Some environmental groups support the decision to delist. The National Wildlife Federation sent out a grizzly e-mail alert with the subject line "I'm back, baby!" to its members last Tuesday. They argue that the bear population in and around Yellowstone is now healthy enough to be managed by the states, with the looser protections that implies.

The federal government's plans to delist will now enter a public comment period, during which everyone from environmental groups to business lobbyists to the general public will have a chance to weigh in. Most analysts expect the delisting to go forward.

While environmentalists and grizzly conservationists may argue the merits of delisting, there's one thing that they all agree on: The Endangered Species Act has kept the bears roaming in the northern Rockies.

"It's probably one of the greatest success stories under the Endangered Species Act," says Chris Servheen, grizzly bear recovery coordinator for the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. "It's a very difficult species to get to recovery." The grizzlies are second only to the musk oxen in North American land mammals for the slowness of their reproductive rate. And the bears need large home ranges, about 100 square miles for females and 300 for males. Plus, there's that old deadly-conflict-with-humans problem.

"It's obvious that the Endangered Species Act has worked because there are more bears now than when they were protected," says Marv Hoyt, Idaho director for the Greater Yellowstone Coalition, which opposes delisting. "Federal protection is the only reason these bears exist in Yellowstone today, and they aren't yet ready to survive without it," says Wilcox from the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Yet at the very moment that the highest federal environmental officials in the land, from Gale Norton on down, are trumpeting the return of the grizzly as an Endangered Species Act success story, the act itself is on the brink of endangerment. The House recently passed Pombo's Threatened and Endangered Species Recovery Act of 2005, which would strip the ESA of many of the protections that have helped the grizzly come back. Environmentalists say the Pombo bill threatens far more than the grizzly population or even endangered species in general: If passed, it could jeopardize wildlife protection and conservation throughout the country.

Last April, I went to Yellowstone National Park to see the grizzly comeback firsthand. At 7 a.m. on a brisk spring morning, I watched a mother grizzly swinging her head back and forth, her big black nose sniffing the air. Even down on all fours, the sow dominated the rocky outcropping scattered with Douglas fir. Weighing in at 300 pounds, the bear lolled 180 degrees to the right, then left, then back again, using her long snout to scan the crisp air for any whiff of danger.

The grizzly mom was protecting her yearlings, which gamboled nearby, rooting in the dirt on the hillside. With all the intensity of adolescents, the cubs tore at the earth with their claws, trying to grub up some ants, moths or worms to eat. The three 80-pounders threw their bodies into the effort, their paws sending dirt and moss careening off the hillside behind them. The pronounced humps on their silvery, yellowish brown backs showcased the powerful muscles that come together at their shoulders. These bruisers are built to turn over logs, move boulders, excavate dens, strike prey. Then about a year and a half old, the cubs still nursed and would continue to stay with mom for another year, before she literally ran them off to wean them.

That morning, those four grizzlies ruled the south side of Lamar Canyon, above Lamar River, just north of Specimen Ridge in Yellowstone. Below them, on surrounding hillsides, hoary-looking bison with their awkward just-born calves, pregnant elk and expectant pronghorn antelope grazed on new grass in herds. A trio of coyotes yipped and howled. Just behind the bears, visible over the top of the ridge, a red-tailed hawk perched on a limber pine.

Ensconced in America's oldest national park, these bears are the top of the food chain -- so-called apex predators -- along with the gray wolf, which has been successfully reintroduced into the park after being exterminated there, another Endangered Species Act success story. These great predators are one of the main draws for the park's more than 3 million annual visitors, who hope to catch a glimpse of just such unfettered wildness -- from a safe distance, of course -- and go back home to whatever tamed city or suburbs they live in with a good story to tell.

It wasn't always this way. As recently as the early '70s, the bears living in this park weren't as wild as they are now. They'd become scavengers, having enjoyed a 70-year run of rummaging through the trash at open-pit garbage dumps while park visitors gawked nearby. Some grizzlies had even come to take treats directly from visitors, right out of car windows. "There was a huge problem with bears who were dependent on human food sources and were not afraid of people," says Tom France, director of the National Wildlife Federation's northern Rockies office.

And when bears and humans tangled, most often the bears ended up dead. "When the bear got listed, most of the mortalities were occurring in the park because that's where the dumps and the conflicts were with people," says Willcox from the Natural Resources Defense Council. In the mid-'70s, the feds decided to wean the grizzlies from the human handouts. But closing the dumps led to about 150 bears having to be killed by federal agents in the following five years, when they got into trouble as they continued to turn to humans for food. But as bears learned to fend for themselves again, the population surged: "The bear population we have in Yellowstone now is not only larger, it's wilder. It's almost entirely dependent on wild food and has a much greater wariness of people," France says. "Those who want to take the teeth out of the ESA try to portray it as a failure. The Yellowstone grizzly situation refutes that."

Now, after decades of bear-proof containers and visitor education -- all a part of bear recovery -- the new generation of bears, like the mothers and cubs I saw, are both more independent and more numerous. The great bears were one of the first species to enjoy protection under the Endangered Species Act, and there were thought to be 200 to 250 bears in the area at that time. Now, the feds estimate that there are 600, even as the human population in the Yellowstone area has boomed, too.

These days, the motto in bear country is "A fed bear is a dead bear." Beyond cleaning up dumps in the parks there are now measures to minimize other bear attractants, from mandating back-country food storage containers to limiting sheep grazing in grizzly habitat. It's even brought better garbage-management techniques to areas on private land. And bears are relocated instead of being immediately killed when they get into trouble with garbage or livestock.

The Endangered Species Act also helped create more space for bears: "We didn't take a gun and go out and shoot bears," says Hoyt from the Greater Yellowstone Coalition, referring to the initial decline in the bears' population. "We just logged the heck out of their habitat and they quit using this area." The act not only stopped the hunting of bears but also forced federal agencies to take a "look before you leap" approach to road building or timber allotments and assess how an activity would affect the bears before greenlighting it.

But if the Pombo bill is approved, environmentalists say, not just the grizzly but wildlife conservation in general will be the endangered species.

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