JIM ROBBINS
To make the plains and mountains safe for the great herds of cattle that were brought to the West at the end of the 19th century, grizzly bears were routinely shot as predators by bounty hunters and ranchers. Ever since, the bears in Yellowstone National Park, protected from hunting, have been cut off from the rest of their kind. Their closest kin prowl the mountains some 70 miles north, in and around Glacier National Park. In a new paper, biologists say that as grizzly populations increase in both Glacier and Yellowstone, more adventurous males from both parks are journeying farther to stake out territory, winding up in places where they have not been seen in a century or more. If they keep roaming and expanding, the two populations will likely reconnect, perhaps as soon as 5 or 10 years from now. “It’s very encouraging for the long-term future of the bear,” said Frank van Manen, leader of the Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team in Bozeman, Montana, which oversees research into Yellowstone’s bears. A mingling of the separate populations would go a long way toward bolstering the genetics of the isolated Yellowstone grizzlies. The bears in the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem, in and around the park, are healthy now, and they have increased to at least 700 today from fewer than 150 in 1975, when they were listed as endangered. But a genetic lifeline from Glacier bears, which are also related to the grizzlies of Canada, will mean a good deal more diversity to help assure the bears’ future. It’s so important that researchers have talked about trucking grizzly bears from the north to add to the Yellowstone gene pool...more
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