Sheep vs. bear, agency vs. agency

In many ways, the tale of Yellowstone's grizzly bears is one of remarkable success. When the species was listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act in 1975, there may have been as few as 136 of the bruins wandering in and around Yellowstone National Park. By 2006, there were more than 500, and in the spring of 2007, the US Fish and Wildlife Service declared the area's population officially recovered. Then in 2009, a federal judge ruled that the bears should remain protected given the number of threats they yet face. Still, their population has continued to expand outward. As grizzly bears turn up in habitat they haven't occupied in years, though, they've raised the specter that old human-bear conflicts will rise in number as well. To minimize the risk that those conflicts will include livestock predation, and to ease the way for grizzlies' and other contentious species' spread, the National Wildlife Federation and other groups have worked closely with the US Forest Service to retire all the sheep grazing allotments and some of the cattle allotments -- totaling more than 600,000 acres and millions of dollars in incentives to buy out willing ranchers -- on federal lands surrounding Yellowstone National Park. But there is a significant holdout, and it's not some stalwart rancher determined to stick it to the feds. It's the U.S. Agricultural Research Service's Sheep Experiment Station (USSES), based in Dubois, Idaho, which runs sheep on thousands of acres of high altitude grazing parcels in the Centennial Mountains on the Montana-Idaho border, smack dab in the middle of the so-called "High Divide."  Conservationists and federal wildlife officials say the area (map) is key to the grizzlies' long-term survival because it provides a path of mostly wild country connecting them and other dispersing Yellowstone wildlife to large chunks of prime habitat further north in Montana and Idaho. The bears have already begun to use it: At least five collared grizzlies have turned up on sheep station grazing lands alone in and around the Centennials since 2001...more