How We’re Helping Grizzlies Come Back from the Brink
Grizzly bear populations are recovering after a century of human-caused decline. Here’s what to know about grizzlies and how we’re protecting this iconic species.
The grizzly bear stands as an embodiment of wild, untamed nature. Yet they were almost hunted to oblivion. Their comeback story illustrates the power of habitat conservation and federal protections to pull a species back from the brink of extinction — but their story isn’t finished yet.
Grizzly bears once occupied much of the American West, with a population estimated at 50,000. Yet a century of hunting and habitat destruction nearly wiped out grizzlies in the lower 48 states. While their population has rebounded since the federal government listed them as threatened in 1975, there are still fewer than 2,000 of them in the lower 48.
Earthjustice attorneys have spent decades fighting to give grizzlies their chance at recovery. Here’s what to know about this iconic keystone species and how we’re working to continue their restoration.
Are grizzly bears endangered?
Within the lower 48 states, the grizzly bear is currently listed as “threatened” and protected under the Endangered Species Act. Yet despite their population growth, grizzlies still face significant threats to their survival due to loss of food from climate change, killing by humans, hostile state management, and habitat fragmentation from human development, including roads.
In recent years, the federal government has attempted to remove federal protections from grizzly bears in the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem and other grizzly strongholds. Earthjustice successfully opposed delisting efforts in Yellowstone as part of a broader campaign to protect grizzlies from excessive killing and habitat destruction.
A grizzly on Dunraven Pass in Yellowstone National Park. (Eric Johnston / NPS)
Where do grizzlies live in the United States?
Since their federal listing, grizzly bear populations have grown in the Northern Rockies region of the United States — mainly in Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming. Though rare, grizzlies can sometimes be seen in Washington State: the last grizzly sighting in Washington was in 1996. This spring, the U.S. government announced a plan to reintroduce grizzlies to the North Cascades region of Washington State.
Grizzlies in the lower 48 states inhabit just 2% of the species’ historic range, which once stretched from Alaska down the Pacific Coast of Canada and the United States, and east to the central Great Plains. Travel between grizzly bear populations is limited, and grizzlies in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem remain genetically isolated from other bear populations.
Outside of the lower 48 states, Alaska and Western Canada have maintained a large population of grizzly bears.
What are major threats to grizzly bears?
Roads
In Northwestern Montana, the Flathead National Forest is one of the most successful strongholds for grizzly recovery. The forest stretches for over 2 million acres and abuts Glacier National Park.
For decades, the government protected grizzlies in Flathead by restricting roads and motorized vehicles in bear habitats. But in 2018, the U.S. Forest Service reversed its decades-long road standards, allowing increased construction of new roads in bear habitat and removing requirements to reclaim unused roads to a natural condition.
Roads are extremely harmful to grizzly bears: they create disruptive noise and increase deadly risks from vehicle collisions and human conflict. Grizzlies avoid areas that they associate with negative experiences, including the presence of human scent, so they will abandon roaded areas — even unused ones. This displacement fragments the bears’ overall habitat, which is especially detrimental as grizzlies need to travel in contiguous, unbroken habitat that’s better suited for their survival.
Silver-tipped Grizzly 399, a Yellowstone grizzly bear, surveys a meadow, looking for potential dangers for her three young cubs.
(Thomas D. Mangelsen)
How Earthjustice is fighting to protect bears from roads: We challenged the Forest Service’s plan to allow increased road construction in Flathead Forest, claiming that the agency failed to consider its harmful impacts to grizzly bears and bull trout habitat. This spring, a Montana district court agreed and sent the plan back to federal agencies for a revised impact analysis.
Trapping and Snaring
Even though federal law prohibits trapping and snaring grizzly bears, lethal traps and snares set for other animals are a serious threat to grizzlies.
In Idaho, wolves and grizzlies share habitat. When the state adopted rules aimed at increasing “recreational” trapping, snaring, and killing of wolves on public and private lands, those same traps posed a threat to nearby grizzly bears.
How Earthjustice is protecting bears from trapping: We sued Idaho’s new rules, arguing that recreational wolf trappers were likely to unlawfully kill or harm federally protected bears who are drawn by the same meat baits used to attract wolves. The district judge listened to the science and sided with us, barring wolf-trapping and snaring in Idaho’s grizzly bear habitat for the foreseeable future, except for when bears are hibernating in dens for the winter. We are actively defending against Idaho’s attempts to undo this hard-fought victory for grizzly bears and wolves.
Alison Cagle is a writer at Earthjustice. She is based in San Francisco. Alison tells the stories of the earth: the systems that govern it, the ripple effects of those systems, and the people who are fighting to change them — to protect our planet and all its inhabitants.
Established in 1993, Earthjustice's Northern Rockies Office, located in Bozeman, Mont., protects the region's irreplaceable natural resources by safeguarding sensitive wildlife species and their habitats and challenging harmful coal and industrial gas developments.