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Defenders Magazine
Ranching With Grizzlies
How a Long-Feared Predator Is Finding a Home on the Range.
Leanne and John Hayne live along Dupuyer Creek on the high plains of northwestern Montana. The Continental Divide defines the western skyline and the slopes of the Rockies spill from there onto the prairie in a lovely cascade of snowfields, ridges, buttes, aspen groves, wild lilies and gusty winds. Folks call this “the front.” Hundreds of sheep graze the 3,000-acre family ranch where the Haynes also tend chickens, assorted cats and a few fruit trees. The town of Dupuyer begins right across the creek.
A sheep ranch by a village is about the last place you might expect to find grizzly bears—at least for longer than it would take for someone to shoot them or place a panicked call to the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks to get rid of the beasts. But the Haynes don’t consider the big silvertipped bears to be trespassers. Like the residents of Dupuyer (all 80 or so), they know these animals roam the willow thickets lining the flood channels and sides of the waterway.
Grizzlies have been doing this more and more over the past two decades here and in other drainages flowing east out of the nearby Bob Marshall Wilderness Area. The bears arrive each spring and fall seeking green sedges or roots, anthills and berries. Some stick around most of the summer. A few travel even farther out on the plains. The Haynes and a number of their neighbors are coming to accept this as a fact of life in the 21st century.
“Oh, when the bears first started showing up, I was terrified,” Leanne says. “My idea of grizzlies came from movies, and I kept waiting for them to tear off the door and come in and eat us. We got over that as the years went on.”
With safer access to rich, low-elevation habitats such as the banks of Dupuyer Creek, female grizzlies on the front are giving birth to more cubs per litter than average and producing litters more often than average. It is the kind of conservation success nobody would have dared predict just a generation ago, when grizzly bears were still widely viewed as a bloodthirsty menace. By 1975, so many had been killed that the creature we labeled Ursus arctos horribilis was listed as threatened south of Canada. Of the 100,000 once found west of the Mississippi, fewer than 1,000 remained, scattered in five small, vulnerable groups in portions of Montana, Wyoming, Idaho and Washington.
Today, the two largest and best-known populations of the lower 48—those of the greater Yellowstone ecosystem and those of Montana’s northern Continental Divide ecosystem near Dupuyer—are on the upswing. Rescuing one of the most powerful, intelligent life forms in America from oblivion is exactly the sort of thing the Endangered Species Act was intended to do. But it won’t work if we concentrate all our efforts on protecting remote mountain wilderness. It has to involve lower-altitude habitat and the people who live and work there.
This requires a change in mindset for some conservationists, who view saving the bears as synonymous with keeping roads and industrial development out of pristine, high-altitude backcountry. But while the highlands have served as their refuge, grizzlies are not truly mountain mammals. Just as their omnivorous diet runs from moose meat to flower tops, their natural range once stretched from the Arizona desert to the buffalo plains of Kansas. Even within the rugged mountain ecosystems where they are found today, the most fecund areas are down in the foothills and river bottomlands, where longer growing seasons produce more abundant food in far greater variety.
Defending Grizzly Bears
Grizzlies once roamed much of the western United States, from the Great Plains to the Pacific Coast. Today, the bears occupy less than 2 percent of their original habitat in the lower-48 states, with the two largest populations centered on national parks in Wyoming and Montana. But excellent potential grizzly habitat remains—and experts have identified the Bitterroot ecosystem of central Idaho as one of the best. With nearly 15 million acres of forests, rivers and mountains—much of it roadless wilderness—the Bitterroot ecosystem is ideal bear country.
In 1997, after an extensive public review process, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposed restoring grizzlies here under a collaborative approach formulated by Defenders, the National Wildlife Federation and the timber industry. Unfortunately, this citizen-led approach was derailed by the Bush administration when Interior Secretary Gale Norton, citing alleged opposition in the state, shelved the plan in 2001. Subsequent surveys found 98 percent of Idahoans favored restoring bears to the Bitterroot ecosystem. But the Bush administration ignored the wishes of the public and deprived threatened grizzlies of millions of acres of prime habitat.
The front is a prime example. Fifty miles south of the Hayne property, Tim Tew, manager of the LF Ranch, runs 1,100 cows and about 250 yearlings on 28,000 acres east of the Scapegoat Wilderness Area and just south of the state’s Sun River Wildlife Management Area. He, too, has grown used to living with the bears.
