Idaho Gov. Brad Little said Thursday he plans to sue the Biden administration for failing to act on the state’s petition seeking to strip grizzly bears of federal protection.
Last March, Idaho petitioned the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to remove grizzly bears from the endangered species list. The request came on the heels of petitions from Wyoming and Montana asking the federal government to delist grizzlies in and around Yellowstone and Glacier national parks. Those areas each hold about 1,000 grizzly bears but Idaho has comparatively few.
Part of the Yellowstone population spills across the state’s eastern edge and there are about 50 bears in the Selkirk and Cabinet-Yaak areas of far northern Idaho. The Bitterroot Ecosystem Recovery Area in north central Idaho, identified for its prime bear habitat, has no grizzlies.
Despite that, Idaho’s petition goes further than those submitted by its neighbors and seeks to end grizzly bear protections across the country. The state claims federal wildlife officials, by defining the area grizzlies would be protected as the lower 48 states, erred when the great bears were first granted Endangered Species Act protections in 1975. Grizzlies never roamed east of the Great Plains and large swaths of their historic range have been so developed that it is unable to support the bears, according to the state’s petition.
A 1993 grizzly bear recovery plan recognized that problem and set the stage for the bears to be delisted based on numbers in certain recovery areas, such as the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. However, the petition says court rulings, often based on the way bears were originally listed, have prevented that from happening.
Yellowstone area grizzly bears were delisted in 2017, but a 2020 court ruling restored federal protections based on multiple factors, including how it would affect bears outside of the recovery area.
Idaho also claims that because there are 60,000 grizzly bears combined in Canada and Alaska, the animals should not be considered endangered.
Little sent a letter Thursday to Interior Secretary Deb Haaland and Martha Williams, director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, protesting the agency’s failure to act on the petition within 90 days as required by the ESA. He said Idaho prefers the state and federal government to spend limited resources on recovery rather than litigation.
“However, we cannot continue to accept vague excuses and inexplicable delays by USFWS representatives concerning grizzly bear delisting,” he wrote. “The current listed entity does not meet the definition of ‘species’ under the Endangered Species Act (ESA), we have robust grizzly bear populations that continue to cause conflict in our rural communities, and we have addressed the concerns of prior judicial reviews.”
Little said Idaho will file a lawsuit if the petition is not acted upon within the next 60 days, adding the state’s congressional delegation is in “lockstep in our demand for answers.”
Idaho Sens. Mike Crapo and Jim Risch and Reps. Mike Simpson and Russ Fulcher sent a letter to Williams last November urging action on the petition.
The Fish and Wildlife Service frequently misses deadlines on petitions to add or remove plants and animals to the list of federally protected species and often faces lawsuits because of it. For example, a coalition of environmental and animal rights groups sued the agency last year after it failed to act on their petition to restore ESA protections to gray wolves in Idaho, Montana and Wyoming. The case is pending and the service has not yet made a determination on the petition.
Barker may be contacted at ebarker@lmtribune.com or at (208) 848-2273. Follow him on Twitter @ezebarker.
