Unlike wolves, grizzly recovery is slow and arduous

Want wolves? Simply pick out a wilderness area with an adequate prey base, room for these big canines to roam freely and expand their territory, then transport in a few dozen healthy adults, declare them a protected species, not to be hunted, trapped, or in any other way harmed, then watch their numbers skyrocket.

Yellowstone Park and Idaho wolf reintroduction programs are classic examples of this. The big grays were released among good elk herds where they quickly multiplied, split off into more and more packs, each year spreading farther and farther from those original release sites.

Want grizzly bears? Well, this it turns out is a much tougher proposition. Even when you start out with a remnant group in a wilderness setting with adequate grizzly habitat and then give the bears at least as much legal protection as the gray wolves get, no population explosions will take place.

In most parts of the United States, in fact, grizzly numbers are on shaky ground. Outside of Alaska and Canada, grizzlies are now confined to six recovery zones in Montana, Wyoming, Idaho and and here in our state's Selkirk Mountains, a zone that stretches into part of North Idaho and British Columbia. No canine-like expansion is happening anywhere.

"These are such different species, the bears so slow to reproduce, the wolves by comparison very fast," says Dana Base, a state wildlife biologist who has spent a lot of his time working on the Selkirk grizzly recovery project. "Just consider their basic biology. A female wolf can start having litters when she is two, then average six pups per litter and have a litter each year.

"A sow bear, on the other hand, won't reach breeding age until she's six. Then she'll average two cubs, but only once in three years. Statistically, with absolutely no mortality, two adult mating grizzlies would turn into 20 in 10 years. Compare that to two adult wolves that could turn into 2,300 in that same period, and you see the disparity."

Of course, neither stat ever comes close in nature. Less than half of all wolf pups make it through their first year, and only about half of those make it to an age where they can disperse from the pack. And with all the obstacles in today's world, wildlife advocates would be thrilled with a pair of mating grizzlies that accounted for four or five healthy adults in two decades.

Still, the point is that wolves can procreate and expand rapidly, and bears can't. It's only a pack's Alpha male and female that breed or far more pups would be born, but this family structure aids survival and it's the key to expansion. When ready to mate, young wolves have to split off, often traveling hundreds of miles in search an adequate prey base to establish their own family group.

So right now our state has at least one pack in the Okanogan highlands, very likely a pack or two up in Pend Orielle County, and at least one has settled into Oregon's Blue Mountains.

Meanwhile, our grizzlies struggle, in real danger of not having the genetic diversity they need to sustain a viable population. Throughout the entire Selkirk Recovery Zone, there may now be as few as 30 grizzlies.

"We lost a female last year in Unit 113, when a hunter mistakenly shot it, thinking it was a black bear," Base recounts. "You hate to see any wild animal needlessly or mistakenly killed, but in a grizzly recovery program, we just can't afford to be losing a breeding female like this. The loss is too significant."

Compare that statement to the controversy now swirling around a federal judge's decision to place wolves back on the protected species list in the West, preventing fall hunts that were scheduled in Montana, Wyoming and Idaho, where roughly 2,000 wolves now roam.

On one hand, you have a federal judge agreeing that this hunt could endanger wolves because it's extreme, allowing too many to be killed. On the other, you have Ed Bangs, the federal biologist who led the restoration program, saying "The kind of hunting proposed by the states wouldn't threaten the wolf population."

No such controversy will ever swirl around our Selkirk grizzlies. The only questions are can we educate hunters, put an end to poaching, keep auto-bear deaths and depredation killings to a minimum? Many more glitches on that radar screen and these bears could blink out and be gone forever.

Leroy Ledeboer is a retired community college teacher and a licensed Alaska fishing guide. He can be reached at 765-6657 or ledeboer@nctv.com.