SQUIRREL, Idaho (AP) - Cattle ranchers Larry and Deanna Orme have been charged by a grizzly and already have lost eight calves to bears this year. Blair and Velma Calaway, also ranchers, had a bear ransack their cabin near Yellowstone's southwest boundary.

The ranchers have learned to tolerate grizzlies. Whether other Idahoans do will play a critical role in determining whether the bears continue to thrive.

Grizzlies were all but gone in eastern Idaho three decades ago. In the 1970s, they were declared threatened under the federal Endangered Species Act.

Today, they're back, rising from fewer than 200 to more than 600 throughout the Yellowstone area. A 2002 Idaho law allows bears to occupy "some limited areas" outside of a recovery zone outside the park.

The Bush administration is expected to propose removing Yellowstone's grizzlies from the threatened species list soon. That would return management of the bears back to the states and make it easier to kill marauding bears.

"I view that as an evolutionary process in Idaho," Chris Servheen, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service grizzly bear recovery coordinator, told the Idaho Statesman. "The average person who works, lives or plays in bear habitat has changed the way they act."

Even though the bear has come back naturally, its return has prompted a response in Idaho similar to the reintroduction of wolves by the federal government. Many people don't want them here.

"There certainly are places that may be appropriate for grizzly bears, but I don't want them in my back yard," said Senate Pro Tem Robert Geddes, R-Soda Springs.

The grizzly grows to 600 pounds, can run faster than a horse, and occasionally eats people. There was about one human injury per year from grizzly bears in the backcountry in Yellowstone from 1970 through 1997.

When Meriwether Lewis and William Clark first arrived in the West 200 years ago, more than 100,000 grizzly bears roamed the area. Now 1,200 to 1,400 survive in and around wilderness areas and national parks. In the Yellowstone area, grizzly bears are again expanding their range east, south and west.

Idaho has always had grizzly bears in the far north Selkirk and Cabinet-Yaak Mountains, and in east Idaho near Yellowstone National Park. They lived in central Idaho until the late 1940s, when they disappeared.

But in eastern Idaho, grizzlies were rare visitors after the 1940s. Those bears that wandered out of Yellowstone into the Targhee National Forest disappeared into forest and rangelands controlled and patrolled by ranchers and sheep herders.

"The bears that went there didn't live very long," Servheen said.

Today, the sheep are the endangered species on the slopes of the Tetons and in the rest of prime grizzly habitat in Idaho's section of what is known as the greater Yellowstone ecosystem.

A cooperative program of environmental groups, the Forest Service and sheep ranchers bought out the federal grazing units in Idaho's grizzly country. The Forest Service also has aggressively closed roads that take poachers and other threats to grizzlies deep into their favorite haunts.

"These bears are beginning to make an effort to recolonize Idaho," said Charles Schwartz, the leader of the Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team in Yellowstone.

Schwartz's team radio-collared five bears this year so the biologists can monitor their movements. They learned that the bears were spending much of their time outside the 9,200-acre core recovery zone, an area larger than Connecticut that spreads into three states.

"There's no doubt about it, we're seeing bears moving outside of the greater Yellowstone ecosystem westward," Schwartz said.

Grizzly bears have shared space with Blair Calaway's cattle along the southwest edge of Yellowstone National Park for years. He and his riders see bears regularly.

"Every grizzly that kills livestock should be exterminated, and ranchers shouldn't have to go through the red tape," Calaway said.