Conservation Northwest

Homecoming for wildlife Joe Scott International conservation director, jscott@conservationnw.org The Cascades' missing link Grizzly bears Anyone who has followed Conservation Northwest over the past 20 years knows we have a soft spot, so to speak, for the grizzly bear. In our formative years as Greater Ecosystem Alliance and subsequently as Northwest Ecosystem Alliance, the grizzly and salmon graced our logo. The restoration of the grizzly bear to the sprawling North Cascades landscape to self-perpetuating numbers has always been sort of an organizational undercurrent—not necessarily a central focus but ever-present while we waited for opportunities to gain momentum. In the past few years, we have seen the wolf and wolverine return to the Cascades and Selkirk mountains in northeast Washington, and we have worked with partners to reestablish the porcupine-eating, bushy-tailed Pacific fisher in the Olympic Mountains, where early settlers and fur traders trapped it into oblivion decades ago. But the grizzly bear languishes—an apparition that appears fleetingly as a fuzzy image on a hiker's point and shoot; or larger than life on biologists' motion sensing cameras. It exists just beyond our grasp on the ridge of the next valley—too distant to clearly discern, as if reminding us that we squandered its abundant and formidable presence with our lethal mix of fear and arrogance. The grizzly bear is currently the only pre-European settlement animal that has not begun to reestablish itself in the Cascades after 150 years of persecution and short-sighted wildlife policies. Its absence is palpable in the remote high elevation valleys of the Pickets, the avalanche chutes in North Cascades Park and the alpine meadows of the Pasayten Wilderness. We strain to see a mother and her distracted cubs raking huckleberries in the August sunshine or a lone male digging patiently, but relentlessly, for ground squirrels—little balls of fat that translate to survival for a 500-pound bear in his winter den under 15 feet of "Cascades cement." A light colored black bear suddenly takes on a grizzly bear's shape and demeanor. With the exception of some very dedicated government managers and biologists who have pushed and prodded for Cascades grizzly bear recovery planning to move forward, government agencies whose job it is to steward and recover our wildlife legacy have seemed disturbingly willing to allow Cascades grizzly bears to quietly fade away into the mountain mists. Immediately north of the border in British Columbia it's déjà vu all over again for the grizzly bear as human endeavors and ambitions push grizzly bears out of their critical seasonal habitats and add another layer of risk to the bears' already Keeping the Northwest wild South Chilcotin grizzly bear in BC. © Jeremy Williams precarious life. Half of all grizzly bear cubs die from a variety of causes before they reach adulthood. Despite robust populations of grizzly bears further north, the bears of the BC Cascades, southern Coast and Chilcotin ranges are in trouble. All threatened with local extinction, they languish in low numbers in valleys like the Lillooet, Stein and Skagit. The combined effects of the exponential growth of backcountry roads and infrastructure serving energy production, mining, forestry and recreation in critical grizzly habitat are eroding bear life support systems. Every year the roads, the livestock and all the other vectors for human presence translate to more dead bears, many of which are females that carry the promise of regional grizzly bear revival. And despite community planning and First Nations mandates to safeguard the iconic grizzly bear for future British Columbians, government has yet to move on long-promised recovery planning. The continuing decline of southwest BC's threatened grizzly bear populations will represent a further 17,000 square kilometer retreat in west coast grizzly range, continuing a trend that started in 1800 as 50,000 to 100,000 bears were systematically wiped out from central Mexico to Washington. Conservation Northwest doesn't intend to wait for the next tragic chapter to unfold. We have teamed up with several Canadian partners to form the Coast to Cascades Grizzly Bear Project. Collectively, we intend to reverse the trend of grizzly bear retreat and surrender and guarantee a future for the Great Bear in southwest BC and the Washington Cascades. And since the five currently fractured grizzly populations need to reconnect to propagate and thrive, regional grizzly bear protection and recovery will help the habitat of all our native wildlife weather the storms of climate change. Our Coast to Cascades partnership will write a new story with the communities in Washington and British Columbia. This one will seek to change the trajectory of the 200 plus years of human–grizzly bear history in which the people learn to live with the bear and we're all the better for it. Join the Coast to Cascades Grizzly Bear Project and see what you can do for grizzly bears when the project launches September 24, 2103. Visit CoasttoCascadesGrizzlyBears.org Fall 2013 13

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