Environmental groups Thursday tried to ask a federal court to halt grizzly bear hunts in and around Yellowstone National Park in the United States.

The hunts were scheduled to start Saturday after a judge delayed his ruling after a hearing, local newspaper Idaho Statesman reported.

Attorneys representing a coalition of local tribal and conservation interests showed up in the federal court in Missoula of the U.S. state of Montana to challenge the Trump administration's decision to strip Yellowstone's grizzly bears of endangered species protections.

The decision led to the first grizzly bear hunting season in the states of Wyoming and Idaho set to start Saturday.

After the decision was made by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service last June, Wyoming drew a plan for trophy hunting of grizzlies, authorizing a hunt beginning Saturday for 22 grizzly bears in the area surrounding Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks.

Idaho also has authorized a hunt for a single grizzly bear starting on Sept. 1.

A dozen bear hunt licenses have been issued by the states out of thousands of applications. It would be Wyoming's first hunt since 1974 and Idaho's first since 1946.

Wildlife advocates then filed a lawsuit against the decision, arguing that grizzly bears are nowhere near recovery as the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service evaluated and continue to need the strong protections of the Endangered Species Act.

Thursday's federal court hearing ended on a confused note when the attorney for Wyoming proposed delaying the state's Saturday hunt start but leaving Wyoming, Montana and Idaho in charge of managing the bears in the future even if the court ruled that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service needed to revise its rule declassifying grizzlies as threatened.

U.S. District Court Judge Dana Christensen didn't respond to that offer and neither issue a ruling from the bench, just saying Thursday's oral argument "is of great assistance to making my decision."

Christensen also asked both sides not to file intermediate motions before his decision, but the environmentalists' attorneys said they would not follow that request.

"We're going to file the motion," Wildearth Guardians attorney Bethany Cotton told local Helena Independent Record newspaper minutes after Christensen recessed the hearing. "We're between a rock and a hard place. The judge hasn't ruled and the hunt starts Saturday."

The groups plan to file an emergency request with the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Tens of thousands of grizzly bears once lived in North America, but hunters killed most of them in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The population of grizzlies living in Yellowstone dipped to just 136 before it was classified as a threatened species in 1975.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service initially declared a successful recovery for the Yellowstone population in 2007 and tried to lift the hunt ban, but a federal judge ordered protections to remain in place.

The government's own estimate of the Yellowstone grizzly population was 695 in 2016.