Confluence | St. Mary
Description
Featuring: Debby Smith, Bob Adams, Tabitha Graves, and Lee Rademaker.
For more info, visit: go.nps.gov/headwaters
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TRANSCRIPT:
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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
WIND INTRODUCTION
Debby Smith: I know I had a number of moments early on working over at the St. Mary Visitor Center, as you kind of get to the edge of the building and the building is no longer blocking the wind. I've had things that just got sucked right out of my hand.
Andrew: That's Debby Smith, she's in charge of among other things, the St. Mary Visitor Center,
Debby: You know, it's also funny, we'll, we'll often get these high wind warnings. I think it was for 40 to 50 mile an hour gusts and maybe even as high as, as 85. And I've, I've told people that, that don't live around here, that that's our weather forecast. And they're like, Oh no, that can't possibly be right. You know, you couldn't possibly have wind that high, but, but we do.
Andrew: How does wind affect people's experience when they're visiting the St. Mary area?
Debby: Partly, it's just about the sort of obvious things like making sure their tents don't blow away and making sure when you're eating lunch, that you're, you have, you know, a hold of everything that, that you brought with you. And then there's also being able to see what the park is like, and whether it's seeing St. Mary Lake on a day that it's really windy with huge white caps. Even sometimes at the St. Mary Visitor Center on really windy days, we'll get the spray from the lake, hitting the windows on the side of the building, because it's just blowing it that far.
Andrew: And the Visitor Center is not right on the edge of the lake there. The wind has to carry that spray over a quarter mile for it to hit the building. When people are hiking in St. Mary, what are some of the effects of wind that they might see in the plants or the landscape?
Debby: One would be flagging on trees. When you see trees that basically all the branches on the windward side are broken off, or they're kind of deformed. So that side that's facing the direction from which the wind is blowing. And then it resembles a flag because all of the branches are just on the other side.
Andrew: Besides the practical side of not letting things blow away. Do you think you've learned anything from the wind there?
Debby: I think a lot of it is just learning about this place. And I mean, there's the obvious challenges that it presents to people like you were mentioning, but I think also the wind is, is something that makes the east side of the park really beautiful, and it makes it, you know, this diverse place and dynamic and harsh and wonderful all at the same time. It just adds to the experience and it, it creates the amazing place that we have on the east side.
Andrew: How does wind affect life in your area? Does it invert umbrellas, sculpt dunes, or drive wildfire? Maybe you hardly think about the wind at all. The way you interact with wind is largely dependent on where you live. In tornado alley, wind is a life-altering force, but in other parts of the country, it might be more of a curiosity. In this episode, we're going to look at two elements that, perhaps like the wind, have been eliminated as a major factor in many people's lives, but that still find a home in Glacier National Park. First, you'll hear a story about the grizzly bears in the park, and then about our dark starry night skies.
Andrew: Welcome to Headwaters - a Glacier National Park Podcast. Brought to you by the Glacier National Park Conservancy, and produced on the traditional lands of many Native American Tribes, including the Blackfeet, Kootenai, Selis and Qlispe people.
Michael: We’re calling this season: The Confluence, as we look at the ways that nature, culture, the present and the past all come together here.
Andrew: I’m Andrew.
Michael: I’m Michael.
Andrew: And we’re both rangers here. And today we're in the St. Mary Valley. St. Mary Lake is the second largest Lake here and home to some of the most breathtaking scenery anywhere in the park.
Michael: I mean, the view from Wild Goose Island overlook is even on Montana State driver's licenses. It's so beautiful.
Andrew: Really, it is?
Michael: Yeah. I mean, look at your own. It's like the, the shimmery thing in the background that they...
Andrew: Oh, yeah, there it is. Wild Goose Island.
Michael: So we're headed to St. Mary because it is a great place to look for experiences that over time have grown harder and harder to find anywhere else.
Andrew: Yeah, Glacier is in many ways, the last best place for experiences that the rest of the world may once have taken for granted, but have since faded away.
