Page 26 - Wyoming's Grizzly Harvest - The Story the State Wants to Bury with the Bears

Wyoming’s Grizzly Harvest mortality by one or two bears per year would likely have been enough to destabilize the population.” The question they need to answer in reality, and not virtual reality, is how many females will need to end up as rugs to destabilize the population now, and in the forthcoming decades? Many of Grizzly Czar Servheen’s assurances of Wyoming Game and Fish Department’s competence to intelligently manage grizzlies in a post-delisting environment were made in the years and months before September 22, 2014 and Luke Ellsbury’s guilty pleas. As a WGFD “bear management specialist,” Ellsbury is a contributing author to much of the documentation produced by the state and upon which Servheen has based his claims and to which his sidekick, Frank Van Manen, the present team leader of the IGBST, has referenced in relation to Wyoming and the Yellowstone grizzly in the drive to delist. Court documents reveal that on September 6, 2013 while performing duties for WGFD with his supervisor, Dan Thompson, Ellsbury spotted “a nice black bear” working a chokecherry patch up the Sweetwater Creek Drainage near Elk Fork on the North Fork of the Shoshone River. After “checking the bear activity” in the drainage, upon their return to Cody, Ellsbury hastily 26