As Miracle’s story spread, the cub became the object of fascination for thousands of people. Perhaps that’s no surprise, as many of us are intrigued by the grizzly’s power and strength, along with the reality that it’s an apex predator, like us.

Miracle’s survival is precarious. Since she left the protection of her mother so early, she’s on her own finding food before hibernating. Seventy-seven grizzlies died in the Yellowstone area last year—the highest number yet. As of September 2025, 63 bears had been killed; at this rate, the number of dead bears will surpass last year’s record. What’s going on?

You could say that grizzly bear recovery in the Lower 48 is a success story. Prior to European settlement, an estimated 50,000 bears roamed throughout the Lower 48. By 1970, though, only about 800 remained, with perhaps 130 of them in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem.

In 1975, grizzlies were listed under the Endangered Species Act, which ended their indiscriminate slaughter, and bear numbers slowly rebounded. Today, the Forest Service says an estimated 700 grizzlies live in and around the Yellowstone area, with maybe 1,000 more in the Northern Continental Divide region of Montana. Despite the increase in numbers, mortality rates are on the rise.

Most wildlife managers say the current rate is not a matter of concern. They say the species is stable.

And yet, is it? Roughly 200 cubs are born in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem recovery area each year, but of those, only around 40 survive. Wildlife managers assure us bears are doing well, but is this sustainable—especially when the mortality rate keeps inching upward year after year?

The most obvious reason for bear deaths is us. We are everywhere. 2024 marked the second-busiest year in Yellowstone National Park’s history with more than 4.7 million visitors. In August of 2025, the park was on track to see a 2% visitor increase over 2024.

On top of increased visitation, the human population in the Rocky Mountain West where grizzlies roam is growing steadily. Teton County, Wyoming has seen a 10% increase in residents over the last decade. The population in Teton County, Idaho is up 74% since 1990. Gallatin County, Montana has grown about 40% in the last 10 years.

On the ground, you can’t miss the impacts of growth: Trails are crowded. Parking is at a premium. You need reservations at restaurants, and the traffic is often stop and go. Not surprisingly, bear-human conflicts are more frequent: Vehicle collisions kill bears, interactions with landowners kill bears.

Grizzlies might do fine with more people if their habitat were intact and healthy, but much of their home ground has been in moderate to severe drought for several years, according to U.S. Drought Monitor. This year’s berry crop was dismal. Whitebark pines, whose seeds are an important food source for bears, are threatened by beetles and blister rust.

All this forces grizzlies to search out new food sources, and some of the best ones turn out to be ours. Our cows and sheep. Our apple trees. Our bee hives.

Wyoming U.S. Representative Harriet Hageman has introduced legislation to take away endangered species protections for grizzly bears, which would be a major blow to their survival. “People shouldn’t have to live in fear of grizzly bears rummaging through their trash or endangering their children,” Hageman said. Such comments are deliberately inflammatory.

I have heard three people describe surviving a bear attack decades ago. All three insisted that the bear was only acting in self-defense. One even remembers how awed he was by the diamond-like glint of water droplets on the bear’s fur as she ran toward him.

I’m not sure what would happen if I faced a charging bear. I just want enough wherewithal to pull out my bear spray. While I hope I never have to deploy that spray, I am willing to take the risk to know wild bears roam the landscape. If grizzlies were gone, something vital would be missing from our world.

While grizzly bear mortality may not yet be alarming wildlife managers, I hope we’ve gotten a wakeup call.

Molly Absolon is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. She hikes and writes in Yellowstone bear country.

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There’s a proud literary canon of women telling their stories of studying wildlife in remote places—Mardy Murie in Alaska, Jane Goodall in Tanzania, Dian Fossey in Rwanda. Now, Boyd’s memoir, A Woman Among Wolves—My Journey Through Forty Years of Wolf Recovery, runs in that pack on the strength of her personality and the drama she documents in both the natural and human worlds.

Boyd was raised in Minneapolis, where her suburban upbringing included regular escapes to local swamps and a zoo. At the zoo, alarmingly, one of the caged wolves bit her dog. Nonetheless, Boyd emerged enamored with both wolves and the wildness they represent.

After becoming a biologist, Boyd found a mentor in the famed wolf researcher David Mech, working with him in the upper Midwest. A woman of statuesque frame and Nordic features, Boyd stood out in a field dominated by burly alpha males, all studying wolves that were then an endangered species.

Her career gained momentum when she moved to Montana in the 1980s, just as wolves were trickling into Glacier National Park from Canada. These wolves would reset the ecology of the American West and, along with it, set a course for her life.

The main setting of Boyd’s book is Montana’s North Fork of the Flathead River, which remains a remote valley flanked by fir forest and glacier-sculpted mountains. This is one of the only places south of Canada that still has all the native predators it had before settlers arrived—grizzlies, mountain lions, wolverines, lynx and more. It’s so spectacularly scenic that Hollywood Westerns have been filmed there, yet so remote it still lacks electric power, pavement and phone lines.

In the 1980s and ‘90s, the North Fork of the Flathead was also a unique natural laboratory. A decade before the Clinton administration and Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt began relocating wolves into Yellowstone National Park, in 1995, the animals recolonized the North Fork on their own. Boyd and her cohorts were there to document their dispersal, compiling data while force-feeding wood stoves to heat drafty cabins in subzero winters.

