Trees, fish, and ferrets—what is our relationship with nature?

The Glacier Conservancy: https://glacier.org/ Whitebark Pine Ecosystem Foundation: https://whitebarkfound.org/ Revive and Restore: https://reviverestore.org/ Pictures of whitebark pine: https://flic.kr/s/aHsmWJ2S4F Ben Cosgrove Music: https://www.bencosgrove.com/

See more show notes on our website: https://www.nps.gov/glac/learn/photosmultimedia/headwaters-podcast.htm

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TRANSCRIPT:

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Lacy: Headwaters is brought to you by the Glacier National Park Conservancy.

[upbeat music begins]

Peri: This season, I set out to learn about a tree, I started by meeting Illawye, the Great Great Grandparent Tree. And I learned how ShiNaasha Pete, a CSKT Tribal Forester, views that tree as an ancestor, with knowledge and power to share. I followed Clark's nutcrackers, red squirrels and grizzly bears and saw how everything in this place is tied to everything else. I cored a tree with Professor Diana Six, and she showed me what we have to lose, and how close we are to losing it. And I followed a whitebark pine seed on its journey through the park's restoration program. Witnessing the passion and dedication of the people trying to save this tree.

[Headwaters season two theme begins, somber piano music]

Peri: Now I want to explore how our relationship with nature has changed over time. To understand how we got here and how I might build a deeper relationship with the world around me. [theme plays, and ends]

Peri: Welcome to Headwaters, a podcast made in Glacier National Park, which is the traditional lands of many Native American tribes.

Andrew: That's our host, Peri, and I'm Andrew. This is Chapter Five, the last in the season.

Michael This season is called Whitebark Pine, a whole series about a special tree, but it's also the story of Glacier National Park and how we relate to this landscape, how we protect it and how we fit into the world around us.

Peri: I've grown up with this idea that people are bad for nature, that we are the scissors snipping apart the strands of the ecosystems around us. And then we have to keep people out of nature to protect it. [jaunty music begins] But where does that idea come from?

Michael We have spent all season with whitebark pine on top of mountains. But this story, Peri, takes us to the lowest elevations in the park—to the lakes, rivers, creeks and streams that fill our valley floors, and that make up much of the park's boundary. [music ends]

Michael: So I want to start off asking, are you much of an angler, are you good at fishing?

Peri: The last time I went fishing, I was five with my granddad and an alligator ate my bobber. [Michael laughing] I have not fished since.

Michael: Ok so, so no. And to be honest, me neither. I'm not very good at it, but I think the story of fish and fish management here in Glacier is interesting because it shows how we're always re-examining how much to intervene in natural processes. The park's mission has always been to preserve and protect this place. But how do you actually do that? What is our role here? [water rushing] Let’s start in the very first years of the park over 100 years ago, a scientist named Morton J. Elrod—who would later become a naturalist for the park—started the first aquatic research project here. And as he studied our lakes and streams, he saw a problem: not enough fish.

Peri: Not enough fish?

Michael: Not enough. So he took depth measurements, and samples of possible fish foods, to determine which lakes people could add fish to.

Peri: What?

Michael: Introduce them, to take them from somewhere else and stock them in lakes where they weren't previously found, or to add to an existing population. All with the goal of enhancing recreational or sport fishing opportunities.

Peri: Gotcha.

Michael: When Glacier was founded in 1910, virtually anyone could apply for a fish stocking permit with the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries. If they approved your application, the bureau would provide you with fish and the necessary permission to place them throughout the park.

Peri: So correct me if I'm wrong. But this wasn't unusual at the time, was it?

Michael: No, not at all. Fish stocking, with the intent of improving sport fishing, was extremely common in mountain lakes across the West. Stocked by state and local governments, individuals, even environmental groups like the Sierra Club. And Glacier, too, was fully on board with the practice. The park cooperatively managed the Glacier National Park Fish Hatchery with the Fish and Wildlife Service, which raised in captivity all the native and non-native species that would be introduced to park waters.

Peri: But doesn't this clash a bit with the whole preserve our national parks unimpaired idea?

