#sorry for hyperfixating

October 2019: The first grizzly bear in over a decade to enter and remain for a significant amount of time far within Idaho borders has now returned closer to its home within Montana borders. After enjoying most of the 2018 activity season within Idaho’s Clearwater drainage, the bear returned to its permanent home in Montana’s Cabinet Mountains to den for the winter. The bear then awoke in early 2019 before again traveling to Idaho, staying in the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness during summer 2019.

This seems like pretty routine news if you’re from this region, but it’s still a Big Deal because, even though grizzlies haven’t permanently occupied central Idaho’s mountains for decades, environmental groups and US agencies have long recognized the “Bitterroot Recovery Zone” (containing the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness) as a formal zone ideal for potential re-establishment of grizzlies, since so much of central Idaho’s mountains are within designated wilderness areas. Grizzlies weren’t detected in the Bitterroots after 1946, but one was killed by a hunter in the nearby North Fork Clearwater drainage in 2007.

-----

In 2018, this three-year-old male bear, from the Cabinet-Yaak population, crossed the Clark Fork River, Interstate 90, and the Bitterroot Divide to enter the Idaho panhandle, and then returned to the Cabinets to den for the winter. But then, in 2019, the bear returned to Idaho, crossing the divide again, and traveled through the St. Joe watershed and lush cedar-hemlock forest of the Kelly Creek area before crossing the Lochsa River to reach the Selway-Bitterroot area.

I couldn’t find any maps of this bear’s journey, but I tried to draw it on this map of current (as of 2018) grizzly bear distribution range, from US Fish and Wildlife Service. [Source.]

And here’s a much larger file size. [I added the text at the bottom.]

--

From the Lewiston Tribune, 11 October 2019:

A grizzly bear that spent much of the summer in the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness Area has nudged north and west into Montana. The 3-year-old griz that has shown an affinity for exploration is still in the Bitterroot Mountains but is now north of U.S. Highway 12. Wayne Kasworm, a biologist for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service at Libby, Mont., said the bear is roaming around the South Fork of Fish Creek drainage, about 15 miles north of Lolo Pass. [...] Kasworm said the bear, whose location is tracked via a satelite collar, had gone missing for about 2½ weeks. But the collar began sending locations again this week. [...] He speculated the huckleberry crop that the bear and other grizzlies and black bears have likely subsisted on for much of the late summer is now pretty well spent. Bears are now focusing on things like the berries of mountain ash trees. [End of excerpt.]

There’s a lot more content about this bear’s journey here: [Source.]

And another article from Coeur d’Alene / Post Falls Press, 1 August 2019: [Source.]

-----

Here’s a thing. [Source: Western Wildlife Outreach.]

[The Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness, where this bear spent the summer, is located within the zone marked “BE.”]

This is also a Big Deal because the bear’s presence in the Bitterroot region is a step towards reconnecting megafauna presence and habitat in the Yellowstone and Salmon River Mountains regions with habitat in British Columbia, Glacier National Park, and the Canadian Rockies. The potential reconnecting of contiguous habitat in the central Idaho with habitat in the Selkirks, Cabinets, and Northern Continental Divide is emblematic of the locally famous “Yellowstone-to-Yukon corridor” concept; or, the establishment of unbroken, undeveloped ecosystems extending along the Rockies from Yukon to Yellowstone.

On that note: Craighead Environmental Research Institute worked with British Columbia agencies and ecology labs in the US to make some nice maps of contiguous habitat corridors in the inland temperate rainforest region, which is the pivotal corridor connecting central/southern Idaho habitats with Canadian environments. [Here, I added the superfluous text.]

All 6 of these species actually are still present in all of the regions marked in deep blue on this map. [Except for the caribou; the caribou no longer lives south of the Canadian border.]

Aside from the grizzly bear, other iconic mountain and forest species which currently live along the Bitterroot slopes of the forested Idaho-Montana border, and which similarly rely on and benefit from this habitat corridor, are black bear; gray wolves; lynx; mountain lion; moose; elk; wolverine; fisher; marten; mountain goat; inland redband trout; bull trout; etc.