The federal government plans to restore grizzly bears to the North Cascades range in northwestern Washington state, where they once roamed and were an essential part of the region’s ecosystem, officials said.
The National Park Service and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced plans this month to release three to seven bears a year over five to 10 years. This will establish an initial population of 25 bears in the North Cascades, where grizzlies have not been seen in nearly three decades.
The goal is to restore the grizzly population to 200, which could take 60 to 100 years, the agencies said, noting that the bears would be rarely seen by people during the first 10 to 20 years of the effort.
The agencies said they would move grizzlies to the North Cascades from other ecosystems, such as the Rocky Mountains or interior British Columbia. The Park Service did not say when the plan would begin.
The U.S. portion of the North Cascades is about 9,800 square miles, or about the size of Vermont, and features scenic and intact wilderness, the agencies said. About 85 percent of the mountainous region is under federal management.
“We are going to once again see grizzly bears on the landscape, restoring an important thread in the fabric of the North Cascades,” Don Striker, superintendent of the North Cascades National Park Service Complex, said in a statement.
The grizzly bears that are relocated to the North Cascades will be fitted with radio collars that will provide wildlife officials with updates on their movements.
For thousands of years, grizzly bears were integral to the ecosystem of the North Cascades, where they distributed native plant seeds and kept other wildlife populations in balance, the Park Service said.
In the 1800s, there were about 50,000 grizzly bears in North America, spread across a wide swath of the western half of the continent from Canada to Mexico, according to the Fish and Wildlife Service.
But their population declined, primarily because of settlers who overhunted and trapped them. The last confirmed sighting of a grizzly bear in the U.S. portion of the North Cascades region was in 1996, the Park Service said.
Today there are more than 1,900 grizzly bears in the lower 48 states, where they are managed as a federally protected species, according to the Fish and Wildlife Service.
Under the restoration plans, grizzly bears in the North Cascades will be designated as a “nonessential experimental population” under a section of the Endangered Species Act that “will provide a variety of flexibilities for land managers and communities to manage a restored population of grizzly bears,” the park service said.
That means that rules under the act could be eased to allow for the relocation of bears “if a conflict appears imminent,” or to allow people to harm or kill bears if they attack livestock or working dogs.
Collette Adkins, a carnivore conservation program director at the Center for Biological Diversity, a nonprofit wildlife advocacy group, said in a statement on Monday that she was “thrilled that grizzly bears will be back in the North Cascades.”
“Grizzly bears once called the North Cascades home,” she said, “and bringing them back is a solid step toward recovery for this majestic species.”
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