Grizzlies may get another shot in North Cascades
The federal government has drafted plans to bring grizzly bears back to Washington state’s North Cascades, the next step toward reintroducing the threatened species to a region where it was eliminated by hunters decades ago.
Grizzlies once played a key role in north-central Washington’s vast expanse of forest, mountains and valleys. Now the North Cascades is one of the last places left in the Lower 48 states where grizzly bears would be able to thrive — and U.S. agencies are evaluating whether to start a population there that could grow to 200 bears within a century.
Bringing them back would be the culmination of a decadeslong effort to restore grizzly bears to the ecosystem, one of six spots in the country where federal biologists have aimed to recover decimated populations.
“We’ve come further now than we ever have before,” said Chris Servheen, who was U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s grizzly bear recovery coordinator from 1981 to 2016 and is retired. “We have to finish.”
The return of the bears would be a major step in the species’ conservation and would benefit the ecosystem.
It would also hold deep significance for Native American tribes, for which grizzlies have cultural importance. Tribes and conservation groups say that bears belong on the land. Grizzly bears would be moved from well-populated areas, such as the Yellowstone region, to the North Cascades each summer until the population became big enough to sustain itself.
The yearslong effort has faced hurdles. The agencies’ last attempt ended in 2020 when President Donald Trump’s administration scrapped the effort. A Republican congressman has mounted opposition to the latest plan, while federal biologists hope their new proposal can win over local and political opponents who have raised objections.
“It’s a pretty divisive issue,” said Lisa Janicki, a commissioner in Skagit County, one of the red-leaning rural areas on the edge of the ecosystem where some business owners and landowners have had concerns about the bears’ possible effect on agriculture, timber and farming.
This time around, the government has proposed a pathway that would allow federal agencies more flexibility in relocating, capturing and dealing with bears if they strayed off federal land or caused problems — a bid to alleviate safety concerns and respond to public feedback that the agencies received last time.
For instance, if a grizzly wandered into a neighborhood, government specialists would have more leeway to deter or relocate it, Fish and Wildlife Service spokesman Andrew LaValle said. To give agencies that leeway, the bears would be designated as an experimental population with a special set of rules.
That option and two others — bringing bears in without the extra flexibility or not introducing any bears — are laid out in the draft plan and environmental impact statement released last month by the National Park Service and Fish and Wildlife Service, alongside the proposed rule to designate the bears as an experimental population.
The North Cascades ecosystem — a largely undeveloped 6.1 million acres that holds wild animals, rainforests, glaciers and meadows — was home to grizzly bears for centuries until hunters decimated them in the 19th and 20th centuries, when thousands of hides were shipped from area trading posts.
By the time grizzly bears were listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act in 1975, few remained in the North Cascades, Servheen said. The last one was spotted in 1996.