As Grizzlies Come Back, Frustration Builds Over Continued Protections
Trina Jo Bradley squints down at a plate-sized paw print, pressed into a sheet of shallow snow.
She reaches down with fingers outstretched, hovering her palm over a sun-softened edge. Her hand barely covers a third of the track.
"That's a big old foot right there," she says, with a chuckle. "That's the one where you don't want to be like: 'Oh! There he is right there!"
Bradley, like many ranchers, applies a wry sense of humor to things that feel out of her control.
Growing up here on the Rocky Mountain Front, where prairie meets mountain, she rarely saw grizzlies. Now, she sees them all of the time. Some nights, her family watches the massive carnivores lumber by outside their living room window. Bradley says they're majestic.
"As long as they mind their own business and stay out of my cows, I could really care less if they're here," she says. "I enjoy having them here and I think most ranchers do."
Like most ranchers, Bradley and her husband have been largely accommodating of grizzly bears as their population has rebounded and they've spread from the mountains into the more-populated plains. They've started storing food for their cattle in a raised, bear-proof container. Neighbors have lined entire pastures with electric fencing. Bradley's daughter now knows not to leave the yard.
But frustration is growing.
Since being listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act in 1975, grizzly bear populations in northwest Montana and the Greater Yellowstone Area have more than tripled in size, thanks, in no small part to a hard-earned tolerance and efforts from people like Bradley to reduce conflict between human and bear.
