by Angus M. Thuermer Jr. and Mike Koshmrl, WyoFile
Federal wildlife biologists list 63 Yellowstone ecosystem grizzly bear deaths this year, a count that’s ahead of last year’s pace, when the highest number of mortalities on record was documented.
Last year, there were 77 known and probably grizzly bear mortalities, surpassing the previous record of 70 in both 2021 and 2018. By this time in 2024, 56 of that total number had succumbed, putting this year’s Sept. 13 “provisional” count ahead of last year’s record pace.
The accounting comes as Wyoming’s rifle elk hunting season — a time of increased conflicts between bears and armed people — gets underway. Double-digit numbers of grizzlies are typically shot and killed in hunter encounters every fall in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem.
“There’s no food for the animals to eat … so they’re coming down into the valley.”
Meredith Taylor
This year’s high tally of preliminary mortalities, which are logged by the Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team, also comes as the ecosystem is in moderate to severe drought, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor.
“There’s no food for the animals to eat — for instance, bears — so they’re coming down into the valley,” said Meredith Taylor, a retired Dubois outfitter who teaches an ethnobiology class. “I was up on Togwotee Pass … in August … and I was absolutely horrified how poor the plants [were] — no berries.”
In September alone, biologists added 17 ecosystem grizzly bear deaths to the 2025 list. The specific dates of seven of those mortalities have not been entered.
On Sept. 21, Wyoming Game and Fish captured and moved two cubs from private land after they were “frequenting a residence” and could not be hazed away. There’s an open debate regarding whether grizzly conflicts are increasing and whether, if so, it’s attributable to having more bears or to more frequent droughts as a result of climate change.
Regardless, there’s a continuing push to remove federal regulations protecting the species. The grizzly is a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act, with a population of roughly 1,000 in the Yellowstone Ecosystem “demographic monitoring area” and an untold number on the fringes of that core zone.
‘Recovery goals exceeded’
U.S. Rep. Harriet Hageman has introduced the Grizzly Bear State Management Act of 2025 that would remove federal grizzly protections for Yellowstone ecosystem bears “without regard to any other provision of law.” The bill passed out of a House committee.
The measure “shall not be subject to judicial review,” the bill states.
Julia Cook’s image of her hiking the same path as a grizzly bear earned her first place in the 2023 Human-Wildlife Coexistence Photography Contest. (Julia Cook/Northern Rockies Conservation Cooperative)
The state’s lone member of the U.S. House of Representatives has simultaneously sought to delist grizzly bears through the federal appropriations budgeting process. There is no “preferred” course of action, she told WyoFile in July at a Pinedale town hall meeting.
“Whatever we can get through,” Hageman said.
Hageman was optimistic that she could corral the needed Democratic Party votes for legislative grizzly delisting to pass Congress.
“We might be able to,” she said. “This is a huge success story. Wyoming has spent millions of dollars recovering this species, we’ve done a phenomenal job and we manage them well.”
‘Desk activists‘
In a statement announcing her bill, Hageman pointed out that Yellowstone-region grizzlies have “far exceeded” recovery goals. She blamed “federal lethargy and wildlife policy dictated by special-interest lobbyists under the Biden Administration” as factors that have kept protections in place.
Federal wildlife managers have “disregarded recovery data” and Washington bureaucrats “continue to obstruct delisting with needless delays and politicized decisions,” she stated. She blamed “desk activists” for “a troubling uptick in attacks on people, livestock, and property.”
“Families shouldn’t have to live in fear of grizzly bears rummaging through their trash or endangering their children,” Hageman wrote.
In addition to Hageman, the Yellowstone grizzly faces a Trump administration that recently installed former Wyoming Game and Fish Director Brian Nesvik as head of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which has oversight over threatened and endangered species. As Game and Fish leader in Wyoming, Nesvik proposed a controversial hunting season for grizzly bears that a judge blocked at the last minute.
Taylor said she wrote Hageman to say “delisting the grizzly bear [at] this time is really a bad idea.” Climate change has reduced the annual crop of whitebark pine nuts as warmer temperatures have allowed insects to ravage stands of what was once a keystone grizzly food.
Whitebark pine, also a threatened species, is expected to see its suitable landscape decline by 80% by the middle of this century,” according to a recent paper published in Environmental Research Letters. Notably, federal scientists who’ve studied the importance of whitebark pine to grizzly bear populations have concluded that the adaptable, omnivorous species can sustain without the high-elevation seeds.
Hunting could provide big game gut piles for scavenging, but the season also brings obvious dangers for bears and people.
“Of course, that’s a time when people are out there with guns,” Taylor said.
This article was originally published by WyoFile and is republished here with permission. WyoFile is an independent nonprofit news organization focused on Wyoming people, places and policy.
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