Federal officials signaled Friday that they have rejected Idaho’s petition to strip Endangered Species Act protections from grizzly bears in the Lower 48 states.

At the same time, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service indicated more modest proposals submitted by Wyoming and Montana merited closer examination. Officials from the agency will spend the next year further studying petitions from Idaho’s neighbors.

Montana asked the federal government that grizzlies in the Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem, a vast area in northwest Montana centered around Glacier National Park, be removed from the endangered species list. There are about 1,000 grizzly bears in the population. Likewise, Wyoming asked for the grizzlies in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem population, also about 1,000 strong, to be stripped of federal protections.

Idaho has far fewer grizzlies — about 50 in the northern tip of the state and a small fraction of the Yellowstone population in its southeastern coroner. But Gov. Brad Little and the Idaho Department of Fish and Game submitted a petition last year seeking to remove ESA protections for grizzlies across the entire Lower 48 states, arguing the initial listing of the bears in 1975 was in error.

On Thursday, Little sent a letter to Interior Sec. Deb Haaland and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Director Martha Williams that threatened to file a lawsuit if the agency didn’t act on its petition. The Fish and Wildlife Service published an advanced note in the Federal Register on Friday saying the Montana and Wyoming petitions may be warranted but Idaho’s was unconvincing.

“We also found that a petition to delist the grizzly bear in the lower-48 states on the basis of it not being a valid listable entity did not present substantial scientific or commercial information indicating that the petitioned actions may be warranted; therefore, we will take no further action on that petition,” according to the Fish and Wildlife Service note that will be published in full on Monday.

A 1993 grizzly bear recovery plan set the stage for the bears to be delisted based on numbers in certain recovery areas, such as the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. However, the petition says court rulings, often based on the way bears were originally listed, have prevented that from happening.

Yellowstone-area grizzly bears were delisted in 2017, but a 2020 court ruling restored federal protections based on multiple factors, including how it would affect bears outside of the recovery area.

Idaho also claims that because there are 60,000 grizzly bears combined in Canada and Alaska, the animals should not be considered endangered.

Little said Idaho prefers the state and federal government to spend limited resources on recovery rather than litigation.

“However, we cannot continue to accept vague excuses and inexplicable delays by USFWS representatives concerning grizzly bear delisting,” he wrote. “The current listed entity does not meet the definition of ‘species’ under the Endangered Species Act (ESA), we have robust grizzly bear populations that continue to cause conflict in our rural communities, and we have addressed the concerns of prior judicial reviews.”

The Fish and Wildlife Service frequently misses deadlines on petitions to add or remove plants and animals to the list of federally protected species and often faces lawsuits because of it. For example, a coalition of environmental and animal rights groups sued the agency last year after it failed to act on their petition to restore ESA protections to gray wolves in Idaho, Montana and Wyoming. The case is pending and the service has not yet made a determination on the petition.