New plan drafted for bears in Rockies, Cascades

Wildlife officials from the United States and Canada want to gauge how climate change is affecting grizzly bears and hope to encourage conservation groups to purchase key parcels of bear habitat.

Those are two of the major changes proposed Tuesday for future grizzly restoration efforts in the Northern Rockies and North Cascades. There are an estimated 1,500 endangered bears in the region's four states and two provinces.

A new recovery plan for the species must be finished by the end of 2012.

An initial draft is being drawn up this week in Missoula by the Interagency Grizzly Bear Committee, composed of federal officials and representatives of Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Washington, Alberta and British Columbia, said committee spokesman Gregg Losinski.

The government has spent more than $20 million on its effort to restore the species. Five bear populations now roam parts of the Northwest and southwestern Canada.

But grizzlies remain limited to just 2 percent of their original habitat, and Losinski said researchers and wildlife managers are increasingly looking to provide "linkages" between isolated parcels of land suitable for the animals.

Given limits on how much the government will pay for such land, Losinski said agencies want to work more closely with the Nature Conservancy and similar private groups buy up land for conservation easements.

"That linkage isn't going to be done by government buying up land," Losinski said. "In the West, that's not what works."

He said climate change is also high on the grizzly committee's agenda, with more research needed to determine how warming temperatures might change where grizzlies can live and what they eat.

As many as 50,000 grizzlies once ranged the western half of the United States. But hunting, trapping and deliberate poisoning drove them to near-extermination over the last century and they were listed as endangered in the United States in 1975.