One of the ironies of the grizzly's fate is that the bear's great size makes it more vulnerable to extinction. While America's grizzly population remains in the hundreds (that figure excludes Alaska, where there are an estimated 30,000), approximately 300,000 black bears currently roam the continental United States. Size makes a difference. Grizzlies can be twice as big as black bears, so they require more food and a bigger range. "The same area of land that will support a few hundred grizzlies is capable of supporting five times as many black bears," explains Servheen. Black bears reproduce more often -- every two years, to the grizzly's every three.
And then there's the human element. "Because they're smaller, black bears are more acceptable to humans," says Jonkel. "We're not so threatened by them, so we allow them to live around us. People don't feel as comfortable around grizzlies. We let black bears adapt to our presence. Grizzlies never had that chance."
Our fear of the grizzly stems from the bear's ability to maul and kill humans, but the chances of that happening are extremely small. Of the 47 million people who visited Yellowstone National Park between 1980 and 1997, only two were killed by grizzlies. Still, such attacks strike some primal nerve in us. We're horrified and fascinated -- witness the worldwide attention paid to Timothy Treadwell, whose gruesome death-by-bear was chronicled by Werner Herzog in his film Grizzly Man. (Treadwell has few fans among grizzly experts in the greater Yellowstone area, many of whom believe his unorthodox methods and horrible death have undone years of public education about grizzlies. "People are going to be killing grizzlies for the next 50 years because of that guy," Jonkel says.)
Despite their reputation as fearsome carnivores, grizzlies are actually omnivores. They'll eat whatever is at hand. That includes grasses, clover, parsnip, wild berries, whitebark pine seeds, bulbs, roots, ants, spawning trout, sheep, cattle, elk, and moose. Grizzlies eat some strange things. If you climb in the Absaroka Range north of Yellowstone, you may spot grizzlies at 10,000 feet or higher, far above the tree line, digging in the talus fields to uncover army cutworm moths, which the bears consider a tasty, high-fat meal. Grizzlies have been known to lap up spilled motor oil and gnaw on the foam in ATV seats. When they find something they like, they'll stuff themselves. "I've come across grizzly scat in the springtime colored yellow with dandelions," says Steve Primm.
Humans aren't high on a grizzly's list of preferred meats -- but sheep and cattle are. And therein lay the problem when the Yellowstone population started expanding into the national forests around the park. In those forests ranchers hold longstanding grazing leases, some of which date back to the early 1900s. If grizzlies find plenty of wild vegetation, they'll usually leave cattle and sheep alone. But researchers have found that when food grows scarce, grizzlies are three times more likely to go after livestock. "During a drought year," says Primm, "all bets are off."
Efforts to cancel those grazing leases in the 1990s failed. "It was a classic environmental clash," recalls Hank Fischer, a special projects coordinator with the National Wildlife Federation (NWF). "Conservationists lobbied the Forest Service to take away a grazing permit. The rancher lobbied his congressman to keep it. Few were ever pulled."
Fischer eventually hit upon a solution. In the mid-1990s, he had helped establish the Defenders of Wildlife's predator compensation fund, which paid ranchers fair market value for livestock killed by Yellowstone wolves. The program went a long way toward easing the ranching community's bitterness over the reintroduction of the gray wolf, and the fund was later expanded to include grizzly predation. To date, the fund has paid out more than $700,000 in wolf claims and $138,000 in grizzly claims. In 2002, Fischer left Defenders to join the NWF, and one of the first things he did there was ask whether the principle that drove the compensation program could also solve the problem of grazing leases.
"We'd been asking these livestock producers to give up their allotments without being compensated, but those leases were worth upward of $200,000," Fischer says. "You'd be pulling some real change out of that rancher's pocket."
In 2003, backed by funds from NWF and other groups, Fischer contacted leaseholders with the highest incidence of predator-livestock conflict and negotiated deals to retire their allotments. Many ranchers used the money -- about $2.50 an acre -- to secure new grazing leases in national forests far removed from the greater Yellowstone region. "The ranchers were motivated because they were losing stock, and the Forest Service was under pressure to defend the grizzlies," says Fischer. "The money made it happen because it acknowledged the ranchers' real economic concerns."
Economics aren't the only obstacle to retiring grazing leases. Fischer is working on several more conflict-heavy allotments, and in some of them tradition plays just as powerful a role as money. For Elaine Allestad, a sheep rancher who in 2006 agreed to retire her 74,000-acre grazing lease in the Gallatin National Forest, an allotment adjacent to Yellowstone, it was a tough decision. "The losses were mounting; we couldn't afford them anymore. Last year we had a flock of 1,200 ewes and we lost 60 to wolves and grizzlies," she says. The agreement enabled Allestad to secure new grazing land in northern Montana, away from the grizzlies. Still, it was hard to leave her lease land. "I mean, we miss the land we were on," she says. "It was going on the fourth generation for our family. My husband's father first went on that land in 1921."
In three years, Fischer's program has retired more than 300,000 acres of former grazing allotments in the greater Yellowstone area. Hundreds of cattle and sheep were killed or injured on those allotments. The number of conflicts on that land has been reduced to zero.
What's happening in the region represents a new paradigm in what might be called conservation psychology. In this part of the West, the words local and federal come loaded with heavy baggage. (One of the most famous antigovernment movements of the 1990s, the Montana Freemen, found some of its supporters among the rural ranching communities of central and eastern Montana.) Edicts from Washington, D.C., are often resented and resisted. Grizzly conservationists have learned that long-term solutions in these remote Rocky Mountain valleys are most likely when local people solve local problems. By working close to the ground, ignoring greater ideological differences, and focusing on specific issues, ranchers, conservationists, and land managers have enabled the grizzly population to grow. As Todd Graham put it to his Madison Valley neighbors, "If we can manage this ourselves, we can avoid having the governor or Congress telling us what to do." Much of the rancor that traditionally characterized the conversation between ranchers and conservationists has given way to hard-earned trust and respect.
A little cultural understanding can go a long way. Seth Wilson, a postdoctoral researcher with the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, works on grizzly conservation projects in Montana's Blackfoot Valley, east of Missoula. Like their Yellowstone cousins to the south, a population of bears centered in Glacier National Park in northwest Montana is moving onto ranchland in the Blackfoot. Wilson and Blackfoot Challenge, a local environmental group, worked with ranchers to establish a procedure to haul away livestock carcasses -- mostly stillborns and the females that die giving birth during spring calving season, a prime grizzly attractant. "When we first started, we'd hold our meetings around a conference table in the middle of a weekday," says Wilson. "Well, ranchers can't give up their workday to sit around with a bunch of bureaucrats and environmentalists from Missoula. So we started meeting in smaller groups over dinner. That's when we really started engaging people." Those face-to-face meetings yielded crucial insights. During the early days of the carcass pickup program, Wilson couldn't understand why more ranchers didn't use the free service. Over dinner they told him: Nobody wanted their neighbors to know how many livestock they were losing. Wilson and his partners introduced anonymous pickup locations, and participation skyrocketed.
It's a subtle but crucial component of environmental work out here. During the Madison Valley barn seminar, for instance, researcher Steve Primm told the ranchers in the audience, "You folks are professionals. You know what you're doing." It was a sign of respect, one that spoke volumes about the years Primm has put in working side by side with local cattlemen. His words also sent a message: I'm not here to run you out of business. I want to make grizzly recovery work for you.
