Christy Clark was stunned last December when Montana’s governor asked her to take the helm at one of the state’s most closely watched agencies, the Department of Fish, Wildlife & Parks. She wasn’t a biologist, unlike many prior directors. And, Clark admitted, she didn’t know much about state fisheries or the nuances of hunting regulations.
“I said, ‘Governor, you really don’t know me very well,'” Clark recently told a gathering of Republican policymakers. “I said my experience and all my interactions with the service, with FWP, has been through the lens of people trying to ranch with grizzly bears.”
In her telling, speaking during the Western Congressional Caucus summit in Whitefish, Gov. Greg Gianforte told Clark that made her the perfect candidate.
At the time, Clark was head of the state Department of Agriculture. A lifelong rancher from just outside Choteau, she had first seen wolves, then grizzly bears, return to the Rocky Mountain Front. The result, she said, was a focus by state wildlife officials that often ignored the struggles of communities living alongside the recovering species.
“What was important for the governor was landowner relationships, and bridging the gap that has maybe existed between Fish, Wildlife & Parks with agriculturists,” she elaborated in an interview last week. In particular, he was interested in land access agreements, but grizzly policy is also a top priority.
Now a fresh push is underway to remove Endangered Species Act protections for the iconic predator, with decisionmakers in President Donald Trump’s administration taking the position that grizzly populations have sufficiently recovered.
Given all this, it’s maybe not surprising that under Clark’s leadership, Montana’s wildlife agency has begun shifting its message as a major information source on the Lower 48’s largest population of grizzlies.
A shift in tone
“I’m trying to change the conversation about how we talk about these carnivores, these large predators,” she said at the August meeting. “When I got to FWP, we talked a lot about, when there was a grizzly bear encounter, we talked a lot about the bear. How old she was, (whether) she was used in research, she was collared, she had a cub. It read like a grizzly bear eulogy.”
While the state agency would issue a press release for nearly every non-natural grizzly death in past years, those notices have sharply dropped in volume. So far in 2025, the agency issued about one-third as many press releases as it had by the same time a year earlier, despite similar numbers of bear deaths. The information is more sparse, with less emphasis on the circumstances leading up to the encounter.
A July press release noted a Flathead County resident at the base of the Swan Mountains had shot and killed a grizzly after it got into his chicken coop. Unlike in previous years, FWP didn’t initially indicate whether the coop was secured with electric fencing (it wasn’t) or offer up best practices for people raising chickens in places with high densities of grizzly bears.
Chris Servheen, a Missoula-based bear biologist who spent three decades as the grizzly recovery coordinator for the federal Fish and Wildlife Service, sees that shift as a missed opportunity to learn from individual bear encounters.
“We should have a detailed report on that so we can understand and learn from it,” Servheen said. “I think it’s important that we have these detailed analyses of what happened.”
Some of those details include what the person was doing, or not doing, while present in grizzly habitat. Were they hiking alone? Making enough noise? Hiking into the wind or with it? What time of day was it? Were they carrying bear spray, and was it in a place where they could readily access it?
“Bears are just out there trying to do their business and stay away from us 99% of the time,” he added. “When there’s an incident or conflict, it’s almost always due to the human behavior.”
Studies have shown that bears, and grizzlies especially, are wary of humans and will typically go out of their way to avoid them if they smell them or hear a person coming.
There are exceptions. When two men from Choteau were charged by a grizzly while picking mushrooms outside Choteau in May, Clark said they had no choice but to shoot and kill it. As usual, the wind was blowing about 30 mph that day, she said, and bear spray wouldn’t have gone very far, even if they’d been carrying it.
“Unfortunately the bear did not survive, but had they not had handguns, they would not have survived,” Clark said last week. “And I wanted (the public) to understand how terrifying that is.”
While bears defending food or cubs may “bluff charge,” actual attacks on humans are unusual, and fatal maulings are exceedingly rare. In Yellowstone National Park, which has one of the highest densities of bears, a 2025 study found the odds of injury by grizzly were 1 out of 3,600,000 visits.
The agency’s messaging on that incident focused on the fact that the two men were uninjured in the encounter, and Clark’s subsequent conversation with them. The windy conditions, whether they were carrying bear spray or whether they attempted to make noise, are details that weren’t initially provided.
FWP spokesman Greg Lemon noted the agency last year launched its “grizzly mortality dashboard,” which provides some basic information on each known death in Montana. It’s part of an effort, he said, to make those notices more consistent across all of the agency’s regional offices.
But Clark acknowledged the shift in communications reflects a shift in management priorities.
“We need to think about management now, not just conservation,” Clark said. The two concepts are intertwined, she noted, “But it’s not going to be ‘every single bear has to be saved.’ I feel like the messaging we’ve done is ‘every single bear has to be saved.'”
Threats in a post-delisting landscape
Along with Clark, a recent Trump appointee to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service also addressed policymakers at the GOP summit in Whitefish. Josh Coursey is an advisor to his fellow Wyomingite, Brian Nesvik, who was recently confirmed as the agency’s newest director. Coursey was a hunting advocate before he was selected by Trump to serve as a senior policy advisory at the agency.
“The science speaks for itself,” Coursey said, speaking alongside Clark during a panel discussion. “… It is fully recovered, and we are moving toward providing that durability to that moving forward, to have this delisted.”
Some biologists disagree. While Servheen acknowledges that overall bear numbers have reached the federal agency’s goals, he notes that’s not the only metric for success.
Since wolves lost federal protections and shifted to state management in Montana, they’ve shown remarkable resiliency. Despite increasingly heavy-handed state policies to reduce the number of wolves in Montana, FWP biologists have estimated about a third of the animals would need to be killed annually to start putting a dent in their population.
That’s not true for grizzlies. The species’ slow, steady recovery since they were listed in 1975 is in part due to keeping human-caused mortalities — the No. 1 source of grizzly deaths — at a minimum.
“You can kill 40% of wolves and they can still maintain their numbers,” Servheen said. “For grizzly bears it’s about 4%.”
One requirement for delisting is the existence of state-level policies that will keep the species viable after it loses federal protections. Servheen worries that Montana’s policies will lead to an uptick in grizzly bear deaths, especially in places outside their strongholds centered on Yellowstone and Glacier national parks. And that wouldn’t bode well for another recovery goal — interconnectedness between the populations.
“I fear they’re going to do to grizzly bears what they’re trying to do to wolves,” Servheen said. “I have full confidence in the biologists at Fish, Wildlife & Parks. But the politicians are making these laws to kill wolves, and they don’t have any love for grizzly bears either.”
Clark said Montana stands ready to assume full management of the species, with a five-year moratorium on grizzly hunting and intensive monitoring built into the state management plan. And through the agency’s annual “bear aware” events and other messaging, she said FWP continues educating ranchers, landowners and others on coexisting with grizzlies.
“I don’t want polarization, I want to move into a place where we celebrate the recovery of the bear,” she said. “The polarization that you see in the wolves, I don’t think we’re going to see in the grizzly bears.”
