“Grizzlies are Coming to Town. Can the West Live With Them?”

For the first time since the late 1800s, a grizzly bear was spotted on the high plains of the Upper Missouri River Breaks in October 2023, according to Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks. This grizzly sighting, which was caught on a game camera on the American Prairie Reserve, occurred hundreds of miles from the primary grizzly recovery zones of the Greater Yellowstone and North Continental Divide ecosystems. It was the furthest east a grizzly had been seen in 100 years.

Grizzlies have also been spotted near Havre, Winifred, in the Pryor, Big Snowy and Crazy Mountains, and on the outskirts of cities like Missoula, Lewiston and Billings in the last five years. These forays back into their historic territory, which often require traversing great distances and navigating a human-dominated landscape, are becoming a pattern as the grizzly population grows.

Scientists estimate there were historically 50,000 grizzly bears in the Lower 48. By the 1970s, the grizzly population bottomed out at about 700 individuals. The grizzlies that remained survived in northwestern Montana and Yellowstone National Park. As a result, grizzly bears were designated a threatened species through the Endangered Species Act in 1975.

Montana Fish Wildlife and Parks estimated there are 2,100 grizzly bears in the Lower 48 in 2023. Half live in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem (GYE), an island habitat made up of Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks. The other half live in the North Continental Divide Ecosystem (NCDE) surrounding Glacier National Park and the Bob Marshall Wilderness.

A small handful of grizzlies live outside the two zones in Montana’s Cabinet Yaak, Idaho’s Selkirk Mountains and the Bitterroot-Selway wilderness along the Montana-Idaho border. The agency is deciding whether to reintroduce grizzlies into Washington’s North Cascades, one of the original recovery zones, in 2024.

For the last two decades, grizzly bear management in the lower 48 states has been stuck in a repetitive cycle. Since grizzlies were listed in 1975, they have been removed from the Endangered Species Act twice and successfully restored both times by legal challenges from environmental groups.

In February 2023, the USFWS started the status review process again for delisting grizzlies in the Greater Yellowstone (GYE) and North Continental Divide (NCDE) ecosystems due to petitions from Montana and Wyoming. This is the second time the agency has considered delisting the NCDE population and the third time it will consider delisting the GYE Yellowstone population. The USFWS is scheduled to release its decision in the spring of 2024.