For grizzly bears, some of the most desirable dispersal habitat crosses heavily checkerboarded lands
By Katie Hill
It took all night to drive hundreds of miles from the Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem (NCDE) in northwestern Montana to the shores of Yellowstone Lake, a trip that Dr. Cecily Costello spent in the passenger seat of a pickup truck. Hitched to the truck was a large, tubular trap containing a young, male grizzly bear, previously tranquilized but now wide awake and sporting a fresh GPS collar.
With a team of researchers, Costello, a bear biologist for Montana Fish, Wildlife, and Parks (MFWP), helped haul the culvert trap onto a boat. Then, the seaworthy crew and the federally threatened apex predator steered to a southern arm of the lake. When they struck land, they had to figure out how to release the bear into the wilderness near the shore.
“We rigged it up so that we could pull a long rope to open the trap from the boat out on the water,” Costello says, noting that her team has been pleased with the success of the 2024 relocation. “The male stayed remarkably close to where we left him. He made one little interesting movement in the fall just before denning, but he’s pretty much staying put inside the park.” The hope is that the NCDE transplant will introduce some genetic diversity into the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem’s (GYE) grizzly population, which is currently one of the criteria for delisting the species under the Endangered Species Act.
In some ideal version of the future, it wouldn’t take traps, tranquilizers, trucks, boats, and ropes to get grizzly bears from the NCDE to intermingle with those in the genetically isolated GYE and produce healthier, more resilient bears. Instead, bears dispersing from their home territories would traverse the slim margin of range between the two recovery zones on their own. The two populations, which have exceeded their recovery goals, are already bleeding out into more lowland riparian areas and valleys between the towering mountain ranges, but they haven’t yet spanned the gap. According to recent research by Costello and Dr. Sarah Sells, the assistant leader of the Montana Cooperative Wildlife Research Unit and a US Geological Survey ecologist, some of the most likely, but perhaps surprising, dispersal routes for grizzly bear connectivity lead straight through checkerboarded lands.
The checkerboard usually refers to an alternating pattern of square-mile parcels under federal and private ownership, which is left over from a time when the federal government awarded railroad companies every other parcel along the tracks to incentivize transcontinental railroad construction. In Montana’s Boulder Mountains, for example, which is one of the rugged ranges separating the northern grizzly populations from Yellowstone, the US Forest Service manages the public parcels, while a series of livestock companies and other individuals own the private parcels.
A different kind of checkerboard connects the Scapegoat Wilderness and surrounding Helena National Forest to the Sheep Creek and Sleeping Giant Wilderness Study Areas at the north end of the Big Belts. This region features alternating private lands and state trust lands, which were awarded to Montana when it became a state and are constitutionally required to generate revenue for Montana’s public schools and other community resources.
From a 10,000-foot view, checkerboarded lands seem like they should be heavily manipulated, chopped-up landscapes. Only European settlers would think to carve lands up and hand them out to various owners in such a manner. The roster of landowners and managers ranges from the state of Montana and three different federal agencies, to absentee landowners and fifth-generation working ranchers. Logic dictates that such a level of human involvement in a landscape would drive grizzlies and other wildlife away. After all, grizzly bears in the Lower 48 survived near-extinction in the late 1800s by retreating into deep, dense habitat, as far away from human influence as possible.
“But our simulated bears don’t know anything about land ownership,” says Sells of her and Costello’s work modeling potential dispersal pathways between the NCDE and GYE grizzly populations. Instead, they used GPS collar data from real grizzlies to model how bears moving through a landscape respond to its overall greenness, terrain ruggedness, density of riparian areas, density of buildings, distance to secure habitat, and distance to and density of forest edge. “Secure habitat,” per the US Fish and Wildlife Service, means habitat on state, federal, and Tribal lands that is 500 meters away from nearby roads.
Then, “these bears take a walk in our simulations,” choosing a path “based on how the model from their data showed them choosing between these [variables],” Sells says. With a long list of known grizzly bear deterrents between the NCDE and the GYE—Interstate 90, growing population centers, new real estate development, sprawling road networks, heavily pressured public lands, and natural resource extraction projects— “most bears tended to select for areas with greater greenness value, closer to secure habitat, higher densities of riparian areas, and generally close to forest.”
Between many bears taking many simulated walks, the model “strings together this pathway that tends to [have] lower building density, higher riparian density, be closer to forest edge, and be farther away from roads. So that’s where you see these rivers of blue that indicate where bears are most likely to travel,” Sells says.
It turns out that this combination of factors foreshadows bears moving through checkerboard, a sign that these areas possess a higher proportion of intact, desirable habitat than the surrounding lands.
That’s largely due to the work of private landowners, according to Heart of the Rockies Initiative partnerships manager Jim Williams. “Working families produce food and, at the same time, protect the spaces between blocks of protected public land,” Williams says. “[Most] of the connectivity habitat within checkerboarded matrices of public lands is on private agricultural lands in the transboundary Northern Rockies, here and in British Columbia and Alberta.”
Take the Hibbards, one of countless landowning families who live, work, and play in a checkerboard matrix between the NCDE and GYE. Cooper Hibbard grew up on the ranch owned by Sieben Live Stock Company, not to be confused the nearly Sieben Ranch, owned and operated by his cousins. Although he is now the fifth generation to work it, he is the first generation to experiment with novel, selective grazing techniques to improve the soil’s water and carbon retention and has been widely recognized in the sustainable ranching community.
