Glacier Park awarded funding for Blackfeet bison, other projects

Glacier National Park announced last week it will receive $1.5 million in funding to support the Blackfeet Tribe’s initiative to restore free ranging bison herds.

The first release of about 50 wild bison was completed by the tribe just to the east of Chief Mountain last June with the blessing of the Park Service, as it was expected the animals would eventually wander in Glacier as the boundary between the park and the tribe wasn’t very far away from the release site.

The continued  funding comes from the Inflation Reduction Act.

“IRA funding will help with coordinating landscape level ecosystem function and connectivity studies, gain a better understanding of how ungulates currently on the landscape (elk and deer) utilize the forage and habitat in the absence of bison, and attempt to obtain a population estimate for these populations through pellet analysis. The Park Service is also assessing infrastructure needs and placement to support visitor use, enjoyment, and safety,” Glacier said in a release.

The tribe, FWP and the Park Service also have radio-collared elk that live both in and out of the park in order to track their movements and to gauge what, if any, impact bison would have on herds.

Glacier Superintendent Dave Roemer said last week that a release of bison directly into the park would require a formal  environmental assessment and is likely years away if it happens.

“It would be something we need to seek public comment on,” he said. 

He noted Glacier doesn’t have a bison management plan, just like it doesn’t have a management plan for other ungulates, like deer and elk.

Bison once roamed Glacier’s east side extensively, even into the high country. He said this funding will bolster studies and put more researchers on the ground. After last year’s initial release, for example, the Park Service had to quickly set up vegetation plots to gauge how the bison might impact the area where they released.

The small herd spent most of the summer in the Kennedy Creek drainage.

There is  the possibility of other releases outside of the park and Glacier is happy to assist.

“We’re honored to provide support and assistance,” Roemer said.

In addition to the bison monies, Glacier received $270,000 to restore threatened whitebark pine and implement the National Whitebark Pine Restoration Strategy. 

The iconic tree, which grows slowly and lives in high elevations, was placed on the Endangered Species List in 2022.

Populations over the past century have been decimated by blister rust, a fungal infection that was imported from wood imported to North America from Asia.

Glacier has, however, seen success in planting rust-resistant trees. But the restoration is slow — it takes the pines 20 to 30 years to  produce cones on ideal sites, but trees do not reach full cone production until 60 to 100 years of age. Having said that, the trees can live 600 to 700 years and some have even lived to 1,000.

The IRA whitebark project also a multi-park project that includes additional funding awarded to Yosemite, Sequoia, Kings Canyon, Olympic, Mount Rainer, North Cascades, Grand Teton, and Yellowstone national parks, totaling $750,000. The project includes working with partners and tribes to plant blister rust-resistant seeds and seedlings, identify rust resistant trees, monitor seedling survival, and identify climate refugia. The project builds on 20 years of work at Glacier National Park and within the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem.

Glacier was also awarded $200,514 as part of a multi-park project to inventory cultural resources in the Intermountain West high-elevation areas impacted by climate change. Other parks awarded additional funding include Yellowstone and Grand Teton.

More than 11,000 years of human occupation and Native American cultural heritage have been documented in Glacier National Park. These resources are experiencing loss through climate change driven impacts such as wildfire and melting ice. The Park Service plans to target the most critically affected and threatened non-renewable cultural resources (such as melted ice-revealed organic materials or eroded cut banks impacting ancient campsites) through an approach that studies climate signals  like the frequency of wildland fires and changing weather patterns and their impacts to cultural resources within high alpine landscapes.

Glacier has done previous work in this field before — bison bones, for example, have been found in high elevation ice fields in previous studies, illustrating they were also a mountain creature, not just animals of the plains.