Grizzlies Down 6% in Greater Yellowstone...

Under the best conditions, grizzly bear populations are by nature slow-growing. The best growth rate ever documented has been around 3% per year. But that growth rate was found in only a small percentage of the entire population in and around Glacier National Park over ten years ago. Only about 40 bears, maybe 6 to 7% of the population were included in the study.

Since that time, the Interagency Grizzly Bear Committee (IGBC), has arbitrarily assumed — without documentation — that grizzly populations were growing each year by the optimum rate of 3% both around Glacier and around Yellowstone Park. And each year the IGBC has ritually tacked on another 3% growth and revised its population estimates upward, as if nothing has interrupted that assumed steady growth rate.

The areas of two grizzly populations are known respectively as the Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem (NCDE) and the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem (GYE).

But allied against that assumed steady growth rate have been several factors with the potential to decrease or interrupt the growth rate and cause grizzly habitat to deteriorate. Those factors include:

Each factor has had the potential to deprive grizzly populations of primary food sources such as white-bark pine nuts, cuttworm moths, and trout.

Ignoring all those factors, the IGBC has assumed a steady growth rate in each population and has repeatedly included those assumptions in press releases with almost hypnotic regularity. In fact, the IGBC has perpetrated a steady, recurrent campaign to have grizzly bears delisted from protection — no matter what the actual conditions of grizzly populations have been.

The IGBC has pushed that campaign for delisting in the news media despite objections from highly-reputable bear biologists. Those scientists have objected that even by the IGBC's own studies, the actual grizzly population could in fact be in catastrophic decline or, at best, fluctuating between growth, no growth, and decline. But now the IGBC's own calculations yield a decline of 6% in one year — thus setting back the assumed growth rate by up to three years.

Yet the IGBC, true to its political agenda, says, "the new grizzly bear population estimate is a single-year snapshot and not any indication that the population is in decline." Decline or not, neither the IGBC nor the general public knows. We simply don't know. But that has been true for previous years also — years in which the IGBC assumed a steady growth rate. But in those years we never heard the IGBC admit that "there is no indication the grizzly population is increasing."

The IGBC is dominated by state governments in the Northern Rockies that have declared their intent to delist grizzlies in their states — regardless of science and the best research available. Their politicians have announced an intent to water down the Endangered Species Act to rid themselves of what they consider its burdens. They have succeeded somewhat with wolves. Grizzlies are now a primary target.

With that in mind, it is appropriate to regard the IGBC as little more than a propaganda machine inserting its mis-information into every possible news account. Skepticism in order.