Whitebark Pine | Chapter Two

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

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, I've talked with a lot of people who love these birds, and no one has been so excited about their sublingual pouch.

Andrew: Yeah, no kidding. So it's basically the bird version of a squirrel stuffing food in its cheeks?

Peri: Pretty much.

Lisa: But then they use that little pouch to go fly off, and then they bury those seeds like two or three at a time. And they are, their memories are phenomenal. And they can remember, like 98 percent of the places where they...

Peri: Each individual can cache anywhere between thirty and a hundred thousand seeds in a year. And in a win-win scenario, the birds like to cache the seeds and open areas, like recent burns, where the terrain is easy to memorize and there's no shade to block the growth of young trees.

Lisa: They are so smart that they can remember where 98 percent of those seeds have been cached. But it's the two percent—the one to two percent that they can't remember or they don't get to—that's what germinates into the next generation of whitebark pine. So it is, it's just this fabulous mutualistic relationship that's evolved over the millennium.

Peri: So whitebark pine depends on Clark's nutcrackers to reproduce. They need the birds to distribute and plant their seeds for them. But it might go the other way too. Nutcrackers can survive without whitebark pine seeds, they can eat other foods and get by, but the fewer whitebarks there are, the fewer nutcrackers there tend to be. And scientists have observed that in years with very small cone crops, nutcrackers are less likely to reproduce.

Peri: You've probably heard of the birds and the bees, but this is the birds and the trees. It's a beautiful thing, these birds and trees in this ancient, balanced and mutualistic relationship. In a way, I almost feel jealous. I'd love to have that close connection with the world around me. And I don't think I'm alone in that... Humans need community, and we all want to feel like we belong. [pensive music begins] But being part of a community means that you need to give back as much as you receive, whether with friends and family or with your natural environment. There has to be taking and giving, or else you slip from mutualism to something else... Instead of the bird and the tree, it's the tick on the deer. Like any relationship, it's a balancing act. When there aren't enough whitebark pine cones, nutcrackers can end up eating every last seed, turning them from seed dispersers into seed predators.

[music ends]

Andrew: Clark's nutcrackers and Whitebark Pine have this mutualistic relationship where the bird feeds on the seeds and the tree depends on the bird to plant the seeds and to sow the next generation. But lots of other species depend on whitebark too.

[upbeat banjo music begins]

Kate: Whitebark pine seeds are an excellent food source for a variety of birds and mammals; woodpeckers, jays, ravens, chickadees, nuthatches, finches feeding on whitebark pine, as well as grouse, ptarmigan, chipmunks, ground squirrels and of course, the red tree squirrel. Mice, I’ve, I've found whitebark pine seeds in coyote scats, and I've even seen evidence of deer feeding on them.

Andrew: That's Kate Kendall. She worked for decades studying grizzly bears here in Glacier, as well as all around northwest Montana, and in Yellowstone National Park. In addition to all those birds and mammals that will eat whitebark seeds, bears—and especially grizzly bears—love to eat them too.

Kate: It's a highly preferred food. I even know of a study in northern or central British Columbia, where there are spawning salmon. Bears choose to go up and feed on whitebark pine seeds when they're available, even when there are spawning salmon in the creeks below.

Andrew: How did you realize that grizzlies were using whitebark pine seeds?

Kate: Well, first of all in Yellowstone we had a lot of radio-collared bears, and we could see their movements moving to whitebark pine stands in the high elevation, uh, late summer and fall. We also paid a lot of attention to bear scats, or their feces. And it was very obvious when bears had been feeding on whitebark pine seeds, there's almost nothing else in their scats, and so it's very easy to tell what they've been eating.

Andrew: But while Kate knew that bears were eating whitebark pine seeds, there were still a few mysteries. For starters, how were they getting the seeds out of whitebark pine cones? No one had seen it happen in person, so Kate took a bunch of whitebark pine cones to the Boise Zoo to find out.

Kate: So, I took a bunch of cones and then a individual pile of seeds that I had laboriously extracted from the cones [upbeat music begins] to the Boise Zoo, where there were two 10 year old grizzly bears that had been orphaned when their mother died in Yellowstone, when they were just cubs. They had gone through one year of feeding with her, and then the next spring, the mother died and they were put into a zoo, so they had been in captivity for nine years.

