Lance Craighead and Doug Ouren are standing on a rugged knob in southwestern Montana looking for grizzly 416. They aren't following the bear's dagger-clawed trail. They can't see its silver-tipped mane. They're just listening to a steady beeping on their tracking receiver.
"That's a strong signal," Ouren says. He checks the frequency and then his notes: Grizzly 416 is a young adult female, fitted with a radio collar. Craighead scours the receding ridgelines with field glasses. To the east a wooded valley rises to the gilded peaks of the Gallatin Range, with Yellowstone National Park just beyond. To the west a hard, vertical hike leads to the Madison River Valley, the home of Ted Turner's Flying D Ranch. Although not strictly part of the park, this is still the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, winter home for thousands of elk and at least three collared bears. When Craighead was a teenager, he used to hike through this country with his father and his uncle, two of Yellowstone's renowned grizzly researchers. Now he is a bear biologist too. He runs his father's institute in Bozeman, Montana, and collaborates with Ouren, who is a wildlife researcher for the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). Compact and curly-haired, Craighead looks like an older, bigger brother of Frodo Baggins and has some of the same earnest good nature. He never flaunts his legacy, but when pressed he admits that this work has become personal: "I sort of feel responsible for the bears in Yellowstone." At first glance, the bears hardly seem to need his help. Some 500 live in this ecosystem, while another 800 get by in the northern Rockies—a remarkable comeback from the 1970s, when the Yellowstone grizzly was declared a threatened species (see "A Symbol Besieged," below). But, today's populations can't compare with the tens of thousands that roamed the Lower 48 when Lewis and Clark passed through. And they are still under siege. To the north, Gallatin County is filling up with new residents and ranchettes. Gateway communities such as West Yellowstone and Gardiner are booming. In 2001, 20 bears were killed in and around Yellowstone by hunters, automobiles, and wildlife managers. Two years ago, grizzly reintroductions in the Salmon-Selway-Bitterroot region were cancelled after Idaho governor Dirk Kempthorne took the plan to court. "I oppose bringing these massive, flesh-eating carnivores into Idaho," the governor declared. "Whenever there's an encounter between a human and a grizzly bear, the human does not fare well." The Idaho decision was a setback for the grizzly. Big animals need big country, and Yellowstone National Park just doesn't measure up. After a century of isolation and a major population crash, the park's grizzlies are genetically vulnerable. They need to mix with other bears across the country to preserve their genetic diversity. With each new road and subdivision along its borders, America's first national park is turning into a genetic prison.
