A Grizzly Mystery in Montana

Flathead County is part of a slice of western Montana that is rapidly getting richer, better educated and more crowded, even as it turns away from the state's traditional reliance on resource extraction industries.

Retirement money and revenue from stock investments now dwarfs, by more than 3 to 1, the combined earnings of timber, mining, farming and oil drilling, according to a recent study. More and more people live here because they want to look at the scenery or play in the out-of-doors -- not because they want to work out there.

Cultural incongruities abound. Rich newcomers build palatial homes on steep mountain slopes (many in areas thick with grizzlies), frequent organic dry cleaners and insist on fresh seafood at pricey restaurants. But the Flathead Valley also incubates far right-wing militants, many of whom are angry about how this once-remote corner of Montana has tarted itself up as part of the New West, while leaving them behind.

A large weapons cache was found near here three years ago, property of a citizen militia group called Project 7. It plotted, rather feebly, to assassinate local officials and then go to war with the National Guard and NATO. A leader of the group, David Burgert, a former snowmobile salesman now in prison, was a sometime caller to Z-600 talk radio, a Kalispell station owned by John Stokes.

Stokes presides over a splenetic midday show in which he and his callers rail against Mexican immigrants, socialism and the sins of the federal government. In an interview about the recent rise in bear killings, Stokes said that his listeners certainly are not anti-grizzly but are justifiably furious about bear-protection rules that for years have closed roads in federal forests.

"The idea that they are endangered or there is a shortage of them is a crock," said Stokes, who added that he and many of his listeners "enjoy watching grizzles" and that he has never heard talk about harming them. As for the feds, Stokes said, that is a different story.

"To say that there is a local agenda against bears is to be paranoid," Stokes said, while quickly adding that federal law enforcement officials "have good reason to be paranoid because nobody likes them around here anyway, and it is their own doing."

The federal official most alarmed about the recent spike in illegal bear killings is Chris Servheen, grizzly-bear recovery coordinator for Fish and Wildlife.

Servheen, who has been supervising the comeback of the bears for 25 years, said there is a strong possibility that the actual number of illegal kills in the past two years is significantly higher than what game wardens have been able to count.

"It is easy to kill and leave them, and the bodies are never found," he said. "It doesn't take very many people who want to kill bears to really make a big difference."

State and federal game agencies found five of the 11 illegally killed grizzlies this year only because the bears were wearing radio-transmitter collars, Servheen said. The collars send a distinct "mortality" signal when a bear stops moving for an extended period of time.

"If we didn't have these collars, we would think there aren't that many dying," Servheen said. "It is critical that we increase our sample of collared bears."

The problem, however, is that Fish and Wildlife lacks enough money to collar and monitor a large enough percentage of the grizzlies in northwest Montana to know with scientific certainty the actual amount of illegal killing, Servheen said. (In the Yellowstone ecosystem south of here, poaching of grizzlies is not regarded as a significant problem.) It costs about $10,000 a year to collar and monitor a grizzly, including equipment, manpower and airplane costs. There are now about 30 grizzlies with collars, but Servheen said that number needs to double -- so about 10 percent of bears could be tracked -- before researchers can get a handle on the scale of illegal killings.

More people and more grizzlies in northwest Montana have meant more mistaken-identity shootings, with hunters accidentally killing grizzlies they thought were black bears. It has also caused more encounters between marauding bears and frightened homeowners with shotguns.

But Servheen said he suspects that something more malicious is behind the increase in illegal killings. He said there is now considerable evidence, although not yet any forensic laboratory proof, that as many as four grizzlies have been poisoned in the past two years in northwest Montana.

Poisoning of bears would be a highly unusual occurrence, law enforcement officials said.

"There are more dead bears and some of them may very well have been poisoned, and those who are doing this are unscrupulous people," Servheen said. "But when you get down to who they are -- I just don't know."