Montana Wrestles With Grizzly Bears--and Their Future : Ecology: The fragility of the remnant population underscores obstacles to preserving the ‘symbolic and living embodiment of wild nature uncontrolled by man.’

In far northwestern Montana, a few miles from where actress Meryl Streep rafted through the Kootenai Falls in “The River Wild,” the grizzly bears of the Cabinet Mountains are bedded down for the winter.

As they sleep in their alpine dens, living off fat reserves for the next five months, a long-running battle over their future will continue to rage.

Isolated in their wilderness redoubt--cut off from larger bear populations and blocks of suitable habitat to the east by the logging roads, timber clear-cuts, housing developments and farms that mark man’s intrusion into their world--the dozen or so grizzlies remaining in the Cabinets are living on the precipice.

The fragility of this remnant population underscores the obstacles to preserving what one writer called the “symbolic and living embodiment of wild nature uncontrolled by man.”

Nineteen years after the federal government put the grizzly bear on the list of threatened species, the rapid decline of a species that once numbered more than 50,000 and ranged across a dozen states from the mid-Plains to California has been halted. But for all the attention and resources--currently $2 million a year--lavished on Ursus arctos horribilis, there is still no consensus on how to guarantee its survival.

The publication last year of a revised version of the government’s plan for grizzly recovery has rekindled a fierce conflict among conservationists, biologists and land managers.

It is a war waged on many fronts, from the esoteric field of population viability, to the mechanics of how to count a reclusive, far-ranging mammal in rough and wild country, to the federal courts where the recovery plan is being challenged by some environmental groups.

And because it involves millions of acres of public land that is already being fought over by environmentalists, loggers, ranchers, miners and visitors, it is a war that is as much political as scientific.

Bear researchers estimate that there are about 900 to 1,000 grizzlies left in a handful of geographically distinct areas in the lower 48 states. The largest population, several hundred individuals, inhabits a 10,000-square-mile area of Montana known as the Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem, which spreads over Glacier National Park and adjacent national forests.

An estimated 250 grizzlies occupy Yellowstone National Park and surrounding national forest lands. Perhaps several dozen live in the Selkirk Mountains region of northeastern Washington and northwestern Idaho, to the west of the small grizzly population in the Cabinets. A few grizzlies may also move in and out of the northern Cascades in north-central Washington.

A sixth region, the 25,000-square-mile Selway-Bitterroot wilderness area of north-central Idaho--the largest contiguous wilderness in the lower 48 states--is being studied as a possible bear reintroduction area and could ultimately accommodate several hundred grizzlies.

The limiting factor for the grizzly is the inexorable shrinkage of habitat. To satisfy their enormous protein and carbohydrate requirements, the omnivorous bears have large home ranges, and they need relatively undisturbed, forested land.

How the idiosyncratic grizzly bear interacts with man and his nature-altering habits is a complex subject. But it boils down to a simple equation: The easier it is for man to get into bear habitat, the more bears will die.

“The only bear that makes it to adulthood is the bear that avoids people,” said Rick Mace, a research biologist with the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks.

Mace and his colleagues are nearing the end of a 10-year study of grizzly population dynamics and habitat selection in an area bordering the South Fork of the Flathead River in the Flathead National Forest. The research shows that bears and roads don’t mix. Bears that avoid roads survive. Those that don’t, get shot--either intentionally, in violation of the law, or in acts of self-defense by humans who are attacked.

“Bears appear to be influenced by a high density of roads, particularly females and females with cubs,” Mace said. The critical threshold appears to be about 2 miles of road per square mile of habitat. A road density higher than that is bad news for bears.

In the national forests of the northern Rockies, managed under a “multiple-use” mandate that is supposed to make room for hunting, logging, grazing, mining, recreation and wildlife, the conflict is clear.

For example, in the Kootenai National Forest, which includes the Cabinet Mountains, there are 7,200 miles of roads--most of them built for logging access.

Since the bear was listed as threatened in 1975, 5.3 billion board feet of timber have been logged in the Kootenai, and since 1979 about 1,600 miles of road have been constructed. From the air, the roads appear as a vast latticework connecting hundreds of timber clear-cuts--all of it a barrier to grizzly movement between recovery zones.

Under legal pressure from environmentalists and administrative nudging by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, national forests in bear country are accelerating the pace of blocking and closing roads. But not fast enough, say many critics.

Some other environmentalists, however, are more supportive of the government’s effort. Drastically cutting back on traditional uses of federal forests, they say, will only undermine political support for two key steps: reintroduction of grizzlies in places like Idaho’s Selway-Bitterroot region, and forging better land-management agreements with private landowners, particularly timber companies that own huge blocks of land where roads could be closed.