Michael: Well, they didn't think so. [pensive piano music begins] Our mission, the NPS mission, is to preserve and protect these places for future generations to enjoy. So the park wanted to make sure that if you came here hoping to catch a fish, you would! The thought was the more fish you and your kids hook while you're here, the more you'll enjoy and appreciate the park. And it's worth noting that this is the same time that the park was poisoning coyotes to ensure that the wildlife people like to see, like deer, would survive. So we were protecting the things about this place that people liked and that they could easily see on their visit.

Peri: Ok, I guess I see the logic in that. But couldn't I use that same logic to build a roller coaster at Logan past?

Michael: Hmm.

Peri: How does this all tie back to Whitebark Pine? Are you saying that planting nursery raised whitebark seedlings is the same as stocking hatchery raised fish?

Michael: Well, no. For one thing, whitebark pine is a native species that we're careful to only plant in areas that we know they used to grow, using seeds that come from this ecosystem. There was nothing at all careful about our fish stocking program. [Peri laughs] Native species, non-native species. It didn't matter. They put them all over the place, often into places that never had any trout at all. So by 1945, nearly 50 million fish had been introduced here, averaging more than a million fish a year every year since the park was founded. [music ends]

Peri: Wow.

Michael: This was massive in both scale and ambition, attempting to bend our fisheries to our will.

Peri: Well, we don't do that anymore. So what changed people's minds?

Michael: Well, the first reason people began to question this practice, was that from a sport fishery perspective, it wasn't really working.

Peri: Which was the whole reason they were doing it in the first place, right?

Michael: Yeah. Despite introducing millions of fish here, they had not created the recreational fishing utopia that they'd long dreamt of. But on top of that, there was a growing understanding that stocking was a harmful practice to native species, and that losing native fish could have negative consequences that extend far beyond our waterways. [water rushing] Glacier has 21 native fish species, and few are better known than the bull trout. Bull trout are listed under the Endangered Species Act as threatened—one step below endangered—because they've declined so dramatically over the past 100 years. In Glacier, the practice of stocking non-native fish is one of their biggest threats. Lake trout were stocked outside Glacier in Flathead Lake, and despite never being introduced directly into the park, they migrated here and have become bull trout’s enemy number one. They are bigger, the largest member of the salmonid family, and reliably out-compete bull trout for food and for space.

Peri: That kind of sounds like a recipe for disaster.

Michael: Yeah. And in the 1970s, the park began to realize that an iconic Montana fish, and an important link in our ecosystem, could disappear. So it prompted a bit of an identity crisis.

Peri: It sounds like we had to decide exactly what we're protecting here, native species or just things people enjoy.

Michael: Exactly. And the park decided that our sport fisheries, while important, couldn't take priority over our native biodiversity, let alone harm it. And in 1972, Glacier ended its fish stocking program, adopting a do no harm approach to our fisheries.

Peri: But they were stocking fish in the park for, what 60 years? Wasn't the damage kind of already done?

Michael: Yeah.

Peri: Cat out of the bag, the fish out of the net?

Michael: [laughing] Oh gosh. [somber piano music begins]

Michael: Well, biologists recognized at the time that these impacts from fish stocking would be hard to undo, and things continued to get worse for bull trout. By the 21st century, lake trout had found their way into well over half of the lakes were bull trout are found, which in the park, is only 17 to begin with. Nearly 40 years after ending the fish stocking program, it became clear that do no harm wasn't going to cut it if we wanted to preserve bull trout. So in yet another reexamination of our mission, the park decided that preserving this place required undoing the harm of our predecessors.

Peri: How do we go about doing that?

Michael: Well, just like whitebark pine, the effort to restore native fisheries goes way beyond Glacier's boundaries. Down in Yellowstone, in Flathead Lake, lots of other places, biologists are undertaking a years-long project to physically remove lake trout from waters where they threaten native species. Around here, Quartz Lake is kind of the prime example. Every year, with funding from the Glacier National Park Conservancy, the fisheries crew heads up to Quartz Lake in the North Fork, hops on a boat and lowers gill nets into the lake. If they catch a bull trout, they let it go