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 Interagency Grizzly Bear Committee (I&E Subcommittee)
Questions and Answers about Grizzly Bear Motorized Access Management
Introduction:
Successful recovery of grizzly bears in the contiguous United States is largely dependant on human tolerance of the species and its needs. One of the most contentious issues facing grizzly bear recovery managers is public understanding and acceptance of motorized access management to minimize habitat displacement and reduce mortality risk. Developing a strategy for increasing understanding and acceptance of motorized management is a five-year goal of the Interagency Grizzly Bear Committee (IGBC).
What do you mean when you say motorized access management?
Motorized access management is the term used to describe management, or control, over the level of public motorized access to public lands for a variety of reasons. Those reasons include, but are not limited to: protection of imperiled fish and wildlife species; reduction of damage to the resource (littering, vandalism, poaching, spread of noxious weeds); protection of rare or fragile resources, archaeological sites, cultural sites, fragile ecosystems or geographic or geological features or other reasons.
Although management does limit motorized access to some areas, hundreds of thousands of motorized routes remain open for the public to use. Motorized access management protects imperiled fish and wildlife species, cultural and archaeological sites, and rare or fragile geographic or geological features. It helps reduce erosion, soil compaction, littering, illegal dumping, wildlife risk and the cost to the public of maintaining motorized routes that are rarely used. It also improves water quality and the overall health of many fish and wildlife populations.
What does this mean for grizzly bear management?
In grizzly bear management terms, motorized access management means limitations placed on the use of motorized vehicles within secure grizzly bear habitat. In rare cases, motorized access management has been used to limit access to trails for limited time periods, usually for public safety as in cases where a carcass (i.e. a horse carcass) which may be used by bears is close to a trail. Today, most grizzly bear – related access questions revolve around motorized access on roads and trails.
What is the conflict between grizzly bear recovery and roads?
Human-caused grizzly bear mortalities are the primary factor inhibiting grizzly bear recovery in the Western United States. The risk of these mortalities increases significantly near motorized routes. The causes for these mortalities vary, but they include accidental shootings when grizzly bears are mistaken for black bears or other game animals, poaching, malicious killing, and self-defense actions. Sometimes bears are struck by vehicles while crossing roads or foraging on roadkill. Others become habituated to human foods by the garbage and human and animal foods often associated with motorized routes and must be destroyed. Some bears are displaced from large portions of their available habitat when they attempt to avoid motorized use areas and their associated human presence.
How do we know that grizzly bears avoid motorized routes?
Although some individual bears become quite acclimatized to motorized routes, multiple studies have shown that most grizzly bears avoid motorized routes when possible, crossing or using them largely during nighttime hours or in seasons when traffic is lightest. Large adult males, the dominant class of grizzly bears, who are able to make more choices about where they live, tend to be found farthest from motorized routes, while bears lower in the pecking order are more likely to be found closer to motorized routes, making them more vulnerable to conflicts with humans.
So if the bears avoid roads, what’s the problem?
Grizzly bears adjust to human disturbance through avoidance, including using alternative habitats within their home range. When motorized route density is high in a bear’s home range, this significantly reduces the amount of habitat and food sources, available to bears. Because motorized routes are generally built parallel to drainage patterns, in riparian zones and other high-quality grizzly bear habitats, they often pass through or near grizzly bear foraging areas. In a world where the amount of suitable grizzly bear habitat has become limited due to human expansion, this can have serious impacts on food availability and habitat fragmentation.
One study in the Cabinet Mountains of Montana indicated habitat within 1000 yards of open roads made up 41% of the study area but received only 8% of bear use, thereby effectively reducing the amount of habitat available to bears (Kasworm and Manley 1990). Because grizzly bears hibernate for most of the winter, they must satisfy their nutritional needs in a relatively short time. Access to food sources, and the ability to feed uninterrupted is critically important to grizzly bears, particularly during spring, when they come out of hibernation, and fall, when they are preparing for hibernation. This is important for females with cubs, who have greater energy demands than other grizzly bears. Because the reproductive rate of female grizzly bears is linked directly to their nutritional status and stress levels, habitat displacement, especially from food-rich foraging areas, can have serious negative impacts on grizzly bear recovery.
