By Mark Davis 

Powell Tribune

Via Wyoming News Exchange

POWELL — On the final day for hunters to apply for grizzly bear tags in the first season in Wyoming in more than four decades, a collaboration of environmental organizations have penned a letter to the Wyoming Game and Fish demanding the 2018 season be adjusted or canceled. 

The groups said they were responding to additional bear deaths in 2017 that were highlighted in the Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team’s recently released annual report. 

The organizations’ letter demanded “immediate action to ensure that Wyoming does not open a hunting season that threatens the survival of Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem … grizzly bears by exceeding the state’s 2018 allocation of discretionary mortality under the Tri-State Memorandum of Agreement and Final Conservation Strategy.” 

Those signing the letter included the Humane Society of the United States, Sierra Club, Center for Biological Diversity, Wyoming Untrapped, WildEarth Guardians and Wyoming Wildlife Advocates. 

The recently released annual report confirmed four additional deaths within the Demographic Monitoring Area (DMA) last year, including at least one adult sow. The annual report cited additional deaths of one adult bear (the gender was not disclosed), whose remains were found near Crevice Creek in Yellowstone National Park; one adult female and two cubs killed last fall in Montana. All four deaths happened inside the DMA. 

Renny MacKay, Game and Fish communications director, pointed out the Memorandum of Agreement (MOA) already takes into consideration the additional reported deaths. 

“They already contemplated this would happen,” MacKay said in a Monday phone interview, adding that, “Population estimates are done to be very conservative.” 

The additional reported mortalities will be worked into population estimates in the coming January meeting of the tri-state organization, as per the MOA, MacKay said. 

Litigation against the delisting of grizzlies, expected to be decided on Aug. 30 in U.S District Court in Montana, is considered the final hurdle for the hunting season. 

It’s set to open in Wyoming on Sept. 1 outside of the DMA and on Sept. 15 inside the DMA. Hunting applications were accepted through Monday. 

The environmental organizations’ letter says any grizzly hunting season is “unsustainable and scientifically unjustified,” but calls on the state to at least make changes “before irreparable harm exceeding even the initially project impact of the hunt is inflicted on the population.”

“Sufficient time remains to make this critical adjustment before the hunting season opens,” the letter said. 

Wildlife managers and leaders in Wyoming, Montana and Idaho all received copies.