the ecosystem, because at one point that was a projected recovery goal for the ecosystem.

“A lot of people thought they were going to stuff 40 bears down our throats and they weren’t going to have that,” Martin said.

Eventually, there was some turnaround in public opinion – enough to get approval for a test program. That resulted in four female grizzly bears being relocated from British Columbia’s Flathead Basin to the Cabinets, one per year, from 1990 to 1994. One of those bears died within a year.

“And after the other three shed their radio collars, we essentially lost track of them,” Kasworm said.

Until last year, that is.

Kasworm led a project involving the collection of bear hair from scent-baited sites surrounded by barbed wire. Through genetic analysis of the hair samples that were collected, six individual bears were identified in the Cabinets, and one of them turned out to be the Canadian female that was transplanted to the Cabinets in 1993. Her sample was collected no more than 5 air miles from where she was dropped off 11 years before. Because the hair snagging research was intended to capture samples from just a portion of the population, it is possible that the other two Canadian bears are still around.

And it’s possible that the 1993 bear could have produced cubs two or maybe three times, Kasworm said.

“We feel we’ve moved beyond the test, and we have results showing it worked,” he said.

That’s one reason state and federal officials intend to transplant one, or possibly two, female grizzly bears annually from the Northern Continental Divide to the Cabinets over the next few years.

“It’s been 10 years since we last did this, so it’s not like were moving terribly fast with this,” Kasworm said.

Transplanting has been used to augment bighorn sheep, mountain goats, elk and even fisher cat populations in Montana, with tried and proven results, Williams said.

“We’ve moved them a lot farther before,” Williams said of grizzly bears. “We’ve moved them from the North Fork all the way to Lincoln. That’s twice as far as this.

“The difference this time is we’re moving one that way,” Williams said, pointing to the west.