CA M PA I G N U P DAT E
YELLOWSTONE’S ICONIC WILDLIFE
ew species have come to symbolize the Rocky Mountain West so much as the gray wolf and the grizzly bear, both for their iconic connection to the region’s wilderness heritage and for their struggle to survive in a landscape radically altered by development. Once nearly eliminated in the lower 48 states, their recovery across wide swaths of the mountain wilderness where they long roamed free remains fragile, even as modern-day science affirms that these keystone species are crucial to maintaining a healthy ecosystem in Greater Yellowstone and beyond. “We’re at a crossroads,” says Matt Skoglund, director of NRDC’s Northern Rockies office in Bozeman, Montana. “There are a lot of people out there saying, ‘The job is done; these animals have recovered.
It’s time to move on.’ But NRDC is going to keep fighting to protect grizzlies and wolves, both to preserve the incredible progress we’ve made over the past several years and to ensure robust populations that can thrive into the future.” For starters, we’ll need to head off any more missteps like the premature decision by federal wildlife officials and Congress to strip wolves of their endangered species protections across much of the Northern Rockies in 2011. Although a landmark NRDC court victory last year restored those protections to wolves in Wyoming, neighboring Idaho and Montana have permitted indiscriminate wolf hunting and trapping seasons. Now the Fish & Wildlife Service appears poised to remove grizzlies from the endangered species list
as well, despite a broad consensus among conservation scientists that the Greater Yellowstone population remains isolated from other grizzlies in the Northern Rockies and that big questions remain about the impacts of development, global warming and changing food sources on the bears. NRDC has been at the forefront in challenging rollbacks in federal safeguards for wolves and grizzlies, marshaling the expertise of leading wildlife geneticists and other experts to advocate for strong wildlife protections based on sound science, not politics. And as in the legal battle over the fate of Wyoming’s wolves, we stand ready to fight in federal court to defend these keystone species from further assault. While courtroom action remains a vital component of NRDC’s overall campaign to The recovery of gray wolves and grizzly bears remains fragile.
secure wolf and grizzly recovery, we are also employing innovative approaches that are already showing great promise in overcoming an age-old barrier to progress. Large carnivores have to share the landscape with cattle, sheep and other livestock. When they attack a cow or sheep, they can be killed by the rancher or by a government agency, and sometimes an entire wolf or grizzly family is killed — a pair of wolves with pups or a mother bear with her cubs. “For far too long, there has been an us-versus-them mentality, that you can’t have wolves or bears coexisting alongside, say, a cattle ranch,” says Zack Strong, an NRDC wildlife advocate in Montana. “But by partnering with forward-thinking ranchers and other landowners and working with them to adopt nonlethal ways of protecting their livestock, NRDC is proving that saving livestock and saving large carnivores doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game.” These “coexistence” strategies, which prevent conflicts from happening in the first place, include hiring range riders to deter wolves and grizzlies through human presence, removing livestock carcasses that can attract the large predators, and installing field cameras to monitor their activity. For the past three years, NRDC has been working directly with ranchers in places such as Montana’s Tom Miner Basin, just north of Yellowstone National Park, to implement proactive stewardship practices, and the success of these pilot projects has started to attract substantial interest among the broader livestock community. In January, NRDC helped organize a first-of-its-kind coexistence workshop for livestock owners in southwestern Montana, where the rate of wolf conflicts is among the highest in the state. The program was so well attended and received that it was hailed as a “landmark” and a “success” by one local agricultural publication, and the Montana director of the federal agency Wildlife Services, NRDC’s partner in organizing the event, is now fielding requests from livestock [Continued on next page.]
WOLF © DANIEL J. COX/KIMBALLSTOCK; BEARS © SKIBRECK/ISTOCKPHOTO
NRDC’s Fight Goes on for Wolves, Grizzlies F
A landmark NRDC court victory last year restored endangered species protections to wolves in Wyoming.