This Week in Yellowstone: July 23rd to July 29th, 2026

This week's Yellowstone news, so there's a few things to discuss.

The first is grizzly bear news.

I'm going to be getting into this a lot more as the year goes on, but I just want to give a quick update right now, and then it will make more sense in later weeks when I talk about this more.

So the debate over delisting grizzly bears in the Rocky Mountains has intensified again, but right now bears have not been removed from federal protection under the Endangered Species Act.

However, on July 14th of this year, the U.S. Department of Interior announced a revised proposal that would give states and tribes greater flexibility to manage conflicts with grizzly bears while maintaining the species' current threatened status.

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum described the proposal as a step toward returning more wildlife management authority to western states, but emphasizes that it does not delist grizzlies or immediately change existing protections.

The proposal follows a January 2025 decision by the U.S.

Fish and Wildlife Service to deny petitions for Montana and Wyoming seeking to delist grizzly bears in the Greater Yellowstone and Northern Continental Divide ecosystems.

Instead, the agency proposed managing grizzlies as a single lower 48 state population while retaining federal protections and allowing limited additional flexibility for responding to conflicts with livestock and human safety.

A final decision has been delayed.

The U.S.

Fish and Wildlife Service extends its deadline for completing rulemaking until December 2026, meaning that grizzly bears across the northern Rockies remain federally listed as threatened while the agency reviews public comments and evaluates its final approach.

Supporters of the greater state management argue that grizzly populations around Yellowstone and Glacier have recovered biologically and should be managed by state wildlife agencies.

However, conservation organizations counter that by saying that continued federal protection is necessary to promote long-term genetic connectivity between bear populations and ensure recovery across a broader portion of the species' historic range.

Now, obviously, there's a lot going on here.

I wanted to just mention it briefly to let everybody know, like, hey, there are some big things coming along that could really impact what grizzly bear populations look like in the region.

As of right now, nothing has been fully decided.

However, it looks like the states are going to be able, in the future, to control grizzly bear hunts for the first time in many of our lifetimes.

And...

A lot of other regulations.

Now, I bring that up because it's going to look very similar, potentially, to how the wolf hunts are done all around the region, which, if you pay attention, the wolf hunts are not rooted much in science or healthy populations.

The Montana State Fish and Wildlife, pretty sure it was them, might have been the Forest Service.

I should have written this down, but one of these groups just admitted that they probably overestimated how many wolves there were.

So the state is actually killing too many or allowing hunters to kill too many wolves based on what the population is.

This probably will be an issue with the grizzly bears if a hunt is allowed to happen, so I'm going to keep my thumb on this and talk to everybody and get some good information for you in the future.