Road traffic drops off at night. Can’t they use the areas near the roads after dark?
Yes and some grizzly bears do. Other bears may not be willing or ready to forage at night. In either case, limiting the amount of time the habitat is available creates special problems for grizzly bears. Because grizzly bears compete for food sources, reducing the amount of time bears can use an area inevitably leads to conflicts between bears trying to use the same areas at the same time. Since larger, more aggressive adult males dominate grizzly bear interactions, females, particularly females with cubs, must either avoid these areas completely or be prepared to defend their presence. This can result in a decrease of the number of bears who can survive in a particular area, mortality among the females and cubs, and the expenditure of precious energy for all bears present from stress or from conflicts.
What other problems are associated with motorized routes?
The biggest impact of motorized routes on grizzly bears – and on other wildlife populations – is the resulting increase in human presence. Motorized routes allow people more access into wildlife habitat, resulting in more noise, traffic, trash, and presence. Any of these activities can increase the number of human-grizzly bear conflicts (resulting in grizzly bear mortalities) and lower the carrying capacity of the area by reducing the amount of available habitat and the overall health of wildlife populations.
Is protecting grizzly bears the only reason so many forest motorized routes are closed?
No. Land managers close motorized routes for many reasons, most of them completely unconnected with grizzly bears. Motorized routes are closed to reduce litter, illegal dumping and road maintenance, to reduce risk of wildfire, reduce the spread of noxious weeds that crowd out wildlife forage species, to reduce siltation to streams for water quality and aquatic habitat protection or improvement; to provide security to other wildlife species such as elk; or simply because they are no longer needed. Limiting or controlling motorized access may be the most direct means of reducing human – wildlife encounters and the impacts of habitat displacement and mortality risk to wildlife. This makes motorized access management one of the most important tools managers can use to maintain healthy wildlife and fish populations and also to recover grizzly bears.
So how do I benefit from motorized access management?
Because healthy, self-sustaining fish and wildlife populations generally require less management, motorized access management will ultimately result in healthier wildlife populations, fewer species being listed under the Endangered Species Act and, in some cases, contribute to the recovery of listed species such as the grizzly bear. ESA listing often limits management options and reduces the role of non-federal managers. Successful recovery returns most species to local state control, expands the list of available management options, and reduces restrictions required for successful species management.
Motorized access management also helps disperse hunters and other resource users, improving the recreational experience and reducing associated impacts to individual areas. It also reduces the spread of noxious weeds that crowd out native plants and limit food resources for species such as elk and deer.
A few questions about hiking trail access management:
Will grizzly bear management close hiking trails and limit my access to public lands?
No. Grizzly bear management does not require nor has it involved closing public lands to human access. There are no permanent closures of trails on National Forest lands for grizzly bears.
Occasionally trails may be temporarily closed when a horse or another animal dies along a trail and bears have gathered to feed on it. In such cases, trails are closed for 1-2 weeks to allow the bears to use the carcass and then disperse when it is gone. This is for human safety so people do not surprise bears on a carcass. However, these situations are very rare and there are only a handful of such closures in any particular year anywhere in grizzly habitat.
Small areas of grizzly bear habitat near some roads in Yellowstone National Park where people stop to watch for bears are closed to human use to allow bears to use natural openings near the roads free of human disturbance and so be visible to car-borne park visitors.
Are hiking trails closed if a grizzly bear is seen in the area?
No. Trails are not closed if grizzly bears are seen in an area. There is no need to do this. Grizzly bears move widely through their habitat and hikers should be aware that a bear may or not be near a particular trail through grizzly bear habitat on any given day. On rare occasions, as described in the previous answer, a trail may be temporarily closed for human safety when bears are feeding on a carcass nearby.
IGBC I&E Subcommittee January, 2008
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