Why didn’t the grizzly bear cross the road? Because Interstate 90 served as a block.
Or, as Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks (MTFWP) emphasized in a 2022 article, the bear was “stymied” (see https://fwp.mt.gov/…/montana…/2022/grizzlycrossing.pdf).
From that publication:
“Costello mapped [the bear’s] locations and was struck by what she saw. ‘Over 29 days in fall of 2020 and 24 days in spring of 2021, he appeared to have attempted to cross Interstate 90 at least 46 times,’ she says. The bear finally made it past the obstacle in early May 2021, ‘probably by walking or even swimming under a set of highway and railroad bridges crossing the Clark Fork River,’ Costello says.”
The grizzly bear featured in this publication has been dubbed “Lingenpolter.”
And while this MTFWP article is from two years ago, recently it has been making the rounds on social media because of a February 9th article in HuffPost, titled “Grizzly Bears Are Making A Comeback.”
The HuffPost article discusses how grizzly bears are starting to reoccupy the Bitterroot region of the U.S. Northern Rockies. The article explains the implications this way:
“The breakthrough made Lingenpolter one of several grizzlies in recent years to bust his way past the formidable obstacles blocking bears from traveling toward the Bitterroot ecosystem, a region that stretches across northern Idaho and a small swath of western Montana.”
“Grizzly conservationists have long viewed the region as a key area for recovering the keystone species, whose range in the contiguous United States has been reduced to a handful of recovery zones since being listed as “threatened” in the Lower 48 under the Endangered Species Act. But for two decades, the federal government took no action to urge restoration to the Bitterroot, even though the mission to return bears there is written into federal law.”
“That hands-off policy is quickly changing now that grizzlies are wandering back into the area on their own.”
Photo Credit: from Yellowstone Safe Passages.
