Page 20 - Wyoming's Grizzly Harvest - The Story the State Wants to Bury with the Bears

Wyoming’s Grizzly Harvest The new DMA (Demographic Monitoring Area) is ostensibly the old Conservation Management Area and includes the PCA, but is reduced from the now apparently obsolete GBDAU. Though some of the verbiage is different, the meaning and consequence, should it be enacted, will be the same: the DMA is Governor Mead’s line in the sand for grizzlies. At an October 2014 IGBC meeting, Wyoming reinforced that one of the areas it wanted to “discourage” grizzlies from was the Upper Green; if the grizzly is delisted, it won’t be eleven grizzlies killed in three years as per the latest FWS Biological Opinion, it will be as many grizzlies as Wyoming is able to kill in the shortest amount of time. The Upper Green is now on the list with “mountain ranges such as the Bighorns, Sierra Madres, Snowy Range, Laramie Peak, and the Black Hills” that WGFD “will not allow grizzly bear populations to reoccupy.” And there is one glaring omission from that inventory, the Wind River Mountains. “Areas south of the Snake River Canyon and Hoback River, the portion of the Wind River Range south of Boulder Creek, and all private and BLM lands adjacent to the National Forests, will be managed to discourage grizzly bear dispersal. Human caused mortality will consist primarily of hunter harvest,” WGFD stated in its 2005 amended plan. 20