Grizzly augmentation showing promise in Cabinet-Yaak

On July 25 a male grizzly bear up the South Fork of the Flathead wandered into a live bear trap. He woke up a few hours later more than 100 miles away at Spar Lake in the Cabinet Mountains.

The young bear — biologists estimate he was about 3.5 years old — was the latest bear to be moved in an ongoing effort to augment the grizzly population in the Cabinet-Yaak ecosystem.

Right now, only about 50 grizzlies roam the 1.6 million acre region.

To put that in comparison, Glacier National Park has about 1 million acres, but it has roughly 350 grizzly bears.

But bears in the Cabinet-Yaak don’t live in a national park, where they’re largely protected and free to roam where they like. They live in a multiple use region that has a host of roads, traffic, private homes and people, notes Wayne Kasworm of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

There’s a lot of temptations for bears in the Cabinet-Yaak, from backyard barbecues, to garbage cans and chicken coops. They also face threats from poachers and run-ins with hunters during hunting season. The program does not move problem bears from one region to the other. The bears that are moved have had no known run-ins with people.

Having said that, there’s still a lot of landscape in the Cabinet Yaak — most of it federally owned — for a bear to roam. But there’s not much wilderness.

Grizzly bears do best where there aren’t roads and people. The Cabinet Mountain wilderness is the crown jewel of the region, but it’s not very big by grizzly bear standards — a little more than 93,000 acres. A griz could walk across the wilderness in a half a day — less if it was in a hurry.

So even though the region is big, with all the challenges bears face, the population goals aren’t Glacier-sized.

“The goal is 100 bears,” Kasworm said.

The augmentation program began in 1990 and since then, 19 bears have been moved from the Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem to the Cabinet-Yaak. The NCDE has about 1,000 bears, so moving one or two to the Cabinets doesn’t harm the overall population.

The idea isn’t just to bolster numbers in the Cabinet-Yaak, it’s also to create some genetic diversity — that’s why biologists move males as well as females. With new grizzly bears roaming the landscape, bears are less apt to inbreed. Once the population grows enough, the hope is that bears from the Whitefish Range area will eventually migrate on their own to the Cabinet-Yaak.

Kasworm said initially, the population trend was going downward in the Cabinet-Yaak, but he credited the work of Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks bear management specialist Kim Annis for bringing it back up.

She not only keeps track of the bears, she does community outreach to educate the public about living in bear country. Today, the augmentation effort, combined with public education, is beginning to see dividends. Kasworm noted that one of the first females that moved back in the early 1990s had 10 offspring in her lifetime and those 10 bears are responsible for 13 second-generation grizzlies.

Unfortunately, the original old sow was killed in 2009 by a hunter in a self-defense incident.

Kasworm said this year, in addition to the male that was released last week, they’d also like to trap and transfer another female to the region this year.

The young grizzly released last week was already on the move — his radio collar last indicated he was about four miles from where he was released.

Biologists can only continually track the bears for so long. They generally drop their collars about a year or so after they’re released. After that, biologists then can only track them if they’re caught again, leave hair on a rub tree, or somehow die. By using DNA analysis they can track the bear in those instances, through DNA analysis.