Conservation Northwest

Getting wilder Joe Scott International conservation director, "Ghost bears" take shape joe@conservationnw.org Rare sighting of Cascades grizzly bear This July brought news of the first verified grizzly bear sighting in the US Cascades in 15 years. Hiker Joe Sebille captured the photo south of Highway 20 in fall of 2010, and sent the photo in to biologists this spring, when it was confirmed, and later announced to the excitement of many. While the sighting garnered significant media and public enthusiasm, it wasn't an isolated event. Late in 2010, a grizzly bear was recorded by a BC government research camera just north of the border in Manning Provincial Park. And a BC hunter video taped an adult male grizzly bear east of Manning Park in 2002. Those three verified sightings in the trans-boundary Cascades are joined by many unverified sightings on both sides of the border. And, as these stories continue to unfold there will be significant media attention on the issue and the region. It's a relief to have concrete evidence that grizzly bears do indeed still roam the Cascades, particularly on the US side of the border. But like the exception that confirms the rule, it serves to underscore the reality that Cascades grizzly bears are hanging by a thread. Their lifeline is the federal North Cascades Ecosystem (NCE) Grizzly Bear Recovery Plan. Thankfully, nature is resilient and full of surprises, also evidenced by resurgent wolverines and wolves. This famous grizzly bear photo has given us all a reprieve— at least for the time being—from the frustration of observing helplessly as grizzly bears disappear from our own backyard: a 10,000 square mile grizzly bear recovery zone. To us, this reprieve is a second chance, but only if we act in a timely way. We've known for decades that Cascades grizzly bears have been on thin ice owing to more than a century of persecution, overhunting, habitat destruction, and mismanagement, all of which compound the limitations of the grizzly bear's slow reproductive biology. In 1967, when the last legally hunted grizzly Another 2010 grizzly bear, a female, just over the BC bear was shot by a in the North Cascades border. BC Ministry of Environment hunter in what is now the national park, there were likely fewer than 30 in the Cascades population. It is highly probable that in the ensuing 44 years, the total population has declined from 10 Grizzly bear in Washington's North Cascades. Joe Sebille A potent symbol of the last of the grizzlies in the Cascades—or the first of a new generation? We have a choice. those couple dozen animals. The paucity of verified presence is not for lack of effort, from remote cameras to hair snag efforts conducted tirelessly by agency biologists and wildlife monitoring volunteers. Most recently, out of 900 bear hair samples obtained in 2010 by government researchers, none tested positive for grizzly bear. Similarly out of 6,500 digital images taken by the team's motion sensing cameras, none were determined to be grizzly bears. Recovery from such desperately low numbers without direct intervention would be without precedent and contrary to everything we know about grizzly bear demographics and genetics. Addressing this need is at the heart of the Endangered Species Act. Yet despite there being a NCE Grizzly Bear Recovery Plan approved in 1997, which stated the need to evaluate a range of recovery options including population augmentation, the US Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) has yet to take the next steps. In the time since Regional Director Ralph Morganweck approved the document, we've had three different US presidents and nine different FWS Directors. Numbers from polling reflect unusually strong public support for grizzly bear recovery in the North Cascades. This can in part be attributed to the cutting edge Grizzly Bear Outreach Project's decade of work, mostly funded by the FWS and Washington State. Follow-up actions to such a program are critical, lest such an extensive effort go for naught. There are enthusiastic partners in a grizzly bear recovery effort. In 2007 the Washington Legislature appropriated a $454,000 contribution to a NEPA process that would implement the NCE grizzly bear recovery plan. That money evaporated the following year when the FWS took no action to initiate an environmental impact statement. But it demonstrates state-level political support. The bi-national Skagit Environmental Endowment Commission has dedicated at least a quarter of a million dollars Fall 2011www.conservationnw.org

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