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Grizzly Bears are Returning to the North Cascades
from 1889 Washington's Magazine + Special Insert: Destination Resorts Northwest | December/January 2024
Grizzly Bears are Coming Back
'Alpine Gardeners' are returning to their historic home range in the North Cascades
written by Lauren Kramer
For thousands of years, grizzly bears made their home in the North Cascades. Like alpine gardeners, they aerated the soil as they dug for roots, dispersed seeds and spread the nutrients of dead carcasses across the landscape. Then, by 1996, they disappeared, eliminated by human fear and deadly bullets. For the past thirty years the National Park Service and the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service have advocated relentlessly for their reintroduction. Finally, in late April, a federal decision was announced.
The bears are coming back.
Their range will be 9,800 square miles of intact wildland, an area where these apex predators once roamed freely. This tract of land, larger than the state of New Jersey, is under federal management and is composed of mostly mountains.
The decision to bring the grizzlies back is a crucial one, said Gordon Congdon, a retired biologist from Wenatchee who is actively involved in the Grizzly Bear Recovery Program in Washington state. “The worldwide effort to prevent the loss of biodiversity is a challenge,” he said. “Oftentimes, large animals like grizzly bears are the first ones to disappear. They have big impacts on the environment, and when they’re gone, there are cascading effects.”
Grizzlies are a keystone species that play a crucial role in a healthy ecosystem, he explained. “Grizzly bears eat plants, defecate seeds and aerate the soil as they dig. They create habitats that support deer, elk and other species, and they clean up the carcasses of animals killed in the winter. They play an important role in maintaining a stable natural environment.”
The decision to reintroduce grizzlies to the North Cascades was thirty years in the making. Back in 1975 they were listed as “threatened” under the Endangered Species Act. “At that time there were a few hundred bears left in the lower 48, and we didn’t know if recovery was even possible,” Congdon said.
In 1997, the North Cascades were identified as one of six regions that had sufficient habitat to support a healthy grizzly population. Four of those locations already had a small population of bears, and were determined as viable places for population growth. Two of them—the North Cascades and Idaho’s Bitterroot Range—had, and still have, no grizzly bears to this day.
The grizzly restoration plans stalled for decades, taking two steps forward and one step back as different political parties took control of Congress. In 2015, a review process received overwhelming public approval from Washington residents, with 80 percent of responses in support of grizzly reintroduction. A second review process followed in 2023 with similar results, eliciting 12,000 public comments.
“Our sense is that wildlife is very popular,” said Graham Taylor, National Parks Conservation Association’s program manager for the Northwest Region. “People believe wildlife belongs in our national parks especially, and in other protected areas where they’ve been extricated by human activities. But that doesn’t mean people don’t have questions or concerns.”
Our sense is that wildlife is very popular. People believe wildlife belongs in our national parks especially, and in other protected areas where they’ve been extricated by human activities. But that doesn’t mean people don’t have questions or concerns.
Some residents asked why grizzly bears couldn’t come back of their own volition, instead of being reintroduced to the region. Physically, that’s close to impossible, Taylor explained.
“It’s very difficult for grizzly bears to reach the North Cascades because the landscape is fragmented by roads, railroads, highways and human development. These things form barriers to natural grizzly migration. Also, the nature of grizzly bear biology is such that female grizzlies don’t stray very far from their mother’s home range. And there are so few bears in the closest source population that there is no reason for them to move, making natural migration highly unlikely.”
Instead, the grizzlies coming to the North Cascades will be translocated from other ecosystems in the Rocky Mountains or the British Columbia interior. While the date of reintroduction has not yet been determined, the plan is to move three to seven grizzlies per year for a period of five to ten years, to establish an initial population of twenty-five bears.
Congdon said those bears selected for translocation would likely be anesthetized and driven by trailer most of the way to Washington. The final leg of the trip, dropping them off in a remote part of their new terrain, would likely be done by helicopter. “These kinds of things have been routinely done in Montana,” he said. “We know how to do this, and there are lots of scientists in Canada and the U.S. to ensure it’s done properly and safely.”
The bears selected are likely to be young females that are pregnant or with cubs, he added, and a smaller number of males. “Female grizzlies are unlikely to try and wander back to where they came from, while male grizzlies have been known to sometimes walk hundreds of miles to get back to where they were captured.”
They will be designated as a nonessential experimental population under section 10(j) of the Endangered Species Act. That designation is important because it gives authorities and land managers additional management tools that would not otherwise be available. By actively managing the grizzly population, the agencies will address concerns about human safety, property and livestock, delivering the reassurance that grizzly bear recovery in the North Cascades will depend on community tolerance.
Congdon said biologists will be tracking the bears with collars and closely following their behavior. “If it appears they’re getting into places with potential conflict, the agencies will react quickly to minimize that possibility,” he said.
