State officials warn grizzly studies in northwest Montana in danger

Written by Karl Puckett and published in the Great Falls Tribune 4/25/07

CHOTEAU — Officials with state Fish, Wildlife and Parks said Tuesday the state can no longer afford to study the long-term population trend of grizzlies in northwest Montana without financial help from federal agencies.

If the monitoring abruptly ends because of the funding pinch, delisting efforts would be set back years, the FWP officials said.

"Zero chance of delisting unless we have some sort of monitoring program," said Rick Mace, a Kalispell-based research biologist who heads the state's monitoring efforts.

Members of the Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem subcommittee of the Interagency Grizzly Bear Committee were informed of the state's financial shortfall at its spring meeting at the Stage Stop Inn Conference Room in Choteau.

The announcement came just five days before grizzlies in Yellowstone National Park will officially be delisted.

The committee leads recovery efforts for the bear in the Lower 48 and the subcommittee implements grizzly conservation efforts in northwest Montana's 9,400 square-mile NCDE, which includes Glacier National Park and federal and private lands along the Rocky Mountain Front.

A key factor in the delisting the 600-plus grizzlies in Yellowstone was scientifically documenting population counts and trends and the same is true in northwest Montana, officials said. That's why funding for the monitoring is so critical, officials said.

"The ramifications, as you all know, are huge," said FWP's James Satterfield, a Kalispell regional supervisor.

The state is in the third year of leading an interagency monitoring study to document whether the population trend in the NCDE is going up, down or remaining steady. Each year, wildlife officials set out to put radio telemetry collars on 25 griz to track their every movement. This year, the plan is to collar grizzlies in Glacier, the Bob Marshall Wilderness and along the Rocky Mountain Front.

Information from GPS collars is uploaded to a satellite, processed and then downloaded to Mace's computer.

"About once a week I can find out who's alive and who's dead," Mace said.

In 2006, of the 34 bears that were monitored, 29 went to their dens for the year with the collars still on. Three of those bears were illegally shot, and collars fell off another two bears.

Monitoring the bears via the collars helps biologists learn about their habitat, how they die and reproduce, Mace said. Obtaining "precision" population data is necessary before federal protections can be removed, he said.

However, Satterfield, who heads the bear subcommittee, said the state only has enough funding to continue the important program through 2007.

"We're broke," he said.

The monitoring study, which costs the state $250,000 a year, is in its third year. For the work to continue, Satterfield said the state needs federal partners to chip in financially. FWP has requested federal funding assistance through the state's congressional delegation but it isn't known if and when that funding will come through.

FWP's Jim Williams, also based in Kalispell, said discontinuing the population trend study "may set us back 10 years."

The state's work on long-term population trends dovetails with a population study by the U.S. Geological Survey that's using DNA from strands of bear hair. So far, the study has shown there is a minimum of 545 bears in the NCDE but researchers continue to work on coming up with a total population.

The USGS's work will offer more of a snapshot in time of the population, whereas the state's focus is on the long-term trend. Satterfield said both are critical to delisting the grizzly. The USGS work will be wasted if the state's effort suddenly is cut off due to the funding constraints, he said.

"You can't just stop it for two years," he said.

Chris Servheen, the nation's grizzly bear recovering coordinator, said he sympathized with the state's position but added that recovery won't come without investment. No money is available in existing federal budgets, he said.

The reason the Yellowstone bears have recovered is because of millions of dollars spent on gathering scientific information on population and habitat and coming up with a management plan, Servheen said. On average, $800,000 has been spent each year on Yellowstone bears, an expenditure that will continue even after the bear is removed from federal protection Monday, he said.

"We have to invest in the Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem," Servheen said.