Grizzly Bears in California

Grizzly Bears in California

Brown bears first entered North America about 50,000 years ago across the Bering land bridge from Asia. Bear specialist, Stephen Herrero, hypothesized that the grizzly acquired its reputation for aggressiveness during its early forays into what are now Alaska and northwestern Canada. The brown bears subsequently evolved into two distinct subspecies as they spread throughout North America: the Kodiak bear (Ursus arctos middendorfii) and the grizzly bear.

Despite their innate aggressiveness, grizzlies in their natural environment rarely attack humans. Socially, adult bears tend to be solitary wanderers and are not territorial. However, individual bears do threaten or attack any bear or person that comes too close, and mothers with cubs are the most likely to attack. Bears will also attack if defending a kill or carrion, creating problems with garbage and improperly stored food at campsites.

The home range of the grizzly is vitally important in managing and conserving the species, as it must contain all the bear's food, cover, and water requirements at all times. The home ranges of individual bears usually overlap and may have a radius of many miles for a female with cubs. Grizzlies have a relatively limited reproductive capacity, which contributes to its rapid decline and hinders current recovery efforts. Habitat loss further exacerbates this low reproductive expectancy by increasing stress from human encroachment. Bears can be predominantly carnivores but are successful omnivores and are almost entirely herbivores in some areas. Biologists have identified four main food items in the Yellowstone grizzly bear population's diet that represent the highest concentrated sources of energy available.These food items include whitebark pine (Pinus albicaulis) seeds, army cutworm moths (Euxoa auxiliaries), large ungulates, and spawning cutthroat trout (Oncorhynchus clarkii). As opportunists, bears will travel wherever necessary to find food, increasing the chances of human-bear interaction if food shortages in their home ranges force them to move elsewhere. This is particularly true for bear populations relying on declining species such as cutthroat trout, or whitebark pine, which currently suffers from global climate change and a disease epidemic.

It occupies an ecological niche as the primary predator in North America's coniferous forests and thus instills fear in all living things it encounters, including humans. Grizzly bears are part of the history of California. However, they are now extinct since the last century. This was due to the human fear which resulted in the grizzly's persecution for many years before protection came at last in the form of an ESA listing as a threatened species. Now, after twenty-five years of protection, plans to delist the grizzly are inexorably progressing after the Interagency Grizzly Bear Committee first proposed delisting the Yellowstone population of the protected grizzly because of impending recovery in 1993.

According to www.grizzlybear.org, over-hunting and human settlement gradually wiped out the 10,000 or more grizzlies that are estimated to have thrived in California before white settlement. And judging by the names of some Placer County landmarks, like Little Grizzly Creek, Grizzly Flat, and Grizzly Canyon, the bears were a part of the area's heritage.

The Endangered Species Act

The value of preserving native species in the United States is only a recent enlightenment in what has often been a sad history of excess and greed in exploiting this country's wildlife resources. The realization that individual species should be valued in their own right, separate from commercial or recreational uses, dawned relatively recently with the rise of the modern environmental movement in the 1960s. After initial, largely ineffective attempts to protect wildlife, mounting public pressure to strengthen wildlife protection and to expand it to all endangered species led to the authorization of the Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972 (MMPA) and culminated in the authorization of the Endangered Species Act of 1973. The ESA's authorization represented a huge step for Congress and a giant leap for wildlife protection. Congress declared "fish, wildlife, and plants are of esthetic, ecological, educational, historical, recreational, and scientific value to the Nation and its people" and pledged to conserve species facing extinction.

The ESA is an astounding piece of legislation in its power and efficacy. For example, the ESA is unique among federal statutes in its ability to effectively control the actions of both state and private landowners. However, the stretching of federalism to its limits is not only a source of strength but also a rallying point for the ESA's detractors who condemn