Young grizzly siblings’ high-profile journey to the Bitterroot Valley leads to an unexpected ending.
SIMILAR SIBLINGS Two-year-old bear siblings feed on grass in the Paradise Valley. At this age, young bears often are pushed out by their mother to begin life on their own. Grizzly siblings similar to this pair wandered throughout the Bitterroot Valley last summer before being captured and relocated in the nearby Sapphire Mountains. PHOTO BY DUANE HUIE
18 | MONTANA OUTDOORS | MAY–JUNE 2023
T By Julie Lue
he first week in August last year was a busy one for two subadult grizzlies on the move in western Montana—and for Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks employees who received a flurry of reports about the pair acting “young and dumb,” in the words of Missoulabased FWP bear specialist Jamie Jonkel. Eyewitness accounts, videos, and trail camera photos revealed details of the bears’ journey from the Blackfoot Valley to the northern Bitterroot, where they spent the next two months crisscrossing a key travel corridor used by many wildlife species. It’s normal for young bears to disperse as they seek their own home range, and also to occasionally use poor judgment as they learn how to survive without their mother. The two-year-old male and female grizzlies—assumed to be siblings—attracted plenty of attention along their southwesterly route. They were first spotted on August 3 on Montana Highway 200 near Potomac, about 30 miles east of Missoula, eating a road-killed deer. The next day, a homeowner photographed the pair walking up the hill behind her house about 20 miles southeast of Missoula. Three days later, they were seen on Interstate 90, eating roadkill again, as traffic whizzed by at high speed. By August 8, the bears had crossed the freeway and triggered a trail camera on the 15,000-acre MPG Ranch east of Florence. And then the siblings dropped down to the floor of the Bitterroot Valley, home to valuable wildlife habitat as well as a rapidly increasing human population. A LONG ABSENCE That put the young bears just a short ramble from the edge of the Bitterroot Ecosystem, one of six grizzly recovery areas established in 1993 under the Endangered Species Act. But this recovery area—which comprises the SelwayBitterroot and Frank Church-River of No Return wilderness areas, mostly in eastern Idaho—hasn’t held a resident grizzly population for about a hundred years. In the early 2000s, grizzlies began making occasional appearances in the Bitterroot Valley and surrounding mountains, likely just passing through as they traveled outside of grizzly population centers to the north—in the Selkirk, Cabinet-Yaak, and Northern Continental Divide ecosystems— and the southeast, in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. Grizzly sightings have become more common in the area over the past decade, according to Jonkel. But no female has stuck around and raised cubs, a critical first step to reestablish a Bitterroot population. Once they arrived in the valley, the young grizzly siblings spent much of their time on large agricultural properties, says Julie Lue is a writer in the Bitterroot Valley. MONTANA OUTDOORS | MAY–JUNE 2023 | 19