Grizzly bears are extraordinary creatures. An adult male Rocky Mountain grizzly may tip the scales at 600 pounds and measure 8 feet standing on its hind legs. (Alaskan coastal grizzlies, also called brown bears, grow to as much as 1,400 pounds, due to their higher-protein salmon diet.) Their sharp, curved claws, long and thick as a man's finger, allow them to peel back a car door as if it were a lid on a can of beans. Grizzlies possess an unusually strong sense of smell. A bear can sniff out an elk carcass half a mile away. A few years ago a grizzly ripped open a Subaru in southern Montana to get at a bag of horse feed inside. Park rangers have reported grizzlies digging through three feet of dirt and ash to get at bacon drippings buried in campfires.
North America once abounded in grizzlies. Until the early 1700s, 50,000 to 100,000 grizzlies roamed from the northern tip of Alaska to central Mexico, from the Mississippi to the Pacific. As the second-largest animal on the continent (only the polar bear is bigger), the grizzly had no true predator. A few American Indian tribes hunted the bear. To the Northern Cree, for example, the grizzly provided a crucial source of winter meat. Other tribes, such as the Blackfoot and Kootenai, considered the grizzly so sacred they wouldn't utter its name. By and large the bears did as they pleased. "They ran the show on this continent for a long time," says Charles Jonkel, co-founder of the Great Bear Foundation, a research organization in Missoula, Montana.
Westward expansion and the mass-production rifle ended the grizzly's reign. From 1840 to 1900, settlers poured into the West, fenced off the range, and built towns, roads, and railways. When humans encountered grizzlies they took dead aim and fired. The bears were driven from the West Coast in the 1870s. Ten years later they were extirpated from the river valleys of the Plains. Grizzlies retreated to ever-higher ground, surviving into the 1920s in pockets in the Rockies and Cascades, a few as far south as New Mexico. Human predation and development continued, and eventually those pockets disappeared. By the 1960s the grizzly population of the continental United States had contracted to isolated groups of bears near the Canadian border and about 300 bears subsisting on rotting garbage at Yellowstone's open dumps. Park officials encouraged dump-feeding as a tourist attraction, setting up bleacher seats for visitors to watch the show. Like most animals, bears are natural economists. They'd rather fatten up on an open buffet than spend precious calories hunting and foraging. As years passed, the Yellowstone bears grew habituated to human food.
In the late 1960s, park officials closed the dumps in an effort to return the bears to a more natural existence. Unaccustomed to foraging in the wild, hungry grizzlies overturned trash cans, raided campgrounds, and preyed upon livestock. Grizzly deaths spiked, as officials, hunters, poachers, and ranchers killed problem bears. Between 1969 and 1972, an estimated 158 grizzlies were killed in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. At the height of the carnage, in 1970, 57 bears -- one-sixth of the estimated population -- were eliminated.
By 1975, when the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service listed the grizzly as threatened under the Endangered Species Act, the greater Yellowstone population had plummeted to about 200 bears. "The situation was dire," recalls Chris Servheen, the service's grizzly-recovery coordinator. "I thought we were going to lose the entire population."
The road to recovery has been long, slow, and deliberate. Early on, wildlife biologists realized that problem bears were trained, not born -- and they were trained by people leaving food around. "Grizzlies are ingenious and incredibly persistent at getting fed," explains Steve Primm, a wildlife researcher with Keystone Conservation in Bozeman, Montana. Primm works on grizzly conservation programs in the Madison Valley. "Once they find food from a human source it's almost impossible to dissuade them from returning." Grizzlies hooked on such food must be trapped and relocated. The worst recidivists were, and still are, killed.
The first step in the grizzly's recovery was a process of eliminating, one by one, these sources of food. In the early 1970s, Yellowstone officials developed the first bear-proof garbage cans -- metal bins with locking devices -- and decreed that every bin would be emptied daily, to reduce the smell and eliminate garbage overflow. Backcountry campers were required to string their food on high ropes between trees, out of a grizzly's reach. Those simple steps produced dramatic results. As the bears returned to more natural foraging, human-grizzly conflicts plummeted.
The Yellowstone grizzly population began increasing by the early 1990s and soon became more frequent visitors to the five national forests surrounding the park. There is considerably more human activity in national forests than there is in national parks. Small towns exist there; ranchers graze cattle and sheep on long-term leases. The bears found tasty new trouble: town dumps, straggling sheep, honey in commercial beehives. "Solving the problems in Yellowstone was like picking the low-hanging fruit," says NRDC's Willcox. "Working on the secondary challenges in more outlying areas has been more difficult. Grizzlies always find the weakest link in the system, so we've had to learn to think like a bear -- identify what a bear would find attractive and eliminate it."
Across southern Montana and northern Wyoming, those weak links were strengthened ranch by ranch, valley by valley. In Cody, Wyoming, state game officials worked with commercial beekeepers to safeguard apiaries with electric fencing. In Cooke City, Montana, near the northeastern boundary of Yellowstone, grizzlies hit the local dump as if it were a smorgasbord. "We tried all sorts of fences but they'd climb them all," said Steve Liebl, manager of the Cooke City dump. "They'd tip over the Dumpsters and cause a real mess." (Liebl was killed in a car accident in late 2006.) With the help of federal money, the town bought an odor-tight trash compactor and encouraged local restaurants to empty their bins once or twice a day. Today you won't find a public trash can on any street corner in Cooke City. They're all indoors.
When the smell went away, so did the bears. "Once in a while a grizzly will wander into town and try to get at a bundle of pizza boxes," said Liebl, "but it'll get frustrated and confused and eventually leave."