But it’s really important to separate fact from fiction when it comes to grizzly bears, he warned.
“When people think of grizzlies, they think of large, voracious carnivores, which is incorrect. Grizzlies get 80 percent of their calories from plants and insects. They’re true omnivores and can get by well without eating cattle, sheep, deer or elk. They’re not the voracious carnivores people make them out to be, nor are they much of a threat to cattle and livestock. Occasionally they will kill, but numbers are low, and particularly in this scenario, with very few bears in the North Cascades, it’s unlikely to happen. If it does, the farmers will be compensated.”
Data from Montana also points to the unlikeliness of grizzlies feasting on livestock, said Chris Servheen, who works with the Bear Specialist Group at the International Union for Conservation of Nature in Missoula. He had a thirty-five-year career as the grizzly bear recovery coordinator with the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service until his retirement in 2016.
Montana is home to 1,500 grizzly bears, thousands of black bears and 2.65 million cows and sheep, he noted. “Last year bears killed eighty-two cows and sheep, which represents an extremely low number. When it does happen, agencies act aggressively to capture and move any bears that kill livestock.”
Grizzly bears don’t pose a significant threat to humans, either, Congdon added. “Many people are afraid of grizzly bears, with good reason—they can be dangerous, but generally they are not. They’re not looking for conflict with humans, and we have great data from Yellowstone National Park to prove it.”
A November 2022 article by Kerry Gunther in the journal Human-Wildlife Interactions noted that in the 147-year period from 1872 to 2018, a total of seven people were killed by grizzly bears in Yellowstone National Park. The frequency of fatal grizzly bear attacks in the park was similar to the frequency of deaths caused by hypothermia, murder, falling trees, avalanches and lightning strikes. In that same period, 121 park visitors died by drowning, thirty-nine by falling off cliffs and twenty-one from thermal burns.
More recent research by Gunther, Travis Wyman and Eric Reinertson, published in the Spring 2023 issue of International Bear News, showed that in the thirty-two years between 1991 and 2022, there were 2,275 bear encounters in the backcountry in Yellowstone and twenty-five of these resulted in attacks. “The risk of attack in the backcountry is one attack for every ninety-one backcountry encounters,” the authors noted. Grizzlies in Yellowstone number 1,100 today, a population that is orders of magnitude more than ever will be in the North Cascades in our lifetimes.
Taylor said a healthy fear of grizzly bears is completely understandable. “It’s a normal thing for our brains to be afraid of larger animals that can attack us, and it’s good to have that fear in place so you conduct yourself in the right way in a place where there are grizzly bears, to prevent and reduce the chance of conflict.”
That means hiking in a group instead of alone, and carrying bear spray, a highly effective deterrent in persuading a bear to leave you alone, he added. If you’re camping or living in a rural area, understand how to store your food, garbage and other potential attractants.
“Understanding the risk level from grizzlies is important,” he cautioned. “You’re as likely to be struck by lightning in Yellowstone National Park as you are to be attacked and killed by a bear. Most encounters with bears don’t end in conflict, but you don’t hear about them because they don’t make the news. While I don’t mean to detract from anyone who has been attacked by a bear, it doesn’t mean grizzly bears should not exist on the landscape they lived in for thousands of years.”
Servheen is in full agreement. “Grizzly bears rarely attack people because they’re not predatory toward people, and almost always, those attacks are related to surprise encounters. Bears are very good at staying away from us, and that’s what they do most of the time. It’s unlikely people will even see grizzlies in the North Cascades, never mind have an encounter with them.”
Grizzly bears rarely attack people because they’re not predatory toward people, and almost always, those attacks are related to surprise encounters. Bears are very good at staying away from us, and that’s what they do most of the time.
He added that there are hundreds of thousands of people recreating in bear habitat, and most of the time, when people get close to grizzlies, they don’t even know it. “There’s no headline in the paper when the grizzly bear leaves because it doesn’t make the news. The only time you see a news story is when there’s a negative event, and that’s why people think of that. Bears do a good job of staying away from us. That’s just what they do.”
Congdon is one of many who believe the reintroduction of the grizzlies to their historic home range in the North Cascades is an issue of moral, ethical, cultural and environmental importance. “This is the future of conservation biology. If we’re going to maintain biodiversity, we need to do it proactively now, while we still have the chance. It would be an incalculable loss if we didn’t,” he said.
Scott Schuyler, policy director for the Upper Skagit Tribe, concurs. “Our ancestors coexisted with grizzly bears for thousands of years, and without these apex predators, the landscape is missing something essential,” he said. “We have a moral responsibility to restore and repair when the opportunity presents itself, and this is the right time to return grizzly bears to our ancestral territory.”
