Lawsuit seeks to restore protection for grizzlies

BILLINGS – Environmental groups on Monday sued the federal government in a bid to restore endangered-species protections for Yellowstone-area grizzly bears.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service declared in March that grizzlies in and around Yellowstone National Park had recovered from more than a century of persecution and could survive on their own. In April, the agency lifted the “threatened” status the bears had been under since 1975.

The environmental groups want the courts to reverse that action because they say the 500-600 Yellowstone bears in Wyoming, Idaho and Montana remain imperiled. Threats listed by the groups include changes in the bears’ food supply due to global warming; residential and oil and gas development encroaching on bear habitat; and a grizzly gene pool too small to assure future viability of the species.

The lawsuit, filed in federal district court in Boise, is expected to become a test case on the effectiveness of the Endangered Species Act.

Federal officials and some conservation groups say a victory for the suit’s seven plaintiffs would hobble the species program and consume resources better spent on other threatened or endangered species. Those who want grizzlies to remain shielded portray the lawsuit as a challenge to the Bush administration’s alleged strategy to remove wildlife as an obstacle to drilling, mining and grazing on federal lands.

As many as 50,000 grizzlies once ranged the western half of the United States. When recovery efforts began in the 1970s, as few as 200 grizzly bears survived in the Yellowstone region.

Following a $20 million recovery effort, federal and state wildlife officials promise close monitoring of the Yellowstone grizzlies to make sure the population does not slide backward. And they say enough of the bear’s habitat is protected – about 80 percent of the 9 million acres where they live – to make such a decline unlikely.

The environmental groups say the Yellowstone population needs to be linked up with at least some of those populations to shield against future declines.

Christopher Servheen, the Fish and Wildlife Service biologist who led the recovery effort, said that while the threat of global warming is real, bears have proved over the last two decades that they can adapt to changes in their food supply. Plaintiffs in the case are the Sierra Club, Natural Resources Defense Council, Alliance for the Wild Rockies, Center for Biological Diversity, Western Watersheds Project, Great Bear Foundation and the Jackson Hole Conservation Alliance.

Several other conservation groups, including Defenders of Wildlife and the National Wildlife Federation, have supported the delisting of Yellowstone grizzlies.

With the delisting, management of Yellowstone grizzlies is now shifting to state wildlife agencies in Wyoming, Montana and Idaho. The states are free to hold public hunts.