While the Hibbards hold a more contiguous tract of land than most, they neighbor parcels held by the Bureau of Land Management, the Forest Service, the state of Montana, and other private landowners. Apart from I-15 snaking northeast from Helena to Great Falls, this area is remote. The closest town is Cascade, population 600, about 20 miles northwest as the crow flies.
Compared to large, intact tracts with more proximity to major population centers, these rural parcels in their 640-acre increments have far less to offer real estate developers. So, they’ve largely escaped development. Those who do build on heavily timbered, checkerboarded parcels often opt for cabin-style dwellings, which tend to be less disruptive for wildlife habitat than suburban style homes with lawns. Meanwhile, the public lands within the checkerboard have often lacked reliable public access, meaning they aren’t as pressured by outdoor recreationists seeking backcountry adventure, hunting, or otherwise spending time on the landscape.
Instead, both public and private parcels in the remote checkerboard between the NCDE and the GYE are more heavily used for livestock grazing, which can help maintain healthy landscapes, and potential resource extraction. While something like timber cutting does disturb the natural condition of an area, its impacts are still less permanent than those of a subdivision. Some studies even show that bears might select regenerating clear-cuts and other restored extraction areas for their renewed food sources and cover.
In other words, the West’s growing recreation pressure on intact public lands and growing development pressure on intact private lands has made the checkerboard into something of a de facto last best place for wildlife.
But, it’s not without its own issues. Conflict between bears and the people stewarding the land is part of the reason why grizzly bear connectivity is such a touchy subject in the rural West, particularly in areas where landowners and government entities border each other.
Hibbard first encountered the aftermath of hungry grizzly bears on his family’s ranch in 2017. Eleven dead calves littered the rangeland sandwiched between the Big Belts and the Adel Mountains, almost perfectly equidistant between Glacier and Yellowstone National Parks. When Hibbard woke up the morning after the grizzly attack and stepped outside, something in the air he’d been breathing since infancy was different.
“It immediately changed the feel of this place,” Hibbard says. “Not for better or worse, but it changed the feeling. You aren’t just going to walk out the door with kids without being prepared. That was when the shift truly happened, when we knew this place was going to continue to be different.”
Hibbard is probably the first in his family to have to coexist with grizzly bears, except maybe his great, great grandfather, Henry Sieben, who arrived from Illinois in 1864 when the species was already in immense decline. “This grizzly question is a big deal. But I also see them as a small ingredient in the big stew,” Hibbard says, mentioning that range riders and other adaptive techniques for grizzly coexistence might be part of the near future of Sieben Live Stock Company.
Supporting landowners by providing funding for these kinds of adaptations is part of the Heart of the Rockies Initiative’s work, says Williams, who worked with MFWP for 31 years as a wildlife biologist and program manager and helped develop grizzly bear conflict monitoring programs in the NCDE. Range riders and electric fences can cost tens of thousands of dollars—money that ranchers rarely have just lying around—so as long as grizzlies remain a federally protected species, coexistence will cost some serious cash.
Now, Williams works on a program called Keep It Connected, which funnels private philanthropic dollars to working-lands families seeking perpetual conservation easements through nearby land trusts. “When a land trust comes to us with a project that lists wildlife connectivity as a primary component, on top of keeping a working agricultural family on the land rather than growing homes, we review it,” he says. “If it’s a match, we bring it to our board for approval. Then, philanthropic donors can search through our list on our website and close the funding gaps on projects depending on what species and locations they’re interested in. It’s almost like online shopping.”
The program is needed, Williams says, because the pace and scale of development continues to climb and to reach further into what was once considered less desirable land. More than half of new houses built in Montana from 2000 to 2021 were built outside of incorporated areas, and 41% were built in subdivisions where individual lots exceeded 10 acres in size, a report from Headwaters Economics shows. Around Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks, residential property has increased 132% since 2000, according to a documentary by the Western Landowners Alliance called “Grizzlies and Grazing.”
This rapid landscape transition means that any version of grizzly bear connectivity will rely, at least in part, on open space preservation and private land stewardship. And conservation easements, which allow ranchers to monetize their open space and wildlife habitat without disrupting their livestock operation, are one way they stand to benefit from a grizzly bear’s presence on a landscape, Williams explains. With the bulldozer threatening both the rancher and the grizzly bear, then the “enemy of my enemy” adage must apply in some way.
While the federal government oscillates over the status and management of Ursos arctos, one thing remains clear: bears will continue to find refuge from a growing, urbanizing West in the kinds of landscapes that rural landowners have long occupied, worked, and stewarded, especially those interspersed with public parcels where habitat remains intact. As long as these checkerboarded areas have water, food, cover, and distance from major population centers, they will continue to be fair game for grazing and grizzlies alike.
“We can adapt,” Hibbard says. “We’re building enough resilience into this system that we can roll with these punches, but we can’t be lackadaisical about it. We have to be proactive.”
Katie Hill is a freelance journalist, writer, and editor based in western Montana. Her writing about wildlife science, conservation, public lands issues, and hunting has appeared in a variety of publications.
Header image: Grizzly bears in Yellowstone (Sarah Sells)
