Collecting pinecones, planting seeds, and other acts of hope.

The Glacier Conservancy: https://glacier.org/ Whitebark Pine Ecosystem Foundation: https://whitebarkfound.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.

[pensive guitar music begins playing]

Doug: You get a really unique perspective being in the top of them, looking at these like big, beautiful cones. Nothing like a whitebark pine cone.

Peri: Back in July, I found myself high on a ridge on the east side of the park, overlooking the Blackfeet Reservation, listening to climbing gear jingle like wind chimes. [climbing gear clacking together]

Annie: Doug has nice long arms to reach out on those branches.

Doug: You think I have nice arms Annie?

Annie: You have nice arms, Doug. [everyone laughs]

Peri: Doug Tyte is a member of Glacier's revegetation crew. Every summer, the park sends Doug, with his long arms, and the rest of the reveg crew to find and then climb healthy whitebark pine trees that have lots of cones. And because whitebark pine cones grow way at the end of the top of their branches, Doug had to climb way up and reach way out to get them. Dangling from Doug's harness were homemade wire mesh cages, the size and shape of a gallon Ziploc bag that he slid over the ends of cone laden branches, crimping down the edges and locking the cones off from the world.

Doug: Three!

Reveg Crew: Three. Three!

Peri: Each time he put on a new cage, Doug would shout down to everyone below the number of cones in it.

Doug: Five!

Reveg Crew: Five! Five.

Peri: But that was back in July. It's a few months later now in September, and I'm revisiting the tree with Doug, only to find that not all of the cages did their job.

Peri: [in the field] Yeah, you can see the claw marks all the way up the trunk.

Peri: The fresh claw marks showed that a bear had taken interest in this tree and its cones.

Levi: See how deep the nails went in.

Peri: [in the field] Yeah, wow.

Levi: Dang.

Doug: It's pretty cool.

Peri: [in the field] It is impressive.

Doug: You can see there's tons of old claw marks too on this thing.

Levi: Yeah, this one has claw marks every year, it seems like.

Peri: After confirming that all bears had vacated the tree, we got set up to climb the tree again.

[guitar music plays softly]

Doug: [climbing gear jingling and clacking] Alright. Lanyards,.

Carleton: Four inch, you good?

Doug: Got my four inch.

Carleton: Some webbing?

Doug: I got webbing. New fancy one.

Peri: [in the field] So how long have you been climbing trees

Doug: Since I could walk. [laughs] But for the government for two years.

Peri: [in the field] So Doug's climbing up the tree, he's making it look pretty easy, actually. How many cones do you think are on this tree?

Doug: Total? I think we got an estimate when we climbed it.

Carleton: 215. He caged 107.

Peri: [in the field] Wow.

Carleton: Using twenty two cages.

Peri: [in the field] How does that compare to other trees? It's just like...

Carleton: It's pretty—it's a high number. I think our highest number of this season was 200...

Peri: The trees they climb are special. Most whitebarks I see around the park do not have hundreds of cones. It's pretty rare for these trees to start producing cones before they're at least 50 years old. And even then, the younger ones usually only manage to grow a handful.

Doug: I mean, this tree isn't that large.

Peri: [in the field] No.

Doug: But it's like a good cone producer.

Peri: After all we've learned about how many species rely on whitebark pine seeds, it seems a little strange that we're actively preventing animals from accessing them. But even on these trees, only about half the cones are caged.

Peri: [in the field] Doug actually told me a story on the way up that once he was caging cones on a tree that had sort of two main trunks coming up, and this nutcracker landed in the one next to him and was just kind of harassing him: “caw, caw, caw”—like, "what are you doing? Those are supposed to be my cones!"

Peri: Perched in the top of the tree, Doug pulls off the cages with the cones inside, then carefully tosses them down to the crew waiting below. Kind of like a bride tossing her bouquet to the waiting bridesmaids.

Doug: Okay, this is gonna be a tricky throw.

Levi: Yup.

Doug: Ready?

