Conservation officials confirm the grizzly bear’s return to the North Cascades

It’s official: grizzly bears will once again roam North Cascades National Park.

America’s Fish and Wildlife Service and National Park Service confirmed last week their decision to restore grizzly bears to the North Cascades. This decision was anticipated after United States government conservation authorities proposed the move back in March.

Grizzly bears were native to the North Cascades for thousands of years until hunters extirpated them from the region by the 1990s. Calling these bears “a key part of the ecosystem” the FWS and the Park Service say they are now moving to reverse this wrong.

“We are going to once again see grizzly bears on the landscape, restoring an important thread in the fabric of the North Cascades,” said North Cascades National Park Superintendent Don Striker in a statement.

The soon-to-be reintroduced grizzly bears won’t be treated as threatened or endangered species. Rather, the services have decided to manage the forthcoming North Cascades grizzly bear population as a “nonessential experimental population” under the now 50-year-old US Endangered Species Act. “The designation will provide authorities and land managers with additional tools for management that would not otherwise be available under existing Endangered Species Act regulations,” NPS said.

Under their plan, NPS and FWS will gradually reintroduce grizzlies to the park until they achieve a bear population of at least 25 individuals. Then they’ll let the population expand naturally while wildlife experts manage and maintain it.

The federal wildlife and parks managers said they decided to restore grizzly bears to North Cascades after receiving more than 12,000 comments from the public during the public comment period it launched last year.

“There is no set timeline for when translocation of grizzly bears to the ecosystem may begin,” NPS said.

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