WTE: The Grizzly Details

Mark Thomas Uptain was a devoted husband and father of five children and an elder at First Baptist Church in Jackson, Wyoming. He was a community-minded businessman, an outdoorsman, and a part-time hunting guide. He was killed by a grizzly bear on September 14, 2018.

Uptain was retrieving an elk with his client when a sow charged him and killed him after a protracted struggle. Details are sketchy, however it seems that he fended off the initial attack and walked about 50 yards uphill when the bear returned with her cub killed him with an instantly fatal bite.

Uptain’s body was found on the following afternoon. An empty can of bear spray was recovered nearby. Based on his injuries, wardens and biologists concluded that both the sow and her cub together attacked the guide.

On Sunday, September 16, searchers returned to the scene and killed both bears. Dan Thompson, Game and Fish’s large carnivore chief, gave the order. The she-bear smelled of bear spray, confirmation that they had killed the culprits.

“She was teaching an offspring that killing humans is a potential way to get food,” Thompson explained. “It’s not something we want out there on the landscape.”

The investigators and wildlife biologists remain puzzled by the behavior of these bears. To be sure, grizzly bears are aggressive and inherently dangerous. However, it is highly unusual for them to attack human beings unprovoked.

Almost every grizzly fatality can be traced either to a sow protecting her threatened cub, or either sex fighting for a carcass that it had claimed. In this case, neither scenario was true. Rather, every sign indicates that the sow and her cub stalked the two men. This behavior is a frightening development.

Sy Gilliland, owner of SNS Outfitter and Guide, has 41 years of experience as a guide in Wyoming and Montana. He is currently a member of the governor’s Animal Damage Management Board. Commenting on Uptain’s death, he said, “I can only imagine how horrific this was. You’ve got a bear population that’s basically un-hunted, is an apex predator, and has no fear of humans.”

He speaks for many in the Yellowstone area who have been trying for more than a decade to return management of the grizzlies to local control.

There have been only twelve Grizzly fatalities in Wyoming’s statehood. Prior to 1975 there were only four, but in 1975 the federal government listed grizzlies in the Yellowstone area as a threatened species. Since 1982, we have seen eight people killed by grizzlies.

The National Park Service website says that in 1975 there were only 136 grizzlies. Federal and state agencies created a bear recovery plan in 1993 that called for three specific benchmarks to be met for six consecutive years before they could be delisted. By 2003 every requirement had been met.

Still, it took four more years of legal wrangling to delist the bears in 2007. Immediately, radical environmentalists sued and, by 2009, a federal judge had ordered the relisting of grizzlies.

After eight more years of study and a steadily growing population, U.S. Fish and Wildlife again delisted the bears in 2017. Nobody knows how many grizzlies are in Wyoming today.

They are only officially counted in the Designated Management Area (DMA) surrounding Yellowstone National Park. The most reasonable estimates, in this area alone, are well over 1,000. That number doesn’t even include the bears in the park itself or those outside the DMA--like those recently reported in Cody, Dubois and near Thermopolis.

To cull the grizzly population in the DMA, Wyoming issued 23 licenses for a short season to begin on September 1. However, two days before it was to begin a federal judge in Missoula, Montana blocked the hunt. Last week he unilaterally returned the bears to “threatened species” list.

Something must be done.

Not only have most of Wyoming’s grizzly fatalities occurred since they were listed in 1975, but they are growing more frequent with every passing decade. Additionally, of three grizzly fatalities in Wyoming’s 128-year history, two have occurred in the past eight years.

Every year the number of grizzly-human encounters grows. They have become so common that they are hardly reported any more. Gilliland said, “We’re at a point where the bears need to be under state management. If we don’t do it with sportsmen and hunters, we have to do it with control action. And that control action means government wildlife personnel killing rogue bears as they did last Sunday morning.”

Every year government wildlife managers kill 15-20 bears that have become dangerous. About the same number are killed by hunters in self-defense or by ranchers protecting their livestock.

Now that the delisting battle has been raging for fifteen years, not only are visitors to the park in greater danger, but Wyoming’s citizens are increasingly threatened outside the park. Mark Uptain is only the latest casualty. There will be more.

The 1993 grizzly recovery plan was designed to balance a healthy grizzly population with common-sense safety for Wyoming’s citizens. It’s time that we value human life enough to follow it.