Feds to reduce grizzly monitoring in Selkirks
Wayne Kasworm, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist who leads monitoring for the Selkirk and Cabinet-Yaak grizzly populations, told state and federal wildlife officials at a meeting Thursday that his office doesn't have enough cash to maintain the summer staffing levels it has had for the past several years.
Kasworm's field staff has typically consisted of four two-person trapping teams that can catch and collar bears and four two-person DNA sampling teams to check remote hair snagging corrals and rubbing posts.
There's only enough money for three of each this year, Kasworm said.
That means he can't split the staff evenly between the Selkirk and Cabinet-Yaak recovery zones. Instead, he plans to assign two trapping and DNA teams to the Cabinet-Yaak and just one of each to the Selkirks.
The Selkirk crews will also have a narrow focus. They'll be stationed in North Idaho near the Canadian border and will prioritize monitoring bears in an area where their work is funded in part by the U.S. Border Patrol.
That means the rest of the Selkirks will get less attention than usual, particularly the portion of the range in northeast Washington.
"The money just isn't there," Kasworm said.
Kasworm was speaking at a meeting of the Selkirk and Cabinet-Yaak subcommittee of the Interagency Grizzly Bear Committee, a coalition of state and federal government officials working toward grizzly bear recovery.
The reduction in effort doesn't completely eliminate grizzly monitoring in northeast Washington. There won't be a team that can trap bears for research, since that has typically only been done by the Fish and Wildlfie Service, but there will be crews gathering DNA samples.
The U.S. Forest Service, Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife and the Kalispel Tribe all have staff that build monitor hair snag corrals and rub sites. Representatives from each agency said Thursday that they plan to continue that work this summer.
Bart George, wildlife program manager for the Kalispel Tribe's Natural Resources Department, said his team will prioritize building hair snag corrals in places like the Salmo-Priest Wilderness to ensure DNA data is still being gathered.
"We're going to try to pick up the slack where we can," George said.
It's a time of uncertainty for grizzly bear managers across the West. Budget cuts and staffing reductions have taken a toll on the federal agencies involved. Meanwhile, a new framework for managing the bears hangs in the balance.
In early January, during the final days of the Biden administration, the Fish and Wildlife Service proposed a sea change in the way the agency manages the bears, which have been protected as threatened in the Lower 48 states since 1975.
The proposal called for keeping the bears listed but managing the various populations as a single unit.
Doing so would shrink the overall area where grizzlies are protected from the entire Lower 48 states to one contiguous zone covering all of Washington and large parts of Wyoming, Montana and Idaho. But it would shift management away from decades of ecosystem-by-ecosystem goals and toward encouraging connectivity between the isolated populations.
An initial public comment period for the rule was scheduled to end in March but was extended two months. It was scheduled to end Friday.
Federal officials will now review those comments and decide how to proceed, but it's unclear exactly what will come next.
Hilary Cooley, the Fish and Wildlife Service's grizzly recovery coordinator, said during Thursday's meeting that the agency still doesn't have a confirmed director, although former Wyoming Game and Fish chief Brian Nesvik has been nominated.
"There are a lot of things that are paused until we have leadership in place to make decisions on what our priorities are," Cooley said.
She added that there's talk of major reorganization within the agency and that they expect big budget cuts. She also said a number of cooperative agreements and grant approval processes are also on hold.
The grizzly recovery team lost two longtime employees to retirements. One of them had worked directly for Kasworm, leading trapping efforts for more than three decades.
Annual trapping is how biologists get radio collars and ear tags on grizzlies in the wild. That work, in combination with remote cameras and DNA sampling, helps wildlife managers get a clear picture of the status of grizzly populations across the West.
There were once an estimated 50,000 grizzlies between the Pacific Ocean and the Great Plains. Today, scientists put the number at about 2,000 in the Lower 48, concentrated mostly in two large populations in and around Glacier and Yellowstone national parks.
The populations Kasworm monitors are much smaller. During the meeting Thursday, he said the most recent minimum counts suggest there are at least 57 bears in the U.S. portion of the Selkirks and at least 58 bears in the Cabinet-Yaak ecosystem.
The Selkirk population has shown more robust growth in recent years than the Cabinet-Yaak population, which is part of the reason Kasworm has decided to put more resources toward the Cabinet-Yaak.
Kasworm said in an interview after the meeting that the Cabinet-Yaak ecosystem is also larger. It includes two mountain ranges in far northwest Montana, one of which bleeds into Idaho.
Overall, Kasworm said, it's "probably twice the size" of the Selkirk recovery zone, and it requires more effort to maintain robust data collection.
Funding for grizzly monitoring comes from a variety of sources. While the recovery program is managed primarily by the Fish and Wildlife Service, it also gets money from the U.S. Forest Service. Kasworm said he has seen reductions in the funding provided by both agencies.
The U.S. Border Patrol helps pay for monitoring in the Bog Creek area of North Idaho. That arrangement was the result of the Border Patrol's request for access to part of a road near the Canadian border that had been closed to protect bears.
Kasworm said Thursday that funding hadn't arrived from the Border Patrol yet, and that he was "a little concerned" that funding might also be cut.
Private funding is preventing even deeper cuts. The Paul G. Allen Foundation awarded money to a researcher based at the University of California-Santa Cruz for a project on grizzly genetics, which is helping pay for a couple of the DNA teams working in Kasworm's area.
The foundation's money is good for multiple years. There's no predicting the future when it comes to federal funding, however.
Kasworm said losing one year of trapping in parts of the Selkirks may not end up being a big deal, but multiple years would be.
"It's not only this year," Kasworm said. "I'm even more worried about next year."
George, with the Kalispel Tribe, said the tribe might have been able to help with the funding woes had they known sooner. Knowing it's an issue, he said they'll start looking for grants and other cash to stockpile ahead of the 2026 field season to "support a full trapping effort."
Until then, the tribe will be prioritizing gathering DNA samples from hair snag corrals and rub sites in. The field work season is getting started.
"We'll be getting corrals out here in the next few weeks," George said. "Hopefully, we can find some bears."
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