September 17, 2021 |
One day after the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said it will take another look at listing the grey wolf as endangered and near extinction, Wyoming’s governor said he will petition to have another species — the grizzly bear — delisted. Governor Mark Gordon said after 46 years and $52 million, the grizzly bear population has recovered.
The grizzly bear went under federal protection in 1975. Since then, Wyoming has spent about $2 million annually to protect and manage the grizzly bear population in Wyoming, the governor said. Although an exact count is unknown because of the elusiveness of the animal, an expanding number of grizzly bears have grown beyond the edges of the bear’s biological and socially suitable range.
The petition will be filed in the coming weeks. The grizzly was delisted in July of 2017. A little over a year later, in September of 2018, a federal judge restored federal protections. In its petition, Wyoming will address concerns raised by the courts in the 2017 delisting. Annual mortality targets and a new population model will be included in the state’s proposal for long-term conservation of the backcountry bear.
A hard date of when the filing will be filed was not given. Management agreements with Montana and Idaho — known as the Tri-State Memorandum of Understanding — must be amended before Wyoming submits the petition to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The procedure for what happens next is outlined in federal law. Wyoming Game and Fish Director Brian Nesvik described the process.
If U.S. Fish and Wildlife decides in favor of delisting, a notice of the final delisting would be published in the Federal Register and management of the Grizzly Bear would return to Wyoming. Nesvik expressed confidence that the state has the science and the policy in place to be successful.
Governor Gordon expressed confidence in the science and the merits of Wyoming’s management plan in this latest attempt to delist the grizzly bear. The governor also expressed optimism about prevailing in this week’s challenge to relist the grey wolf. Gordon said the wolf has been recovered since 2003 and the data shows that its population is stable.