Andrew: Kate hope these two orphaned cubs would show her how bears accessed whitebark pine seeds.

Kate: And they still had their regular food which were apples, carrots out there. And as soon as they release those bears into the enclosure, they just absolutely made a beeline to the pile of cones, sat down and started crunching them up. They break them up by biting them, and then they'd let that fall to the ground and they rake out the debris and just very dexterously lick up just the individual seeds. And if they got a cone scale in their mouth, they, it would come get ejected out of the side of their mouth. It was just unbelievable that that...

Andrew: This behavior couldn't have been learned in captivity. The bears remembered the trick that their mom had taught them that one fall, nine years earlier. However, they didn't touch the seeds that Kate had carefully extracted from the cones.

Kate: And I don't understand this, but they never touched that pile of seeds, and sadly, that all got washed down the drain at the end of the day.

Andrew: All your hard work?

Kate: All my hard work, and it was really hard to extract the seeds. Whitebark pine cones are extremely resinous, and I would get my fingers completely glued together and have to pry them apart with solvent in order to, like continue.

Andrew: And the bears don't get their lips glued shut by the pine resin?

Kate: They don't! But, I have pictures of bears, and they had been feeding on whitebark pine cones before the big die off and they had no hair on their bellies because so much resin had collected. And then when they tried to get the resin off, they like pulled out all their hair. They had clubbed feet. Their front paws were just completely matted with resin.

Andrew: It's that good? They wouldn't stop?!

Kate: They wouldn't stop. Nope.

Andrew: But even knowing how bears opened the cones, it's hard to imagine grizzlies getting to the cones in the first place. Whitebark pine cones are kind of unique because they sit way up high in the tree at the very ends of the branches. Black bears are excellent climbers, but grizzly bears are not.

Michael: As it turns out, grizzly bears rely on another animal to do their dirty work and retrieve all the cones for them.

[red squirrel chattering]

Michael: You recognize that sound, right?

Peri: Of course! They are all over my yard right now. Red tree squirrels.

Michael: [footsteps on leaves, walking outside] Oh, my gosh, yeah.

Peri: I know! There's these piles of cones.

Peri: Yeah, so they chatter outside very dramatically all the time, and they've made these piles of cones all over the yard.

Michael: Oh my gosh, yeah, look at them!

Peri: They're just stacked up under these bushes, like

[red tree squirrel chattering]

Michael: Hundreds of them!

Peri: Very neatly, all in little rows, all stacked up. And there's more over here, too. I've never noticed squirrels doing this before.

Michael: But you know why they're doing it, right?

Peri: I mean, I assume they're to eat over the winter?

Michael: Yeah, these are these are piles that have a specific name. They're called middens.

Peri: Like for your hands?

Michael: No, it's middens with a D. M, I, D, D, E, N, S.

Peri: Oh, OK. I have heard that before.

Michael: Yeah. And middens are these stashes of food, preparing for the winter that they build on [squirrel chattering continues] all summer, especially here in the fall when the trees cones are mature. And middens are more than just piles. They look like piles, but they're actually kind of like a refrigerator that preserves these cones all through the summer and into the winter.

Peri: Really?

Michael: Yeah! If they just left all these cones out willy nilly, a lot of them would spoil, would rot because the cones would start opening. Some of them might even start to germinate and turn into a new tree,

Peri: Oh.

Michael: Which wastes a lot of the nutrients that they could easily get out of the seed. And so it's easy to see why all of this hard work that this squirrel puts in, it's something they get very protective over. That chattering you're hearing is them saying–

Peri: Squirrel yelling!

Michael: Yeah, back off!

Peri: Get away from my pine cones!

Michael: I’ve worked hard on that! Don't take my food, which we get to hear all over the park. It's probably not quite as effective when they do it at a grizzly bear because this is what grizzly bears raid. They raid these middens. That's how they get whitebark, pine cones. In fact, early in the spring, when other foods like huckleberries aren't ready to eat yet, bears can still dig up and access these cones. And Kate had seen this sort of thing in real life.

