Shawn Stewart / Montana Fish, Wildlife and ParksThis image of grizzly sow 822 was taken in late July when she had a summer coat, which is very short around the face; this makes her ears look long. In the fall or spring, the longer hair would make the ears appear much shorter.

Elusive, resourceful and in the end a troublemaker, Montana grizzly bear 822 was killed Oct. 1 for developing an intolerable appetite for cattle.

“She was a real piece of work,” said Shawn Stewart, biologist for Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks in Red Lodge.

The story of 822 and other grizzlies has wildlife managers rethinking what they once defined as grizzly bear habitat when the animals were first listed as a threatened species in 1975.

“Certainly bears are utilizing far broader landscapes than what we thought,” Stewart said. “They are amazingly adaptable critters.”

Instances like 822’s capture and eventual death sentence points out a problem, too, as grizzly bear numbers in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem have climbed to around 700. The country, despite its relative vastness at more than 34,000 square miles, is getting crowded because bears are hemmed in by increasing human development in rural areas. So far this year, 43 grizzly bears in the GYE have died, 20 of them removed for conflicts with humans such as cattle depredation.

Trapped

“The challenge for wildlife managers is that while the Yellowstone Ecosystem is large, it has only limited release sites for problem grizzlies,” wrote Greg Losinski, of the Idaho Department of Fish and Game, in a news release. “Once a bear has learned a negative behavior, it is extremely difficult to relocate that animal to a place where it cannot get into a similar problem situation or even head back to where it originally was trapped.”

That was the case with 822. Stewart first met the sow when she was trapped on July 24 in the Bearcreek Basin after more than a dozen cattle, mostly calves, were killed. The basin is southeast of Red Lodge along the eastern front of the Beartooth Mountains. At the time, Stewart estimated there were about 24 grizzly bears inhabiting the area.

“We could put her at one or two of the (kill) sites, but not all of them,” Stewart said.

Since the cattle killings were a first offense for 822, and because she had a cub of the year, the sow and son were moved to the Teepee Creek area high up Gallatin Canyon, thereby removing the bears from the temptation of killing more livestock.

Flight

822 was a healthy 8- or 9-year-old female, Stewart said, weighing in at about 300 pounds — an average weight for that time of the year. After being released in the Gallatin drainage, 822 hung around about 24 hours to get her bearings, then began traveling west — crossing U.S. Highway 191 and the Gallatin River before traveling up Sage Creek. Stewart knows this because she was wearing a GPS collar that allowed FWP to track the bear.

Four days later, she crossed the highway and river again, this time traveling east along the northern edge of Yellowstone National Park. The park is the core of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. Surrounding Yellowstone are numerous mountainous regions managed by the U.S. Forest Service.

“That’s the other thing fascinating about following the collared bears — the tremendous diversity of places they use,” Stewart said. “On the same mountain you’ll have some out in the sagebrush while others are always up high and you’ll never catch them down low.

Homeward bound

About a week after being dropped off in the Gallatin Canyon, 822 was photographed on a camera trap at a U.S. Geological Survey trapping site near Jardine, set up for bear research. That meant 822 had climbed over the Gallatin Mountains and crossed the Yellowstone River and U.S. Highway 89. That distance is only 30 miles by airplane, but in between are mountains more than 9,600 feet tall.

“When they have a mind to go, they can definitely cover the country,” Stewart said.

The photo did not capture any cub traveling with 822. Possibly the cub was killed during an encounter with a male grizzly, which are known to slay cubs to induce the female to mate.

From the Jardine area 822 dropped into the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness, passing close to the Forest Service’s Hellroaring Guard Station before working her way across the top of the Beartooths and possibly wading the upper Stillwater River before coming down the West Rosebud drainage and back onto the Beartooth Front, frequenting the Fiddler Creek region. It was there she began killing cattle again, this time 12 calves.

“She typically would not return to a kill site,” Stewart said. “Wildlife Services would set traps, but at that point she was a pretty wary old girl.”

A cautious approach

Wildlife Services is an agency specifically tasked with killing livestock-killing wildlife such as bears, lions and coyotes. They use a variety of techniques, from snares to aerial gunning. With 822 they tried to set up traps along her travel routes since she wasn’t returning to kill sites. But even that wasn’t working.

“She would come down the mountain and tiptoe around those (trap) sites after dark,” Stewart said. “By morning she was way up on top of the ridges. I never saw her. She was always in the thick timber (during the day).”

Early this month, Wildlife Services went out on what was expected to be another futile attempt when they finally caught 822 out in the open and shot her.

“I don’t think there was a soul who saw that bear,” Stewart said, even though she had roamed all around Fiddler Creek, crossed the West Rosebud River several times, wandered across Ingersoll and Morris creeks while also exploring Fishtail Creek and the Benbow region, which is popular with hunters and ATV enthusiasts.

“In retrospect, I suspect that she was involved in a majority of the cattle that were killed east of Red Lodge,” Stewart said. “When we took her out, there was never another kill east of Red Lodge.”

He speculated that to feed her cub, while also attempting to avoid other males in the Bearcreek area, 822 would kill a calf, feed and then move on. Two males that may have been following her to feed on her kills were trapped and euthanized this summer.

Many questions

Had 822 grown up along the Beartooth Face? Was she one of the several bears that migrated north out of Wyoming in 2011 to inhabit the area south of Red Lodge? And how did she navigate this summer across such rugged country to return to within 20 airplane miles of where she had been originally trapped only two months earlier? By smell?

Stewart can only speculate on the answers to those questions. And each bear that he’s relocated has reacted differently. Unfortunately for researchers, most of the trapped bears quickly lose their GPS collars, so continued tracking is impossible.

“Their necks are bigger than their heads, so it’s like trying to put a collar on a funnel,” Stewart said.

A separate death in Idaho

The sow’s story, although intriguing, is not an unusual occurrence. A week after 822 was killed, Idaho Department of Fish and Game officials euthanized a 13-year-old sow grizzly. She had been trapped near Cody, Wyoming, with her two yearling cubs three weeks earlier and had been relocated more than 100 miles west in the Jedidiah Smith Wilderness, northwest of Jackson Lake. Three weeks after being trapped near Cody she was trapped again, this time near Chester, Idaho, because she and her cubs were raiding apple trees.

“In this case, the relocation of the bears only delayed the inevitable decision about what to do with bears that have become too comfortable around humans,” Losinksi wrote. “The decision to euthanize the sow was not made lightly but underlies the ongoing challenge of managing a population that has exceeded all recovery goals set under the Endangered Species Act.”

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is preparing to delist grizzly bears as a threatened species, a decision that will be tied up in court challenges. What the grizzly bear’s future will look like is uncertain, but one thing is for sure in Stewart’s opinion.

“In my mind the areas used by grizzly bears are not limited by a grizzly’s ability to make a living there. It’s limited by our social tolerance,” Stewart said. “That’s not to say grizzlies belong every place, but they can make a living in places that are no longer socially acceptable.”