Federal wildlife officials weren’t directly involved in the management of Grizzly 399 until fall 2020, when federal agents investigated a homeowner in Jackson Hole’s Solitude Subdivision for feeding generations of offspring born to the famed grizzly bear. No charges were filed.  By the following year, averting conflicts with Grizzly 399 had evolved into an all-hands-on-deck situation. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service was going to great lengths to keep the savvy, but sometimes-beleaguered sow grizzly alive. Conflicts with the famous, yet wild resident of Jackson Hole were stacking up as she pursued long walkabouts south of her normal haunts in Grand Teton National Park.  “Because there was so much national interest in her, we put a significant amount of resources in trying to manage the situation,” Grizzly Bear Recovery Coordinator Hilary Cooley said on Wednesday.  Grizzly bear 399 and her four cubs eat molasses-enriched grain left outside a home in the Solitude subdivision south of Moose in the fall of 2020. The homeowner, who was known by local wildlife managers to have fed moose on her property for years, was the subject of a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service investigation related to the grizzly bear feeding for potential violation of the Endangered Species Act. (U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service) Cooley retold that history while addressing the Interagency Grizzly Bear Committee’s Yellowstone Ecosystem Subcommittee, which met for the first time since a commuter struck and killed the 28-year-old sow in what authorities described as a faultless accident on Oct. 22. She also spoke candidly about navigating the inherent controversy of making decisions about how to handle a conflict-prone animal beloved by people around the world.   “The public scrutiny, I’ve never experienced anything like this,” Cooley told members of the subcommittee. “This is probably the biggest challenge of my career.”  “[Grizzly 399] highlighted these difficult management questions that we still need to grapple with,” Cooley said.  Grizzly 399 helped solve some of the management problems herself — at least in Teton County. When the bruin started taking sojourns into southern Jackson Hole four autumns ago with four cubs at her side, there were holes in local zoning regulations that could have spelled real trouble for bears. That’s since changed.  Hilary Cooley, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s grizzly bear recovery coordinator, listens to a May 2023 meeting about Yellowstone-region grizzlies in Cody. (Mike Koshmrl/WyoFile) “I know that those efforts to codify food storage ordinances in the county were a result of her,” Cooley said.  Cooley wasn’t the only federal wildlife official to reflect Wednesday on the  storied sow grizzly. Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team leader Frank van Manen put the record-breaking female’s history into the context of grizzly bear recovery in the Yellowstone region generally. “She was born in 1996, and at the time of her birth the population was about little over 500 bears in the ecosystem,” van Manen said. Today, there are an estimated 1,000-plus grizzlies just in the portions of the Yellowstone region where managers keep track. “During the lifespan of a single individual bear, to see that change in the population is pretty remarkable,” he said.  At the time of Grizzly 399’s first capture in 2001, the then-little-known sow lived on the southern edge of grizzly range — the occupied habitat line cut right through the middle of Grand Teton National Park. Today, grizzlies roam the entire park and many of the peripheral mountain ranges in the region.  “She was really kind of at the forefront of range expansion,” van Manen said.  Grizzly 399, right, and the sow’s yearling offspring in summer 2024. (Thomas Mangelsen/Images of Nature) Other lesser-known sows also contributed to the “conservation success.” Those bears, he said, “were just living quiet lives out in more remote places” and their lives may forever remain a mystery.   Grizzly 399, however, gave the public — literally millions of people, over the decades — a rare look into the lives of a large omnivore species that don’t always have it easy living in the modern world.  “To the extent that we can admit [it] as government biologists, she was special,” Teton Park science and resources chief Yvette Converse told her fellow committee members on Wednesday. “She provided a unique glimpse into the lives of wild bears and insight into how bears use the landscape.” BEFORE YOU GO… If you learned something from this article, pay it forward and contribute to WyoFile. Our work is funded by readers like you who are committed to unbiased journalism that works for you, not for the algorithms. RELATED Goodbye, 399: Jackson Hole, global admirers, send off the world’s most famous grizzly Authorities: Driver hit Grizzly 399 while going speed limit, killing famous bear almost instantly The post Grizzly recovery boss: Public scrutiny over 399 ‘probably the biggest challenge of my career’ appeared first on WyoFile .