Boyd’s memoir vividly paints that place and time, spiced by tales of derring-do—trapping wolves for radio-collar research, surviving close calls with grizzly bears, crossing icy rivers and flying small planes low over dangerous terrain. It also paints colorful portraits of fellow scientists along with neighboring hermits and poachers, outfitters and loggers. 

In those early days, scientists weren’t sure that wolves would regain a toehold in the American West. By the end of Boyd’s career in 2019, the population of wolves had grown from a rumored few to thousands of animals.

The wolves proved resilient, reproducing faster than the rigors of the wild and the hand of man could limit them. From a conservationist’s perspective, recovery of the animals has been a remarkable success of the Endangered Species Act.

Yet Boyd also illustrates the dark side of that story. Some of it is personal—a man who grabbed her leg and tried to assault her in the backwoods of Minnesota; two pursuing men she scared off with a hunting rifle at a remote cabin.

Nearly as unsettling is her more recent tale of representing the Department of Fish, Wildlife & Parks at contentious public meetings in rural Montana. Elk and deer numbers go up and down like the stock market, but when numbers of game animals seem low, wolves are the favorite scapegoat.

At times, Boyd and her colleagues had to stand before a crowd of armed and angry men, fueled both by alcohol and politically driven disinformation. Such can be the reality of being a public servant in today’s West.

“Wolf management is people management. Period,” Boyd concludes. “My hope is for a more tolerant world, with wolves living out their lives as a valued wildlife species. We can live without wolves, but the world is a much richer place with wolves in it.”

Reading Boyd’s memoir, it seems we’ve come a long way, though wolves still have a lot of enemies who wish they’d disappear.

Ben Long is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit that aims to spur lively conversation about the West. He is the author of Hunter & Angler: Field Guide to Raising Hell and can be found at www.conservationforthewin.org

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Consider grizzly bears. In 1973, grizzlies were on a steep decline and headed for the list of threatened species. Wolves were almost extirpated from the West.

As that story was told, its villains were often the folks in the cowboy hats. It was an old tale that cattle and predators didn’t mix. Environmentalists came up with all kinds of insults for livestock producers, but the one that stung the most was “welfare rancher.”

It was true that some livestock interests played into negative stereotypes, promising to “shoot, shovel and shut up” any predators caught within rifle range.

But fast-forward 50 years to 2024. Those few hundred grizzly bears have been reproducing under the protection of the Endangered Species Act, and now number perhaps 2,000 in the Northern Rockies. Since the 1990s, wolves have gone from a handful to about 2,500 in the Northern Rockies.

This has been a conservation success story. Yet too often the story still smears a broad brush on the same bad guy, the rancher.

If you ask someone in Montana, Idaho or Wyoming what the largest environmental threat is, they probably won’t say the biodiversity crisis or climate change. Most times out here, the air blows clean and the place is full of open space.

But Westerners are likely to rue something they see with mounting heartbreak: Family farms and ranches lost to development, open spaces built on and paved over.

While bears and wolves have expanded their range in the last half-century, times have been hard on local agricultural producers. High production and shipping costs, low commodity prices and meat packing monopolies tighten the vise. Millions of acres of ranch lands have been transformed by trophy homes, ranchettes or roadside strip malls.

It turns out that losing all that ranch land is bad for the environment. More residential sprawl means lost winter range and wildlife migration routes for deer, elk and antelope, which people, mountain lions and wolves depend on. And the loss of farming and ranching has significantly more negative consequences. It’s irreversible. 

Subdivisions are essentially minefields for hungry bears. Garbage cans, pet food and hobby chickens are just too much temptation for bruins to resist. Fed bears end up dead bears.

A problem, yes, but also an opportunity. Conservation groups like the Montana Land Reliance and scores of local land trusts are focusing on conserving agricultural lands. The same ethos is beginning to take hold in the wildlife advocacy world as well.

There is a joint benefit in keeping bears acting like bears and not raiding ranches. Ranchers and their families feel safer and have more and fatter calves to send to market. Wildlife advocates enjoy more wild animals behaving as they should in the habitats where they can best survive.

The good news is, we have the technology to reduce conflicts between agricultural producers and bears and other wildlife. Range riders are essentially hired hands on horseback, keeping an eye on predators and livestock alike. Electric fences can keep bears, wolves and coyotes out of calving and lambing pastures. With some extra effort, livestock carcasses that are part of ranch life can be disposed of, composted or rendered so they don’t attract wildlife.

Bears sometimes eat calves and lambs, of course, and can even cause trouble with farm crops, eating corn on the cob and chickpeas in the field and learning to pry open grain bins.  But merely shooting the offender is rarely a long-term solution. Another hungry animal is sure to show up.

It’s not fair to expect ranchers to pay all those costs because society at large has decided it wants predators on the landscape. That’s where conservationists and wildlife agencies can come in, with private-public partnerships to get those solutions in place on the ground.

Don’t expect everyone to buy into this solution-based conservation paradigm. There is something deeply emotionally satisfying about engaging in political battles, no matter which side you are on. 

But the story is changing. Are we nimble enough to change with it?

Ben Long is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He is senior program director for Resource Media and lives in Kalispell, Montana.

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