(ConservativeHub.com) – On Thursday, April 25, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Park Service (NPS) announced that they are planning to work to reintroduce grizzly bears to the Washington state’s North Cascades region.
The region previously had grizzly bears roaming around for thousands of years. The NPS noted they were an important part of the ecosystem due to their role in maintaining a balance in wildlife population and distributing plant seeds. Despite this, the last sighting of a grizzly bear in the region was all the way back in 1996. This was due to the large decline in the grizzly bear population caused by human beings.
North Cascades National Park Service Complex superintendent Don Striker revealed in a statement that they would be seeing grizzly bears in this landscape again as they would be restoring this important part of the environment. The restoration efforts are going to occur through the “translocation” of the bears from the British Columbia and the Rocky Mountains. As part of the efforts, they are planning to move around three to seven grizzly bears to the region every year for the next five to ten years. It’s still unknown when this movement will start.
As part of the process, grizzly bears are being designated a nonessential experimental population as per the Endangered Species Act. Agencies are hoping that with the designation, they will be able to access more tools for handling the grizzly bears than they would have otherwise gotten access to.
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