Why Did the DOI Kill the North Cascades Grizzly Plan?
Getting to the lower 48’s second-largest swath of prime grizzly bear habitat takes less than an hour by car from Seattle. The North Cascades Ecosystem begins at Interstate 90 and stretches north into British Columbia, covering 9,800 square miles—600 more than grizzlies have around Yellowstone National Park. Yet the odds of seeing a grizzly here are essentially zero.
Hunters in the 19th century shot thousands of the bears, as they did throughout the United States, driving them to near-extinction. But recently there has been solid action to reintroduce grizzlies into the North Cascades. Last January, the National Park Service and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service released a draft plan to build a population of 200 bears here over the next 25 to 100 years, a move that could diversify the gene pool in case something devastated the species in the Rockies. The federal government had already poured money into a public relations campaign to educate locals. More than 127,000 comments had been made and were being reviewed. Then—without reason or warning—the recovery process came to a halt near the end of December.
Karen Taylor-Goodrich, superintendent of North Cascades National Park, said the Department of the Interior (DOI) ordered her team to stop all work on the North Cascades grizzly environmental impact statement, the first of many steps toward reintroducing the bears. “We’re in year three of the process,” Taylor-Goodrich said, according to the Missoulian. She and her team were offered no explanation. The DOI, in fact, has yet to say why it has seemingly abandoned the North Cascades grizzly program—DOI spokesperson Heather Swift told Outside that Secretary Ryan Zinke did not make the call to end the program, and when Outside asked if Zinke was even aware of the decision, Swift did not respond.
The North Cascades region is a rugged place, with remote terrain. It is fairly road-free and loaded with plants, berries, fish, and game that the omnivorous grizzlies can dine on, which would help keep them away from cattle and orchards. Fish and Wildlife identified the area as a potential grizzly recovery zone in 1993, due in large part to its size. “There are not many places in the lower 48 that you can even think about recovering bears,” says Bill Gaines, a former Forest Service biologist who worked on the North Cascades recovery plan. “And then to have 10,000 square miles of public land, and something on the order of 40 percent be a national park or wilderness—that’s a pretty good chunk of wild country.”
Despite the habitat suitability, not a single grizzly is known to be currently living in the U.S. chunk of the range. An estimated six bears live in the Canadian section—far too few to push a meaningful population of breeding bears south. Without bringing in outside bears, biologists have concluded, local extinction of grizzlies is a major threat.
https://www.outsideonline.com/2272371/grizzly-expansion-comes-halt?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Dispatch-01162018&utm_content=Dispatch-01162018+Version+A+CID_0b1050c8e2173fc122cbc3225d733b29&utm_source=campaignmonitor%20outsidemagazine&utm_term=READ%20MORE
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