Kate: This whitebark pine stand is cratered by bears that have come out of the den and been able to smell these caches of cones six feet under snow. Dig them out. Feed on them, there's cone debris all over the place, bear scats full of seeds. And I'm telling you, it was it was like bombs had gone off all over the whitebark pine stand.

Peri: Why do you know so much about squirrels?

Michael: OK, well, when I worked as an interpretive ranger, the guided hikes, that sort of thing, we were asked to come up with a 30 minute talk about animals, and a lot of my colleagues gave talks on mountain lions and mountain goats, grizzly bears,

Peri: Charismatic megafauna.

Michael: Charismatic, yeah I gave my mine on squirrels.

[both laughing]

Peri: [joking] Cool!

Michael Yeah, I mean, I REALLY think they are an under-appreciated critter in this park. Just because they're common, it's easy to overlook them. But one adult squirrel could have easily cashed all of these cones in your yard.

[whimsical music begins]

Peri: Honestly, I definitely have a newfound appreciation for squirrels this summer, watching them run around like tiny lunatics [Michael laughs] and build up these huge piles all over the yard. It's been really fun to watch.

Michael: To quantify it, it's like ten, to over a hundred and fifty cones stashed a day

Peri: Wow.

Michael: for the average single adult squirrel, which,

Peri: how industrious

Michael: Very industrious, over 15,000 in a summer.

Peri: Wow.

Michael: So by stashing that many and remembering where most of them are, they are able to stay active all through the harsh Montana winter. Honestly, like looking at these piles in your yard, it's a wonder between squirrels and nutcrackers and bears that whitebark pine have any cones left, any seeds left at the end of the summer.

Peri: So whitebark pine trees know that birds and mammals will eat their seeds, but they have this trick called masting that they use to outsmart them, and masting is when a tree that produces fruit or seeds, nuts, chooses to produce them at kind of unpredictable intervals. And so if a squirrel or a nutcracker knew they could come to whitebark pine every year and just eat as many seeds as it wanted, there would be way more squirrels and nutcrackers that could eat so many seeds that the tree would be totally picked over with no seeds left for it to reproduce.

Michael: So the trees don't produce cones every year they like, take a vacation.

Peri: Yeah, kind of. They take some years off, which prevents these seed predators from having a reliable food source, which then controls their populations. So then, after one or two or three years, the tree will have a “mast” year and produce a ton of cones, way more than squirrels or nutcrackers could ever hope to eat.

Michael: Wow.

Andrew: Evolution has given these trees a great strategy for dealing with seed predators. It's almost like they've outsmarted these animals.

Peri: Yeah, it's almost like they're saying, Ooh, nice try.

[warm guitar music begins]

Peri: So, it's clear that this relationship between a tree, a bird, a bear, and a squirrel—it’s really complex, and it's something that people have studied year after year to understand better.

Kate: I was hiking up one morning and there was this black bear that was digging at the base of a tree, and it just ran off immediately. And so I think, Oh, I need to see whether it's digging up cones or maybe it's finding little seed caches! And so I am down with my butt in the air, digging up, trying to carefully see are there seed caches here? Well, I'm behind the trunk of the tree, and the bear didn't see me, and it comes back and pokes its head, around and we both kind of go WHOOEAAHH! [Kate, Andrew and Michael laughing]

Peri: Hearing Kate's stories of her time spent in whitebark stands, and learning about all these interconnections, made me want to go try and see them for myself. I’ve had the chance to visit the trees themselves, but I never paid much attention to what was going on around them. But now that I know the stories of the nutcrackers and bears and squirrels, I want to watch those relationships in action.

[car noise]

Greg: [answering over the phone] Glacier Dispatch, this is Greg.

Vlad: Hey, Greg, this is Vlad Kovalenko, uh, would you please initiate my backcountry tracking?

Greg: There you are... And out by 7:00 tonight, right?

Vlad: Yep.

Greg: Alright, we’ll talk to you then.

Vlad: Awesome, thanks Greg.

Greg: You got it.

