The reason the pine nuts are not available to grizzly bears is because the whitebark trees in the Yellowstone region have succumbed to global warming. This is especially true for the grizzly, one of the world’s slowest-reproducing mammals. A hundred dead bears per year, no matter if the total number in the ecosystem is 200 or 600, means the population is crashing downhill. “Known” mortality is, as a rule of thumb, generally about half of actual grizzly bears dead. In short, the grizzlies were easy to kill because their lives were made less valuable by delisting. Bear management had been turned over to fish and game agencies of Wyoming, Idaho and Montana who tend to accept any hunter explanation of self-defense in grizzly country. People killed grizzlies because they could - sadly, a not uncommon human attitude in the American West - and since Yellowstone’s grizzlies had been removed from the protection of the ESA listing, there were virtually no penalties for shooting them.

In 2008, hunters and other humans shot bears in record numbers. The quality of habitat for the grizzly is eroding because of warming temperatures. The agency’s decision to delist suggested that all was well with the great bear. Fish and Wildlife Service removed Endangered Species Act protection for the Yellowstone grizzly bear. How could this record mortality have happened? In April of 2007, the Department of Interior’s U. Mountain pine beetles killed the trees the warm winters of the past decade allowed the insects to move up the mountains into the higher whitebark pine forests. Related to the high mortality of 2008 was the massive die off of whitebark pine trees, whose nuts are the bear’s principal fall food. The Yellowstone grizzly population sharply declined in the early 1970s and, consequently, the bear was listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act in 1975.

Some 54 grizzly bears - including 37 shot by humans - were known to have died in 2008, the highest mortality ever recorded this number probably exceeds the extensive killings of 40 years ago when Yellowstone National Park closed down its garbage dumps and bears wandered into towns and campgrounds. During 2008, the bears suffered a double disaster: Grizzlies died in record numbers, and global warming dealt what could be a death blow to the bear’s most important food source. The Yellowstone grizzly bear population is again in serious trouble.

Grizzly years by doug peacock