“The last problem bear here was the Falls Creek grizzly a couple of years back,” Tew says, taking a break from corral repair. “He was a big 22-year-old male, and he took at least nine calves during a heavy spring snowstorm. We don’t actually see grizzlies all that often. They keep to the brush. But any time you walk up Smith Creek to change the irrigation head gate, you’re likely to cross fresh tracks. A lot of ranchers used to handle bears with the triple-S method: Shoot. Shovel. And Shut Up. The owners of the LF believe that predators belong here and the occasional loss is part of operating at the base of the Rocky Mountains. The previous owner killed off predators and grazed down the range awful hard. We’ve let the grass grow back and allow all kinds of wildlife. Yet we’re able to support as many cows as he did, and we’re making a good profit doing it.”
If Tew wasn’t sincere, he wouldn’t have volunteered to talk about living with predators to ranchers in neighboring Alberta, Canada, on Defenders’ behalf. “I see more grizzly sign here than back in the heart of the wilderness,” he says. “What we do in these edge areas is important. They are a key to recovery.”
The point is that wildlands and ranchlands are both crucial to the comeback of a species whose home range typically covers several hundred square miles and can take in as many as a thousand. Defenders’ Northern Rockies Field Representative, Minette Johnson, puts it this way: “Preventing conflicts is our best bet for building tolerance among local folks and helping the bears recover. And the ranchers shouldn’t have to shoulder all the economic burden of livestock losses and taking steps to prevent problems.”
Along these lines, Defenders reimburses ranchers for any livestock taken by the big bears through The Bailey Wildlife Foundation Grizzly Bear Compensation Trust. In an average year, the statewide toll for Montana and Idaho comes to less than 15 cattle and 15 sheep—a tiny fraction of the livestock lost to other causes. Established in 1997, the trust has paid out a total of $112,668 to date. Tew and the Haynes have received payments from the trust.
But Defenders does more than just compensate ranchers for losses—it seeks to prevent trouble in the first place. Defenders partnered with Montana officials to provide electric fencing around a bedding ground for the Hayne’s sheep and lambs, and also helped build an electric fence around 400 acres of their pasture. In addition, the group helps fund a program using Karelian bear dogs to condition grizzlies to avoid potential trouble sites. Defenders helps purchase bear-proof garbage containers for residences and communities in grizzly country as well.
Partly because of conflicts with livestock, grizzly bears have largely disappeared from the North Cascades ecosystem of Washington. By contrast, the Selkirk ecosystem of northern Idaho’s Panhandle contains the most viable population in the lower 48 outside a national park ecosystem. Although the total comes to just 40 to 55 animals, it is a horde compared to the 1970s, when most experts considered the Selkirk grizzlies gone. Counts suggest they may currently be increasing more than 4 percent yearly. As in the Yellowstone and Glacier areas, some of the most valuable spring and fall habitat lies not among the summits but at their feet, where grizzlies graze sprouting greens each spring and forage for berries and tubers late into the fall after the high country freezes.
Julien Bucher raises cows and selectively cuts timber on his ranch on the east side of the Selkirk Range, where the cedar forest meets the fertile floodplain of the Kootenai River not far from the Canadian border. He has grizzlies on his place or next door every year now, and he doesn’t especially mind. Why? “They haven’t ever caused trouble—if you don’t count the young male that got into some fermented grain in the hay shed,” Bucher says while overlooking the valley. “There’s another answer. Years back, I got to know a mother grizzly named Si with cubs on our summer pasture. Someone ended up shooting the family. I found myself taking their death personally. That’s when I thought: maybe I do like bears.”
He must. Bucher recently arranged a bear-friendly conservation easement with a land trust, Vital Ground, intended to prevent subdivision and limit disturbance on his acreage during the weeks when grizzlies are most likely to be present. With cooperation like that, the bears could find their way across the valley to connect with the two or three dozen grizzlies hanging on in western Montana’s Cabinet-Yaak ecosystem, the fifth and final group left in the lower 48.
Despite the examples of folks like Bucher, Tew and the Haynes, there are people who just can’t seem to stop hating grizzlies. Some still believe the overblown predator tales of yesteryear. Others loathe the bears more as embodiments of unwanted federal regulations. Clearly, not all ranchers are becoming huge fans of grizzlies. But a growing percentage get along with these burly carnivores far better than people might gather from listening to the usual political rhetoric.
In many ways, the fate of grizzlies depends less upon biology than sociology, for the bears will only thrive to the extent that our culture is willing to share big western landscapes with them. The good news is that it gets easier to find examples of a fresh start in the heart of ranch country every year.
