In Glacier, ongoing effort to save an iconic tree

If you had been out hiking the Scenic Point trail in Glacier National Park last week you may have noticed something odd: The trees were shaking.

And it wasn't the wind. It was part of an ongoing effort to save Glacier's whitebark pine trees.

It was Park revegetation crews putting "cages' on whitebark pine cones — protective screens that keep the squirrels and birds from eating the cones. The cages are kept on the trees until fall, when the cones mature. The cones are then harvested by the same crews. They're are sent to the U.S. Forest Service Nursery in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, where the seeds from them are raised into seedlings.

About a year-and-a-half later, the trees are sent back to the Park where the seedlings are planted.

Whitebark pine was once an abundant and important species in Glacier. The elegant trees produce pine nuts — an important food source for everything from Clark's nutcrackers, a jay-like bird, to grizzly bears. But in 1910, a shipment of white pine from France to British Columbia introduced blister rust to the West.

The Clark's nutcracker actually "plants' the tree by caching seeds in the ground. It then forgets where some caches are, and the seeds, in turn, sprout. The tree relies on the bird — or humans — to propagate.

Slowly, but surely, the insidious fungus spreads on the wind, carried by a secondary host — gooseberry bushes and other species. The rust infects and eventually kills the trees.

From 1939 to 1965 Park crews eradicated some 4.5 million gooseberry bushes. But to no avail. The fungus also has other hosts, and on misty mornings, which Glacier has plenty of, it travels on the wind, noted Park restoration biologist Joyce Lapp.

By the mid-1990s, studies done by U.S. Geological Survey scientist Kate Kendall found that 78 percent of 410 plots that were surveyed in Glacier had a 78-percent infection rate of blister rust and a 44-percent mortality rate. Because the rust was a non-native invader, Glacier began a program in 1997 to collect cones from the remaining live trees and plant their seedlings, noted Tara Carolin, who is now the director of Glacier's Crown of the Continent Learning Center.

The cones were taken from "plus' trees. They were trees that were not showing signs of the rust, Carolin said.

From 1998 to 2000, Park crews gathered 22,500 seeds. In 2000, 96 trees were planted on Grinnell Point shortly after a fire there. The seedlings, Carolin noted, tended to do better in burned areas. There is less competition from other plants and the soil is fertilized from the fire.

By 2006, Grinnell Point trees showed a 34-percent survival rate.

Meanwhile, the techniques for raising the trees and planting the seedlings were refined. If trees were planted in "micro sites' where they had some shelter, they did much better.

In 2001, 2,938 whitebark were planted on West Flattop, 100 on Dutch Ridge and 425 on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation. On Flattop, 34 percent survived to year five. In successive years, more have been planted and survival rates are going up or are stable. Glacier continues to secure funding to keep the project going with tree and seed planting at Caper Peak and near Red Eagle Lake.

The Red Eagle trees are showing much promise, with a 79-percent survival rate. Similar plantings have been done with limber pine, without nearly the success rate. Limber pine are also killed by the rust.

This year the Park will take a closer look at the trees and seeds themselves. The nursery will test them to see if they are truly rust resistant, or if they just happen to be surviving, Lapp noted.

In the meantime, the rust is taking its toll on the Park's older whitebark stands. Many are now dead or dying. Ghosts of a time gone by. And the seedlings planted today won't produce cones for decades — long after the people that planted them are gone. Whitebark pine live for hundreds of years. Small trees crews were working on last week were likely 200 years old.

But both Lapp and Carolin are hopeful.

"I'm really optimistic with the whitebark pine plantings," Carolin said.

Lapp shares the same view. The tree is an important one in the ecosystem — from feeding a unique bird to holding snows in the Glacier's high country.

"It fills an important niche," she said.