• The order’s Jan. 20 deadline means the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s long-awaited grizzly bear proposal will likely come as the second Trump administration begins.

 

By Mike Koshmrl, WyoFile.com

A judge has ordered federal wildlife officials to decide by Jan. 20 whether Yellowstone-area grizzly bears should be delisted from the Endangered Species Act. 

The order, issued by U.S. District Court of Wyoming Judge Alan Johnson, could speed up a potential handover of authority to Wyoming, Idaho and Montana — opening the door for grizzly bear hunting. 

Johnson issued the decision Friday in response to a Wyoming petition that sought to compel the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to honor a missed one-year deadline to determine if the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem system’s isolated grizzly bear population still warrant “threatened” status. If the agency meets the new 45-day deadline its decision will have taken about three times as long as originally scheduled — with a court-ordered determination due just as the second Trump administration begins. 

“[T]he Court finds it proper to require FWS to issue its 12-month finding within 45 days of this Order,” Johnson wrote in a legal filing. “To be sure, this deadline will allow FWS to take its mandatory action nearly two years after it was initially due, as well as within a mere few weeks of the schedule it already indicated it could meet on its own.”

The federal wildlife agency was already operating under a self-imposed administrative deadline of Jan. 31, 2025 — but only after blowing a July deadline, much to the ire of Wyoming officials. The 45-day deadline, the judge wrote, will “prevent the Service from again failing to meet its own internal schedule.” 

Gov. Mark Gordon applauded Johnson’s ruling in a statement his office released Friday. 

“With the bear recovered, it is long past time for GYE grizzly bear management to be entrusted to the states,” Gordon said. “The USFWS can no longer stand unresponsive to our petition to move forward with the delisting process.”

In early 2023, the Fish and Wildlife Service initially responded favorably to Wyoming’s petition seeking a third attempt at delisting Yellowstone-region grizzly bears from the Endangered Species Act. Under the act, Ursus arctos horribilis has been managed as “threatened” since 1975.

The Greater Yellowstone area’s grizzly population has long achieved recovery goals, and the species’ resurgence is considered a conservation success. Numbers in the core of the ecosystem where managers count grizzlies have more than tripled over the last four decades, reaching nearly 1,000 animals, according to the most recent population estimate.

But both times the bruins have previously been delisted — twice in the last 17 years, most recently in 2017— lawsuits from environmental advocacy groups successfully overturned the decisions.

Although the Fish and Wildlife Service is now staring down a fast-approaching deadline, a long administrative process including a proposed rule, final rule and multiple periods of public input will have preceded any potential shift of grizzly bear jurisdiction from the federal government to the Northern Rocky states. 

If the states do gain control, it’s all but assured that they will pursue the first grizzly bear hunting seasons in the Lower 48 in a half-century. 

WyoFile is an independent nonprofit news organization focused on Wyoming people, places and policy.