Peri: We're driving to the East Side with Vlad Kovalenko. He's a grad student at the University of Montana, studying Clark's Nutcrackers and their relationship with whitebark pine. And like this show, Vlad's work is supported by the Glacier National Park Conservancy. This summer, he's working with Lisa Bate.

Vlad: I wouldn't say the hike up is pleasant. It's pretty bushwacky, and it's hard to find the path. But once you're up there, it's quite nice.

Peri: And if we don't find it?

Vlad: Then all hope is lost.

Peri: [laughing] Great! Great.

Peri: The goal? Hike up a ridge, and try and find some birds.

Michael: And not by just blindly stumbling around with binoculars.

Peri: No, higher tech than that. So eight birds—eight Clark’s nutcrackers—were equipped with little transmitters that emit a signal Vlad can pick up and follow.

Michael: And that's one thing I had a really hard time wrapping my head around. Like nutcrackers are related to crows and ravens, famously smart birds, like how on earth did they catch them?

Peri: Well, it took a lot of planning and a lot of patience to try and outsmart them. [dramatic piano music begins] They used a bait called suet to lure the birds into a trap called a “bow-net.”

Lisa: [wind rustling] But we had suet strung between this tree and all the way over to that tree. And there was probably what, five feet of snow here? So it hung there and hung there, and nothing happened, nothing happened. We were hiding way back in the trees. But you know, he makes it sound really easy. [Vlad laughing] It was anything but easy. No, we spent like hours, we spent days sitting there in a chair and we had to learn to just hold perfectly still, didn't we?

Vlad: Yeah.

Peri: This is the middle of winter. Snowy, cold, windy. And this went on for months with no luck. Staff and volunteers alike were checking for signs of birds on the bait every week or two, driving several hours and skiing several miles until finally, one day when Lisa was running errands in town, she got a text from a volunteer.

Lisa: Bird on suet. Bird on ground. [birds chirping] And like the first thing I did, I just got goosebumps. I called Vlad, I'm like, What are you doing tomorrow? He said, I don't know, what am I doing? I'm like, we're trapped in a bird!

Peri: The obvious question is, what do they do with the birds once they've trapped them? The first step was just to hold on to them, which wasn't always easy.

Lisa: Every single bird that we handled had a different personality. There was the one that we came away with bruises all over our knuckles. [Lisa laughs] And then there was another one that was just cool as a cucumber, and I don't think we got pecked...

Peri: Vlad and Lisa explained that they tied a tiny backpack with a transmitter onto the birds, which they secured around their wings and across their chest with a Teflon ribbon. It only weighs five grams, which is just four percent of the bird's body weight. And apparently the trick to distracting the birds enough to get this done, was giving them a stick to hold on to with their toes.

Lisa: [wind continues] And that was so invaluable because otherwise, you know, we'd be processing on a towel on a table and they were just picking it up, grabbing anything. Anything and everything. But you gave them a stick, it gave them some obvious sense of security and it would calm them down.

Peri: And once the backpack with the transmitter was tied on, they let the bird go, and sent it off with their gratitude.

Lisa: But, you know, we just kept saying thanks, you're doing this to learn more about your species and you know, you're paying one forward, hopefully for the species, so.

Peri: The cool thing about the transmitters is that they'll let Vlad see where these birds are throughout the year. Even if they leave the park, or Montana altogether.

Lisa: Other biologists have learned when the probability of survival reaches zero in a certain habitat, [somber piano music begins] the bird will leave that area to go somewhere where the probability of survival is much greater. And we were wondering if that's happening here in the park. We don't even know of Clark's breed here anymore in the park. But without Clark's to bury seeds to initiate that new generation of whitebark pine, there will be no natural regeneration of whitebark pines. That's the only way it regenerates is with the Clark's nutcrackers. So without Clark's, no more whitebark and without whitebark, will we lose all of our Clark's? We don't know.

Peri: That's the downside of this mutualism. Sure, when things are going well, they support one another and they both thrive. But when the scales start to tip out of balance, they all pay the price. [somber music ends]

[hiking through bushes]

Vlad: We're about to enter the whitebark zone.

Peri: It was a pretty steep climb up the ridge, but luckily there were plenty of thimble berries to distract me.

