An entire ecosystem held together by one tree.

The Glacier Conservancy: https://glacier.org/ Whitebark Pine Ecosystem Foundation: https://whitebarkfound.org/ Tree Huggers Comedy: https://www.treehuggerscomedy.com/ Picture of Clark’s Nutcracker: https://flic.kr/p/2mqRdzH 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.

[car driving by]

Peri: If you've ever driven the length of Going-to-the-Sun Road, you've crossed the Baring Creek Bridge—on the east side of the park. [dynamic piano music playing]

You might have been staring up at the mountains and not noticed it, but it is worth checking out. Built in 1931, the bridge is huge. One of the largest on Going-to-the-Sun Road. It's so big that there's a path you can work on that takes you under it next to the creek. And if you look up, you can see all the beautiful red and green local rocks it was built with. The rocks stack on top of one another to form a single long arch that touches down on each side of the creek. And at the apex of the arch is a single stone that's bigger, and more prominent than the rest. And that's called the keystone. If you pulled out the keystone, the rest of the stones would collapse into the creek.

[music ends]

Peri: Well, not really, in this case. The rocks on the Baring Creek Bridge are just a facade for a concrete arch. But keystones have held bridges and arches together for thousands of years. One iconic stone that transforms to unstable stacks of rock into one of the strongest and most important shapes in all of architecture.

[Headwaters Season Two theme begins: somber piano music]

Peri: In the late 1960s, ecology borrowed this concept and started using the term keystone species. The idea is that some species—like whitebark pine—are so important that they hold up the rest of the ecosystem, the way the keystone holds up the arch. If whitebark pine go extinct, then all the other species dependent on them could go extinct as well.

Peri: My name is Peri, and you're listening to Headwaters Season Two, a story of a tree over the course of a summer in Glacier National Park. Of course, this story is also about a lot more than whitebark pine. It's about the purpose of the National Park Service and our relationship with nature.

Michael: I'm Michael.

Andrew: I'm Andrew. And the three of us are Rangers here in Glacier.

Michael: You're listening to Chapter Two of Five, although we'd recommend starting with Chapter One. And if you haven't already, you could listen to season one of this podcast for an introduction to Glacier National Park.

Peri: Last time, I met whitebark pine. I spoke with foresters, rangers, artists and more to see what we can learn from a tree. Today, I'll meet the plants and animals that depend on whitebark pine.

[jaunty piano music begins]

Michael: Could you introduce us to Piney?

Brad: Yes! So yes, I have a puppet here with me, I'll pick her up. Piney is like an artificial Christmas tree that's been truly gussied up. Whose trunk has been painted white because she is a whitebark pine. [Michael laughs]

She has been giving a beautiful sequined evening gown with some pretty profound pine cone... [Michael laughs again] A pine cone bosom situation, which I will say…

Peri: Glacier has an Artist in Residence program: a way for the park to invite and host artists to visit for a month at a time, while working on a project about the park.

Michael: So she's about three and a half feet tall, three feet tall, green sequined dress, looks kind of like a–

Brad: I would say, like a lounge singer, perhaps. She's got one hand that's perpetually on her hip and one hand that she gesticulates with.

Peri: This year, one of our artists was Brad, who came to our studio with a handmade whitebark pine puppet named Piney, whose plastic needled branches have been squashed into a quasi-feminine form.

Brad: My name is Brad Einstein and I am a federally recognized forest comedian. [Michael laughs again]

Peri: Brad and his friend Kyle Neimer started Tree Huggers Comedy, where they make nature documentaries that they describe as a little John Muir and a little John Oliver. One of the videos they're working on explores a relationship, specifically one between whitebark pine and a bird called a Clark's Nutcracker.

Brad: So the whole play with this noir was that the detective was a Clark's Nutcracker, who had a very good memory for triangulating and finding things.

Peri: Clark's Nutcrackers are a beautiful gray bird that's related to crows and ravens. And they have black wings and a huge black beak that they use to crack into white bark pine cones. They extract their seeds and then cash them for the winter. Here's a clip from Brad and Kyle's video.

