The estimated Yellowstone area grizzly bear population dropped from 602 in 2010 to 593 in 2011 as officials continue to make bewildering cliams about bear numbers and population trends.
In May, 2011 Wyoming Game and Fish Department Deputy Director John Emmerich said he estimated there were at least 1,000 grizzlies in the Yellowstone region.
In 2007, the Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team's annual report put the grizzly population at 571, but at a meeting in Bozeman, Mont., yesterday, Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team researcher Mark Haroldson said that since the mid-1980s, the region's bear population had "grown at an average rate of 4 percent annually."
Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team annual reports prior to 2007 don't include population estimates.
U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service grizzly bear recovery coordinator Chris Servheen said yesterday that the region's forests "can only support so many bears."
But after a record high number of bear-human conflicts and and record high number of grizzly bear deaths in 2010, Servheen said, "the population will continue to grow with the mortalities we're seeing now."
The loss of high-calorie high fat grizzly bear foods like spawning cutthroat trout and whitebark pine seeds has reduced the carrying capacity of the Yellowstone region. Hungry bears are being forced to forage on land occupied by humans--with disastrous results.
Yellowstone National Park's "bear jams" are especially worrisome. Grizzly bears have killed two people this year, and in 2010 a grizzly at a U.S. Forest Service campground just outside Yellowstone's northeast entrance dragged a sleeping camper from his tent, killed the man, and ate him. Grand Teton National Park's website says, "Bears and roadsides are not a good combination. Bears feeding along roads quickly become habituated to vehicles and people. Habituated bears may learn that it is acceptable to frequent campgrounds and picnic areas, where they may gain access to human foods. When bears obtain human food, a very dangerous situation develops that may lead to human injury and the bear's death."
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