Elderly Yellowstone Grizzly Named Scarface Shot And Killed — Death Being Investigated


An elderly Yellowstone grizzly nicknamed Scarface had survived 25 harsh winters and violent scraps with other bears in the national park. What ultimately felled him wasn’t old age, but a gunshot wound.

Now state authorities and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service have launched an investigation into the grizzly’s shooting death, since the animal is protected by the federal government and the state of Montana, CBS News reported. The only acceptable reason to kill a grizzly is self-defense.

Scarface was shot by persons unknown in November 2015, and the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife, and Parks has just confirmed the death as suspicious. Known to Yellowstone officials as No. 211, the grizzly was fatally shot in the Little Trail Creek drainage north of Gardiner on the Gallatin National Forest, just outside Yellowstone’s northern reaches, the Casper Star Tribune reported.

One of 750 grizzlies at Yellowstone, the bear was a favorite of tourists and wildlife photographers, some of whom saw him every year for decades. One of those photographers is Sandy Sisti, who saw him for the first time in 2011 and snapped his picture every year after. The last time she saw him, she was “very thin” and “looked terrible.”

“I’m just really kind of choked up. He was an icon in the park. There was just something about him. He had so much character and, oh my gosh, he’d been in the park since before the wolves were introduced.”

The grizzly had recently lost about half his body weight. Yellowstone officials said that in his prime, Scarface grew to 600 pounds — as big as bears get.

He was first captured, collared, and released when he was 3-years-old and was captured 16 more times after that by biologists, which made him “one of the most studied bears” in Yellowstone. But last year, the animal weighed in at only 338. This was likely due to his advanced age; most Yellowstone bears die at age 11, and less than 5 percent make it to 25.

The so-called “king of the woods,” the old grizzly was distinctive for his looks as well as his age. The right side of his face was scarred and his ear damaged so that it “flopped over,” the Washington Post noted. He likely earned the scars fighting other bears over women or for dominance or while claiming deer, elk, or bison carcasses.

Yellowstone’s bear management program leader, Kerry Gunther, said that “his scarring was more severe than many others.”

Two years ago, nature photographer Simon Jackson wrote about the grizzly on his blog; he’d seen the bear 20 times over the years.

“I’ve seen him almost kill a black bear for getting too close to his carcass in Antelope Valley and I’ve seen him barely bat an eyelash at people who find themselves far too close. There is no one animal that has inspired me like Scarface nor any animal that has played such a profound role in defining the person I’ve become.”

After news emerged that the old bear had been shot, he described emotions alternating between “shock, sadness, anger and a profound sense of loss.”

Meanwhile, the fact that this beloved bear was shot to death is bound to spark fresh opposition to a plan by Fish and Wildlife to lift the animal’s federal protections and allow hunting in Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming. The animals were deemed threatened in the 1970s after hunting decreased their population to less than 150, which has since recovered.

Regardless, wildlife organizations are fighting the proposal; the Sierra Club argues that “bears’ naturally slow reproductive rate, loss of key food sources to climate change, and state plans to reduce numbers through methods like trophy hunts, all spell disaster.”

Jackson hopes officials will continue to protect the bears, in honor of the shot grizzly.

“Nothing will bring back our beloved Scarface, but we can still do right by the many bears he fathered and all of the bears that shared the landscape he once roamed.”

[Image via Georgia Evans/Shutterstock]

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