Levi: Yup. [catching sound]

[Headwaters season two theme starts playing: somber piano music]

Peri: So everyone is kind of packing up all their gear, and someone hands me this big burlap sack with all of the cones in it from this tree. And it's pretty light, but it kind of makes me think that there's a lot in this bag. The seeds in these cones are our answer to blister rust—they're the hope for our future forests, and they have a long journey ahead of them.

[Theme music ends]

Peri: Hi, I'm Peri.

Andrew: I'm Andrew.

Michael: And I'm Michael. This is Season Two of Headwaters, a podcast from Glacier National Park.

Andrew: This is Chapter Four of a five-episode season, which is all about whitebark pine. In the past three episodes, we've learned about why this tree is important to people and our cultures, how so many pieces of our ecosystem are connected to it, and why it's at risk.

Peri: Now we're going to meet the people trying to save it.

[short segment of guitar music plays to mark a transition]

Peri: The world of whitebark pine is full of giants. Everywhere I turn, I encounter another brilliant ecologist who's been studying these trees for longer than I've been alive. Luckily for me, a group called the Whitebark Pine Ecosystem Foundation has gathered all of these giants together. In 2021, the High Five conference, as in five-needle pines, was hosted virtually, and with help from the Glacier Conservancy, I registered to attend.

Rob: We have a terrific conference planned for you...

Peri: The conference is a three-day event with over 100 different talks, all in service of saving a tree. Sitting in to listen, I got to hear about all the work still being done to shape the future of whitebark pine restoration.

Diana T: [fading in under Peri’s narration, then back out] I look forward to seeing you all at the question and answer panel discussion, after...

Peri: And who better to talk with about the history of whitebark pine restoration than two leaders in the field?

Diana T: [voice over the phone] I'm Diana Tomback…

Peri: Diana is a professor in Integrative Biology, and one of the foremost names in whitebark pine.

Diana T: [laughs] pulling it off my shelf

Peri: Reaching up to grab it early in her video call, Diana literally wrote the book on whitebark restoration. But when she started her career in the 70s doing research on whitebark pine and Clark's nutcrackers…

Diana T: There was nothing on my radar screen, nothing on the horizon to indicate that this species would be in the trouble that it is today. We have to thank Steve Arno and Jim Brown for the foresight back in the 1980s to realize that the Northern Rockies was losing its whitebark pine.

Peri: I also connected with Bob Keane, a now-retired Forest Service scientist that has worked on whitebark for decades.

Bob: [voice over the phone] I was working with Steve Arno and his research that he was doing in the high elevations, and well, what I saw was the fact that there were many whitebark pines that were dead. And I just thought it was, this is what happens up high when plants grow, they often die because it's so cold and icy and snowy up here. But Arno said, no, no, these plants can easily handle the ice and cold. These trees are dying because of an exotic blister rust.

[slightly ominous banjo music begins playing]

Peri: There was no single turning point that woke everyone up to the decline of whitebark pine. Instead, it was this slow accumulation of new science and growing concern. That said, one moment did stand out. In 1998, Bob, Diana, and other leaders in the field gathered for a conference and presented data that showed just how rapidly whitebark was declining. But it was what happened after the conference, after the talks ended, and the posters were packed up, that Diana said was pivotal.

Diana T: And that conference, Restoring Whitebark Pine Ecosystems, is the one that really made a bunch of us think, “Where do we go from here?” So I recall when the conference was over, it was that afternoon, and everyone had picked up and gone home except us. [laughing] We were sitting around with a can of beer or something asking each other, “Where do we go next?” And a suggestion was made by Dana Perkins, who's with the BLM, that perhaps we should consider forming a nonprofit.

Peri: That casual brainstorming turned into the Whitebark Pine Ecosystem Foundation, which has been a key advocate for whitebark pine science and restoration for the last 20 years. They're the central guiding organization for whitebark pine restoration, and the group hosting this conference.

Diana T: A number of us who came out of that era came to realize that the ecosystems that we were studying, they were deteriorating from various anthropogenic problems.

Peri: [to Diana] So once you recognized that blister rust was kind of the key problem and you knew you needed to take action, how did you know what to do? Did you have to start from scratch?

Diana T: Well, the tools were there already.

Peri: