Thank the USFWS for Protecting Grizzly Bears
- by: Mitch Merry, Endangered Species Coalition
- recipient: US Fish and Wildlife Service Director Dan Ashe
Last week was Bear Awareness Week, and we're thanking the United States Fish and Wildlife Service for making a sound, science-based policy determination in maintaining Endangered Species Act protections for grizzly bears while they study the impacts of recent changes on bear habitat and food sources.
Last month, FWS announced it was delaying delisting the grizzly while it studies the effects that the loss of one of the bears' primary food sources (whitebark pine trees) is having on their survival.
Please send FWS Director Dan Ashe an email thanking him for protecting grizzly bears.
Dear Director Ashe,
I am writing to thank you and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for your recent announcement to delay any changes in the Endangered Species Act protections for grizzly bears in the Yellowstone Recovery Area for two to three years in order to allow time for further scientific research. Given the cultural and ecological importance of the grizzly bear to the western United States, we appreciate this deliberate and thoughtful approach.
Thanks to decades of hard work by you and your staff, as well as state wildlife agencies, the Grizzly bear has been saved from extinction and is making a remarkable comeback in the Yellowstone region. Indeed, the recovery of the grizzly bear is on its way to becoming another remarkable ESA success story.
However, one of the Yellowstone Grizzly bear’s main food sources during the fall – the seeds of the Whitebark pine – is in serious decline due to intensifying bark beetle outbreaks as a result of global climate change. This brings grizzlies to lower elevations and closer to people as they search for food at a time when they are trying to fatten up for winter.
According to the Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team (IGBST), 80 percent of all known grizzly bear mortality is human-caused, and in years of poor Whitebark pine cone production, bear-human conflicts and bear deaths increase. Unfortunately, recent studies by the U.S. Forest Service and the Natural Resources Defense Council indicate that 82% of the Whitebark pine forests in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem have already suffered high or significant mortality from mountain pine beetles. Additionally, government studies show that female grizzly reproductive success is closely associated with Whitebark pine seed availability.
Given the slow reproductive rates of female grizzly bears, and thus, the difficulty of bear populations to rebound from any population crash, it is vitally important that we fully understand the impacts of these still-developing, landscape-level changes on grizzly bears before removing protections that have been integral to their survival and recovery.
Once again, we thank you for taking the time to gather and review all available science with regard to this important ESA decision.
Sincerely,
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