What if, year after year, citizens` bear supporters could buy a non-consumable grizzly day that generates considerable costs for the gaming and fish department? In 1983, when the assistant secretaries of the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Department of the Interior signed the Interagency Grizzly Bear Committee`s Bear Charter with the governors of Wyoming, Montana, Idaho and Washington, they agreed that cooperation and participation between federal and regional authorities was perpendicular to the best interests of grizzly bears. The Committee`s objective is to involve senior federal and regional officials in coordinating research, policy, management and planning activities to facilitate the recovery of grizzly bears. Like the Safe Harbor Agreements, the Insurance Candidate Protection Agreements (CCAAs) should encourage landowners who are willing to voluntarily commit to supporting threatened species. CCAas are available to any non-federal landowner. For example, a private landowner, a local or state authority, a tribal government or a non-governmental organization. These agreements are for species identified by the service as candidates for listing or for species likely to become candidates. The CCAA`s policy and related rules were adopted in 1999.
To date, we have 10 CCAAs for 24 types of candidates or declines and about 300,000 hectares. Several CCAAs are being prepared with individual owners, as well as programmatic agreements with states where several landowners can voluntarily participate by containment. For many candidates and declining species, we believe that a broader use of CCCA can significantly reduce the need for listing. In 1800, an estimated 50,000 grizzly bears lived in the western United States, but only a few hundred remained in the 1930s. Species decline is the result of human intolerance of bears, aggressive killing campaigns and relentless interventions in habitat. For years, population survival depended on a few remaining bears in Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks, which made Grizzlies a refuge, the habitat having disappeared until 1975, when they were considered threatened under the Endangered Species Act (ESA).