When was the grizzly bear endangered

Its only serious competitors for food were the Native Americans, who considered it a sacred animal-although they did hunt the bear as a test of strength and its long claws were prized symbols of status.

During their expedition to the Pacific, Lewis and Clark encountered many of the bears and were awed by their impressive speed and power.

On July 1, , while the expedition was making the slow portage around the Great Falls of the Missouri River in Montana , Lewis wrote in his journal that grizzlies were all around their camp.

Because of such hunting and the general destruction of their habitat, the grizzly began to disappear in concert with the settlement of the West. Outside of Alaska , by the s small populations of bears remained only in a few isolated wilderness areas and national parks in Montana, Wyoming , and Idaho.

In a last ditch effort to halt the decline, Congress designated the grizzly a threatened species on this day in Protected from hunting and trapping, grizzly populations have slowly begun to recover.

However, there are still only around 1, grizzlies in the lower 48 states today, nearly half of them in Glacier and Yellowstone National Parks. The future of the grizzly bear will depend on human willingness to share their habitats with the bears and set aside areas of wilderness large enough for them to survive.

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Fish and Wildlife Service, As of now, there are an estimated 16, grizzly bears living in British Columbia, and just under in Alberta.

A mixture of policy change and conservation efforts has accomplished huge strides, especially in the Greater Yellowstone Area, where numbers have increased over five-fold since from about bears to , according to National Park Service estimates. Although the two names are often used interchangeably, the grizzly bear is actually a North American subspecies of the brown bear which can also be found in Russia, Europe, Scandinavia, and Asia.

This is not to be confused with the other subspecies of North American brown bear, the kodiak bear , which is only found on a specific Alaskan archipelago — a distinction earned due to their genetic and physical isolation. Thanks to long claws on their front feet and a large hump over their shoulders made up of pure muscle, grizzlies spend a lot of time digging after food and hollowing out dens for hibernating. Despite reaching up to pounds in weight and a height of 8 feet while standing, these bears can run at speeds of up to 35 miles per hour when the occasion calls for it.

Grizzlies can also be distinguished from black bears or other brown bears by their ears, which are rounder and smaller, while their heads are rounder with a more concave facial profile. Their original placement on the endangered species list in definitely gave grizzlies a fighting chance, and conservation programs in places like Yellowstone made huge advancements for the subspecies. In , however, the U. Fish and Wildlife Service decided to establish the grizzlies in the Greater Yellowstone region as a separate entity in order to remove their threatened status.

What followed can only be described as a legal back-and-forth between conservationists who wanted to maintain existing protection for grizzly bears and policy makers who either believed that the Endangered Species Act was inherently flawed or thought that the bears had recovered enough. A number of environmental organizations responded with lawsuits aimed at reenlisting the bears, and by , a U.

District Judge had reinstated protection by citing the decline of the whitebark pine — an important food source for the Yellowstone grizzlies. Fast forward to , when the Trump administration officially removed them from protection once more, arguing that the Yellowstone bears had sufficiently recovered.

Again, conservation and tribal organizations fought back, suing the administration, winning, and returning the bears to federal protection in just before a controversial grizzly hunt was set to commence in Wyoming and Idaho.

Meanwhile, in Canada, a DNA study in found that grizzly populations in Alberta had increased faster than previously believed, threatening bear policy there as well. While human-bear conflict remains the largest threat to the North American grizzlies, loss of major food sources and suitable habitats due to climate change and development follow close behind.

As humans began to settle in North America, they killed huge numbers of bears for self defense purposes, for food, or for their hides. It's only natural that these bears, as omnivores who require large ranges, are attracted to the same areas as people.

Isolated subpopulations of grizzly bears are especially threatened by development, with small groups often found in remnants of wild habitat surrounded by humans. Development is usually accompanied by logging and construction, which can temporarily displace bears by fragmenting the ecological continuity of habitat or destroying it altogether.