Pining for Seeds, Bears Need Helping Hands of Humans

Somewhere in Glacier National Park, high above the thick, forested river bottoms, Tara Williams is feeding the bears.

She knows well all the standard park slogans--”Don’t feed the bears,” “A fed bear is a dead bear”--but she isn’t worried. From the time she feeds the bears to the time the bears actually get the food, more than a century will have passed, and Williams will be long gone.

“That’s one of the very unique things about this project,” she said. “We won’t know the results in our lifetime.”

That’s because whitebark pine trees grow at such a painfully slow pace; a knee-high sapling no more than an inch around might be 60 years old.

Williams is staff ecologist in Glacier, where she has embarked on a Johnny Appleseed quest to replant vast whitebark pine stands at the edge of treeline, high up at the top-most edge of vegetation, in the place where trees give way to tundra.

The hardy five-needled pine, which has in the past served as a key food source for bears, is dying away up there, victim to a century of fire suppression and a fungus from France.

Currently, about 45% of the whitebark pine in Glacier are dead. Of the survivors, about 85% are infected with the blister rust fungus, and so are doomed to die. In fact, a quarter of those survivors already are effectively dead, no longer able to produce the cones and seeds needed to propagate the next generation.

“Normally, we wouldn’t interfere to this degree,” said park horticulturist Joyce Lapp. “Normally, we would let nature take its course. But this is different. This isn’t normal.”

The demise of whitebark pine and other five-needle pines is not normal because it is the direct result of human intervention.

The pines, which can live for millenniums (the oldest known living tree dates to 726 A.D.), are not very tolerant of shade in their youth. To get enough sun, the trees often put down roots in recent burns, where shady plants have been torched out.

But for most of the past 100 years, the National Park Service has been snuffing wildfires, creating a jungle of sub-alpine fir and other growth beneath which a sun-loving whitebark pine cannot survive.

In addition, an introduced fungus, brought from France in 1910 on a load of lumber bound for Canada, is crippling the pines, girdling the bark and killing entire stands of trees.

That is particularly worrisome, said Kate Kendall, because bears and other species are highly dependent on the fatty, high-protein seeds, or pine nuts, contained in whitebark pine cones. Kendall is a grizzly bear researcher for the U.S. Geological Survey and has spent two decades unraveling the relationship between whitebark pines and bears.

“Whenever the seeds are available, bears will feed on them exclusively until there are no more to be had,” she said. “In a bumper year, bears will eat the seeds from August through autumn, then squirrels eat them all winter, and there will still be enough to feed the bears the next spring.”

The seeds, in fact, are the keystone to a high-elevation food network that has at its center birds, bears and trees. Clark’s nutcrackers gather and cache the seeds, getting a fine meal while at the same time spreading the tree populations for miles. Later, the bears raid those caches, fattening up for a long winter’s night.

When that system is interrupted, Kendall said, hungry bears are forced to wander out of the high country and into backyard orchards, where they find trouble with landowners.

Which is exactly why she is so excited about Williams’ work to feed the bears.

“They [Williams and other project members] are the vanguard of what I think will be a growing movement to restore whitebark pine,” Kendall said. “This is important work, and a lot of people are watching.”

They began watching in 1998, when Williams and her field crews first took to Glacier’s alpine heights and began climbing whitebark pines. The crews carried tiny metal cages all the way to the top, where the purple cones grow, and snapped the pens over the cones to keep the birds away.

In the fall, they returned and unlocked the seed--about 25,000 seeds--working on the assumption that survivors among the long dead likely are genetically resistant to the blister rust.

Now, after raising the seeds to seedlings, they have returned to the field, planting whitebark pine in recently burned areas such as Flattop Mountain and other “great little islands that are still largely black,” as Williams calls them.

The hand-picked seed could be as much as 40% more rust-resistant than the original generation, Kendall said.

The approach is a new spin on an earlier attempt by the Forest Service, which focused on “inoculating” young nursery seedlings with blister rust to create trees with immunity. Although results looked promising at first, recent studies show the immunity did not last.

Such are the difficulties of researching the life cycle of trees that live for 1,300 years.

Even earlier attempts focused on the small family of shrubs, called Ribes, that provide a necessary intermediary host for the deadly blister rust. Between 1930 and 1971, an estimated 14.3 million native Ribes plants--including currants and gooseberry bushes--were removed from Glacier, Yellowstone, Grand Teton, Rocky Mountain and Mt. Rainier national parks, all to no avail.

Although most were pulled by hand, more than 535,000 gallons of the herbicide 2-4-5T were sprayed in the parks to kill the Ribes, but the rust continued to spread.

The current approach--to protect, pluck and plant those seeds assumed to be most rust resistant--is complemented by a Forest Service program aimed at quantifying and measuring that assumed resistance.

This year, 1,500 seedlings were planted in July, which is the equivalent of spring in the high elevations. Another 1,500 were planted in mid-September, and researchers will keep close track of the trees to determine the best time for future plantings.

“If it looks like it’s working,” Williams said, “if it looks like they’re surviving, then we might try to extend the work for several more years.”

Which means she and many others will continue to be found, high above Glacier’s thick forested river bottoms, on that line between trees and tundra, breaking all the rules and feeding the bears, a few generations removed.