Video Clip of Bird Puppet: [a film reel spinning, a countdown beeps, and a playful bass line begins] The name's Clark. Clark S. Nutcracker. From nine to five, I'm a private detective. The rest of the time [caw caw sound], I’m a bird. Why am I a detective? I have a nose for it. More specifically, a beak. There's not a case this thing can't crack. More specifically, seed cases. More and more specifically [a whip cracks], pine cones. And while I’ve cracked lots of cases from lots of pines, there's only one case [romantic music begins], that cracked my heart into two.

Peri: In this bit, Clark S. Nutcracker is a detective, sporting a three-piece suit and a felt fedora. The joke is that, like a detective, these smart birds use their excellent memory to remember all the places where they've cashed whitebark pine seeds.

Brad: He was a private eye, and we kind of had a “Beautiful Mind” sort of conspiracy theory wall of him doing this triangulation. And of course, in that relationship, the whitebark pine was the stemme fatale.

Video Clip of Bird Puppet: [somber music plays] Of all the mountainside she could grow on for centuries. She had to pick this one. She had a voice like the wind [wind blows]

Video Clip, Woman’s Voice: Hey there, Clark

Video Clip of Bird Puppet: Which on second thought it probably was. Holy Crow...Three hundred years old, she had roots for days. In short, a real stemme fatale...

Brad: And hence, [Michael laughing] hence she's a little mysterious. Sassy. I don't know. A tragic female protagonist. Oh no. Her base fell off.

[pensive piano music begins]

Michael: What would I after watching this bit, you know, what, what would you hope I would get from it?

Brad: Hmm. One, I... I think the whole goal always is to kind of remove the otherness of the natural world, and use irreverence in a variety of different ways to promote reverence. Whether that is a feeling of awe towards the grandeur of the natural world, or a feeling of intimacy that like, these creatures, these relationships, this inner-species union is not so different from the relationships that we as humans have.

Peri: When I think about relationships, I see my loved ones—my family, my friends. I don't usually think of the natural world. The way plants and animals interact, the food chain we're all taught in high school, it can feel very transactional, kind of unfeeling. But is that really true? How do the bonds between plants and animals compare to our human ones? How can we relate to them? Or, as Brad said, share a feeling of intimacy with the world around us.

Peri: Biologists call an intimacy between species “symbiosis.” The literal translation from its Greek roots means “living together,” and that describes most life on Earth. Depending on one another. As humans, we depend on plants and animals to survive and to add richness and beauty to our lives. Symbiotic relationships take many forms. Sometimes, like a tick on a deer, only one member of the pair benefits. But when both benefit, like with whitebark and nutcrackers, it's called mutualism. They each gain something and they help one another.

[soft music begins]

Lisa: [wind rustling] I’m Lisa Bate, I'm a wildlife biologist here at Glacier National Park. I mean, I've talked with some other biologists when we mentioned Clark's Nutcracker, they’re like, Oh, what's that? And it's like, oh, ok. [birds chirping] You know, not everyone is aware of birds, and the important role—ecological role—they play in the ecosystem, so…

Peri: You might remember Lisa from season one of Headwaters, in our story about harlequin ducks. Well, she studies a lot of other species, including Clarks Nutcrackers. You've already heard a bit about their unique relationship with whitebark pine, and how they use their specially adapted bills to open cones, extract the seeds, and cache them in the ground.

Lisa: But you mentioned that bill, and it is stout. It's powerful, and it has to be for a reason—because most pine cones open on their own to disperse its seeds. Not whitebark. The only way it opens is with that Clarks just clobbering it. And it's just amazing to watch. And so when it opens it, that allows it to become available to all these other species, too.

Peri: One of the fun things about talking to Lisa is her enthusiasm for the animals she works with.

Lisa: And the amazing–OK–this is like the most amazing thing [others laughing] about Clark's nutcrackers to me, when I first started working on this proposal. They are the only bird in North America with a sublingual pouch. That means a pouch under the tongue. It’s, and they have co-evolved with whitebark pine to collect those seeds, they put them in that little pouch, and if you're lucky enough to see that start bulging, you can actually see the definition of the individual pine seeds.

Peri: I have to say,