Peri: [in the field] Picked too many berries, fell behind. Here I am!

Peri: But as we crested the ridge, the forest gave way to a wide open meadow. The high peaks of the continental divide rose up above us to the west, and to the east I could see all the way out onto the rolling plains of the Blackfeet Reservation. As we hiked, [footsteps on dirt] we were very aware of Kate's stories about running into bears in whitebark pine territory. So we were sure to make lots of noise all day.

Peri: [in the field] HEEEEYYOOOO.

Peri: And we never saw a bear in person. But we did get to see, in sort of a roundabout way, that they are eating whitebark pine seeds.

[upbeat music begins]

Vlad: Nice.

Michael: Oh, that's fresh.

Vlad: [wind rustling] Yeah, look at those berries, didn't even chew.

Peri: We used a stick to poke through the bear poop.

Peri: [in the field] I mostly see berries, although what’s that?

Michael: I need a better stick.

Vlad: Oooh that could be it!

Peri: Yeah.

Andrew: That's cool, but also kind of gross. The way Kate put it, it would be pretty easy to spot evidence of whitebark pine seeds in bear scat.

Kate: It's a combination of these woody coats and then the pine seeds like pinion pine nuts crunched up, coarsely, and it's just packed in the bear scat. And it's actually a good source of food for birds and small rodents. They'll quickly consume a bear scat that's full of whitebark pine debris because there's so much undigested pine seeds in there. [upbeat music ends]

Peri: It was a pretty cool moment, and I got to see proof of this relationship without having to get too close to a bear.

[hiking sounds continue]

Robotic Voice: One. Zero. Three.

Vlad: WOO! That's good news.

Peri: [in the field] So it's transmitting?

Vlad: Yeah, someone's transmitting.

Peri: The robotic voice means that Vlad's receiver is picking up one of the backpack wearing birds that's part of his study. Basically, the higher the number, the closer the bird is.

Robotic Voice One five six.

Peri: The receiver pointed us downhill, so we kept walking that direction.

[hiking noises continue]

Peri: [in the field] And it’ll just keep transmitting as we go?

Vlad: Yeah, it should keep increasing.

Robotic Voice Two. Zero. Eight. [whimsical music begins]

[Clark’s nutcracker cawing]

Peri: [in the field] What’s that?

Vlad: There's our friend the Clark's Nutcracker! [Clark’s continue cawing]

Michael: Oh, one right on the top of that tree!

Peri: [in the field] Oh yeah.

[Clark’s continue cawing, flies buzz by]

Peri: [in the field] Oh, there's a ton of them!

Peri: We found a whole flock of nutcrackers, but we couldn't be sure that any of them were part of lab study without seeing an antenna.

Vlad: Alright, give me an antenna, please...

Peri: [in the field] It sounds so robotic.

Vlad: Yeah, that's an interesting variation of their call on that one.

[music ends]

Peri: Their calls are so harsh, distinctive and loud that it was really easy to hear them, but we still needed binoculars if we wanted to see which one was wearing a backpack with a transmitter.

Michael: It's at the top of this really thin tree. [wind bowing, clark’s calling]

Vlad: That's got an antenna!

Michael: It does?

Vlad: Yeah.

Peri: [in the field] A big fat one.

Michael: What is it doing?

Peri: [in the field] Oh! I see a bunch of opened cones. It's perched right on top of that whitebark. I haven't yet seen it drill open the cones to get the seeds, but there's a bunch of already open cones at the top of that whitebark.

Peri: Seeing a bunch of nutcrackers frolicking around at the tops of whitebark pine trees started to make these relationships more tangible, more real to me. It's not just a set of connections I might describe scientifically, but these trees, and these birds, right in front of me. Having a great time, it seemed like.

[Clark’s cawing back and forth]

Vlad: Gosh, they're fun to watch.

[Upbeat banjo music begins]

Peri: Whitebark's importance to the landscape and the plants and animals that live there is pretty impossible to overstate. But I was surprised to hear that fewer whitebark pine cones in the mountains, might mean a bear in my yard.

Kate: When, when the cone crop is low, or it fails, those bears tend to migrate down to lower elevations in search of alternate foods. That's where there's more human activity.

