Grizzly project bears fruit despite McCain ire

WEST GLACIER, Mont. — If you've heard Sen. John McCain's stump speech, you've surely heard him talk about grizzly bears. The federal government, he declares with horror and astonishment, has spent $3 million to study grizzly bear DNA. "I don't know if it was a paternity issue or criminal," he jokes, "but it was a waste of money."

A McCain campaign commercial also tweaks the bear research: "Three million to study the DNA of bears in Montana. Unbelievable."

Actually, it was a scientific and logistical triumph, argues Katherine Kendall, 56, mastermind of the Northern Divide Grizzly Bear Project.

Kendall is one tough field biologist: She was once charged by an enraged grizzly. She stared the bear down.

So she can handle a growling politician — even one now poised to become the Republican nominee for president.

"It's pretty cool that we pulled it off," Kendall said of her project. "Nobody got seriously hurt. We collected a ton of bear hair. We stayed on budget."

McCain has been jabbing rhetorically at Kendall's study since it began in 2003.

Kendall, on orders from her superiors, will not directly respond to McCain ("I really can't wade into that"), but she clearly doesn't find his jibes amusing or accurate. The truth is, her project is focused not on the DNA of grizzly bears but on counting them.

As a scientist with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), she set out to get the first head count of grizzlies in the Northern Continental Divide ecosystem. She and her co-workers have used DNA primarily as a bear-identifying tool. She also used barbed wire and homemade bear bait brewed up from rotten fish and cattle blood.

"There's never been any information about the status of this population. We didn't know what was going on — until this study," Kendall said.

The project involving 207 paid workers, hundreds of volunteers, 7.8 million acres and 2,560 bear sampling sites. The project did not cost $3 million, as McCain's ad alleges, but more than $5 million, including nearly $4.8 million in congressional appropriations. It had a strong advocate in Montana's three-term senator, Conrad Burns, a Republican who was defeated in 2006. He is now chairman of McCain's campaign in Montana.

Grizzly bears in northwest Montana are listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. But Kendall's project revealed there are more grizzlies than anyone had realized. That suggests that three decades of conservation efforts, costing tens of millions of dollars, have paid off.

This could have long-term implications for the Northern Divide grizzlies, possibly including their removal someday from the threatened list. Delisting them would restore management to state control after decades of oversight.

"Someone like McCain should be delighted, in fact," said Sterling Miller, a bear researcher working for the National Wildlife Federation. "The Endangered Species Act works."

Protecting bears is, in a sense, a way of protecting everything else around them. They're an "umbrella species," as conservationists put it.

"They are these very flexible, intelligent animals who can survive just about anywhere," Kendall said.

The secret to counting bears is obtaining hair. One way is to pluck it off of "rub trees," which bears use for marking territory. The other trick is to use a string of barbed wire to make a pen. Place some stinking bear bait in the center, and the bear will slip under (or sometimes, if the bear is huge, over) the wire. Snagging hair that way doesn't hurt the animal.

In 2002 Kendall and her colleagues proposed using such hair traps to count bears in Glacier National Park and the nearby wilderness. Multiple state and federal agencies backed the plan.

The project found a powerful ally in Burns, who chaired the subcommittee overseeing the USGS budget, added $1 million to the budget in 2003 and pushed through add-ons for the next four years.

That got the attention of McCain, who every year puts out a list of what he considers egregious or laughable pork-barrel projects. He has criticized the $2 million spent on Oregon's Groundfish Disaster Outreach Program and the $280,000 spent on asparagus technology in Washington.

But McCain didn't try to block the grizzly funding by offering an amendment to remove it from the 2003 appropriations bill. And ultimately he voted for the bill.

A Senate aide to McCain said the senator objects to the way that pork — which he views as money not requested by the administration or properly authorized by Congress — is slipped into bills via add-ons and earmarks.