Grizzly Bears

The bear is still there. When Johan Otter runs through the city streets in Sunday's Los Angeles Marathon, he will do so in unmarked clothes, a gentle gait, seemingly very much alone. Yet he will have 400 pounds of company. The giant grizzly he once fought to protect his daughter will be felt with every step. "In many ways," he says quietly, "the bear never left." The grizzly will be there in the simple cap he wears on his head.

After more than 30 years of strict federal protection, the Yellowstone population of grizzly bears is being removed from the endangered species list by the Bush administration. Formidable remnants of the wild frontier, the Yellowstone grizzlies, living in and around the national park, have rebounded from fewer than 200 animals in 1975, when they were listed as a threatened species, to about 600 today.

JOHAN looked up. Jenna was running toward him. She had yelled something, he wasn't sure what. Then he saw it. The open mouth, the tongue, the teeth, the flattened ears. Jenna ran right past him, and it struck him -- a flash of fur, two jumps, 400 pounds of lightning. It was a grizzly, and it had him by his left thigh. His mind started racing -- to Jenna, to the trip, to fighting, to escaping. The bear jerked him back and forth like a rag doll, but he remembered no pain, just disbelief.

HIS halo was a cage, and all Johan Otter could do was stare out through the carbon graphite rods that pinned his head in place. If he slept, he dreamed, and the dreams bordered on nightmares. He lay in a passageway somewhere between a gym and a locker room. People came and went. He didn't mind the traffic, only he was puzzled by a black object in the middle of the room. It looked like the Batmobile, dark and sinister. What was it? Uncertainty brought a tinge of adrenaline and a flood of panic.

A nature photographer mauled last week by a sow grizzly bear in Yellowstone National Park had no time to use pepper spray against the animal, a friend said Sunday. Jim Cole "does remember trying to grab his bear spray," Michael Sanders said. "He said that that he assumed that he startled the bear and the bear startled him."

As the sons of a troubled parent, life has not been easy for Scout and Montana. Their mother just could not keep away from people and their trash. And so when she broke into a -- thankfully -- unoccupied camping tent near Moose Creek, Idaho, authorities took action. In a two-day operation, the grizzly bear sow and her cubs were captured. The mother was sent to the veterinary school at Washington State University to be watched and studied.

Federal officials have begun the process of removing grizzly bears around Yellowstone National Park from the endangered species list, ending 30 years of protection and shifting responsibility for their management to state officials who may allow hunting.

A federal judge Monday restored protections for grizzly bears near Yellowstone National Park, overturning a George W. Bush administration finding that the animals had made an "amazing" and sustainable recovery. In a strongly worded order, U.S. District Judge Donald W. Molloy said that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's conclusion that the bears would find adequate food and protected habitat in Wyoming, Montana and Idaho was not supported by the government's own science, and that protections put into place for the grizzlies were not enforceable.

On April 12 of last year, state Game and Fish officers shot dead a dangerous nuisance known as Bear #G92, after the grizzly repeatedly broke into buildings searching for food on a ranch near here. The 5-year-old male was the first of 19 grizzly bears to die in the region surrounding Yellowstone National Park and one of 50 killed in the lower 48 states, making 2004 the worst year for grizzly mortality since the animal was added to the endangered species list in 1975.

After a 30-year struggle, grizzlies are multiplying throughout Yellowstone National Park as another top predator -- the gray wolf -- has helped build the bear population in a surprising way.