Peri: Bears looking for food in human spaces usually ends badly for the bears, and the fewer whitebark pine seeds there are in the fall, the more often this happens. But the web of relationships stretches even further than that. Big whitebark pine trees at high elevation, with their poofy canopies, shade the snowpack and slow down spring runoff, so their presence has an impact way downstream.

Kate: So it just has this huge effect, not just as a wildlife food and shelter, but it affects—even human drinking water is higher quality, and more of it because of whitebark pine's presence.

Lisa: [wind rustling] I was camping at Lower Quartz one year, there was a loon nesting. And then the next day I went up to the Upper Quartz. It got really, really hot. And when I came back down, that nest was a foot underwater, in 24 hours. I mean, we have done research showing that Harlequin duck reproduction success is intrinsically linked to stream flows. And in years where we have real chaotic stream flows, you know, high ones, more than one rise and fall, and we lose a lot of nests, so.

Lisa: [wind continues] Black Swifts, as far as we know, they only nest on persistent waterfalls—those waterfalls that are fed by glaciers or snowpacks. So as we lose snowpacks, are we're going to lose black swift colonies? We don't know. It's like a spider web, you pull on one little strand and it's going to affect the whole web in some form or another.

[pensive piano music begins]

Peri: As ShiNaasha said when we visited the Great Great Grandparent Tree; if we lose whitebark pine, we will lose a lot more than just a tree.

Peri: There's this game you can play with kids to teach them about ecosystems and these interconnections. You have the students stand in a circle, and each one gets a card with a different species. Whitebark pine, a grizzly bear, huckleberries, maybe a squirrel. And then you pass a ball of yarn back and forth across the circle to connect each one that provides food or shelter for another. You end up with this crisscrossing web of yarn. And then you have the students lean back just a little bit. And they're kind of skeptical, but the web of yarn supports them. But then you take out your scissors and you snip the strands holding just one species to the others. And the web comes apart and everyone falls down.

[warm piano music beginning]

Peri: It's a little silly. Everyone ends up on the ground giggling, and there's yarn everywhere. But I like it. I think what I like about it is that it puts people into the web. It reminds me that the word symbiosis means living together. What kind of relationship do I have with the world? It really changes when you realize you're living together and sharing a home. In this crisscrossed web of yarn. I've often seen humans as the scissors cutting things apart. But maybe it doesn't have to be that way.

[music ends]

Andrew: [hopeful music begins] Next week on Headwaters, we learn what whitebark pine is up against and the lengths that previous generations went to try to protect it.

Doug: The musclebound jocks from the University, building up for the football season, were now carrying five gallon cans of poison on their backs and squirting that poison with a little hatchet hose right into the white pine trees trying to save them.

Andrew: That's next time on Headwaters. [music ends]

[upbeat banjo music begins]

Peri: Headwaters is a production of Glacier National Park with support from our partner, the Glacier National Park Conservancy.

Peri: Glacier is the traditional lands of several Native American tribes, including the Aamsskààpipikani, Kootenai, Séliš, and Qìispé People.

Peri: Headwaters was created by Daniel Lombardi. Andrew Smith, Peri, Sasnett, and Michael Faist, produced, edited and hosted the show. Ben Cosgrove wrote and performed our music, and Claire Emery let us use her woodcut piece, titled Wind Poem, for this season's cover art.

Peri: Special thanks this episode to Bill Hayden, Brad Einstein, Kyle Neimer, Piney the whitebark pine puppet, Lisa Bate, Kate Kendall, Vlad Kovalenko, Taza Schaming. Everyone with Glacier's Native Plant Program. The Whitebark Pine Ecosystem Foundation, and so many others.

Peri: If you're enjoying the show, send it to someone else who loves squirrels.

Lacy: This is like for the end?

Daniel: This is it. Yeah. You saying that? That's going to be in it

[laughter]

Lacy: The Glacier Conservancy is the official fundraising partner of Glacier National Park. To learn more, visit glacier.org

Peri: I think that's the best time you've done yet.

Lacy: Okay, do I need to get one more time?

Michael: I think we're good.

Peri: Yeah, I think this is good.