Michael: Today, we're going to focus on two of those experiences. One that it helps to get up early for. And one that it helps to stay up late.
Andrew: Yeah. Something for the early birds and the night owls.
BEARS
Michael: Now, one thing that makes Glacier special is that we are home to an abundant and diverse range of wildlife.
Andrew: We have 71 species of mammal, 276, different birds, six amphibians, and even three reptiles live here.
Michael: Yeah. And I'm curious what your experience has been Andrew, but as an Interpretive Ranger, it seemed like half of the questions I got from visitors were logistical. Like, where should I hike? Is this campground open? Et cetera. And the other half was about wildlife. Do you have moose here? Yes. Where can I see a mountain goat? That sort of thing.
Andrew: Definitely. You could make someone's whole trip by just pointing a spotting scope at a herd of bighorn sheep.
Michael: But that excitement for wildlife encounters can go both ways, cause some people are thrilled at the prospect, but others are actually scared. Glacier is home to predators like mountain lions and wolves, but the critters most people think about when they're here are bears.
[Sound of bear growling]
Andrew: [Piano music starts] We have a lot of bears here.
Michael: Both black and grizzly bears.
Andrew: As of 2018, the population of grizzly bears for the whole Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem of which Glacier is a small part, was estimated to be about 1,050 individuals. Of these about 250 to 300 would live in Glacier.
Michael: Wow.
Andrew: Some bears are gonna spend part of their lives in the parks part of their lives outside of the park. And the black bear population in Glacier was thought to be about 600.
Michael: I've heard that that's more grizzly bears per acre than anywhere else in the lower 48.
Andrew: Mmhmm.
Michael: But how do we even know that this place is huge? It's like finding a thousand needles in a million acre haystack.
Andrew: Yeah, it was actually a pretty big undertaking to get those numbers. I actually talked to Tabitha Graves, the scientist who was involved with a lot of this research.
Tabitha Graves: Hi, I'm Tabitha Graves. I am with USGS, I'm a research ecologist.
Andrew: Not only is it a massive area to survey, you have to figure out how to distinguish individual bears. So you don't just keep counting the same ones.
Michael: And I know with birds in these sort of situations, biologists will catch them and mark them with a leg band, some other animals with ear tags.
Andrew: Yeah. But capturing and marking hundreds of grizzly bears would be super expensive and time-consuming, sounds very dangerous, and would probably seriously disturb the animals. So the scientists use some really cool technological advances to measure the bear population in a different way.
Tabitha: Back in 1998, my predecessor in my job, Kate Kendall, started doing research using genetics of bears. She put out strands of barbed wire around some trees in the woods with some stinky lure in the center of it and found out that grizzly bears would go into smell that when they did that, when they walked over or under the barbed wire, a few strands of hair would be pulled out. And in that hair there's DNA in the hair follicle. And from that, you can identify individual bears.
Andrew: With the DNA captured in a hair trap. You could tell how many distinct individuals were around. This initial experiment proved the concept, and then they did a much bigger in 2004.
Tabitha: Where we got a population estimate, it was the first population estimate that had good confidence intervals and was fairly precise. That was 765 animals was the point estimate in 2004...
Andrew: From there, they took the survey even wider. And I cannot overstate how big of a project it is. They were monitoring a ton of hair traps across the whole northern continental divide ecosystem. Michael, do you want to take a guess at how many rub sites they were monitoring for bear hair?
Michael: Well, I imagine they tried to put them all over the park in the different regions. I'm gonna say, maybe like 500?
Tabitha: Um, we had across the whole ecosystem there around 4,000 rub objects per year,
Michael: 4,000? Holy crap, that's a lot!
Andrew: Yeah. And Tabitha told me that this genetic data is useful for a lot more than just those population surveys.
Tabitha: [Music starts] Yeah. That's the cool thing about having genetic data is yet you can not only identify individual bears, but you can actually see who's related to who.
Andrew: For instance, they found.
Tabitha: One male grizzly
United States
