Migration and belonging. A convergence of non-native species helps save, and then scatter, iconic bald eagles. Belonging is not just a feeling: it’s something we build together. What does it mean to be from somewhere?
Glacier Conservancy: https://glacier.org/headwaters Frank Waln music: https://www.instagram.com/frankwaln/ Stella Nall art: https://www.instagram.com/stella.nall/
Daniel: [hypnotic synth starts] Headwaters is brought to you by the park's nonprofit partner, the Glacier Conservancy. Donations from listeners to the Conservancy are what make Headwaters possible. If you'd like to support the show, go to glacier.org. Beyond that, leaving a review in your podcast app or sending this episode to a friend is a big help.
Gaby: [western tanager birdsong] Where I'm from, there are parrots. Their chartreuse green and cinnamon red is everywhere. At the beach, they perch on palm trees, above loud streets filled with traffic. They build their homes on telephone poles. tree swallow birdsong] At soccer games, they fly and squawk overhead. So, like most people, I've always assumed they belong here. I'm from Miami. And to me, home and parrots are inseparable. But I only really noticed them in the first place because of my mom. My mom's love for animals has been around longer than I have. She says her first true love was a chicken named "Teresita." Her second was a canary named "Flautín." She groomed Flautín's nails, and he taught her to whistle and mimic bird songs. Flautín and Teresita are long gone. But when my mom video calls me with an unfamiliar parakeet perched on her shoulder, I'm really not surprised. It all started when my mom was on a walk and a flash of red popped out from the leaves of a tree. She sweetly greeted it in Spanish: "Hola." The parrot cocked its head and responded, [in parrot voice] "hola" right back. She found out later the parrot was an escaped pet named Perri. The exotic bird rides on my mom's shoulder all morning until her owners come and pick her up.
Gaby's Mom: ...Y le empecé hablar, "¡Hola, hola! Chiquitín, que cosa más hermosa." Yo lo veía, y me miraba y me decía, "chee, chee, chee."
Gaby: As funny as it sounds, this isn't a unique story. Pet birds escape and survive in Miami all the time. Many species of non-native parrots have become established in city parks. [music fades out] That is, they now nest and reproduce on their own. [American robin birdsong, hypnotic synth fades back in] Today, you can find flocks of parrots in Chicago and Brooklyn, in Tokyo, and Barcelona, countless cities across the world where they once arrived as pets, but have now settled in as residents. The parrots of Miami aren't native there either—they're pretty far from their home range—but nonetheless, people appreciate seeing them around the city. And this part of the story isn't unique either [music fades out]. Many non-native species are disparaged for their negative impact on the local habitat, but others are widely celebrated. A few examples— honeybees are loved for pollinating our foods, but are not native to the Americas—they're from Asia. Oryx are prized by big game hunters in New Mexico, but they're native to the Kalahari Desert [starting flute notes of "Wild West" by Frank Waln fade in] in Africa. Another example is a type of fish here in Glacier National Park: kokanee salmon. Kokanee are at the heart of this episode about non-native species. [drumbeat starts] They were introduced to the region over a century ago, and for a long time they were celebrated [strings start] until everything fell apart.
Music: ["Wild West" plays]
Gaby: Welcome to Headwaters, a show about how Glacier National Park is connected to everything else. I'm Gaby. We're calling this season "Switchback." We're telling stories about when the park went in a different direction, like a switchback on a trail. This episode is about native and introduced plants and animals, and our relationship with them.
Glacier Superintendent: Kokanee salmon, an introduced species, have become the most frequently caught fish in Lake McDonald, Superintendent of the Park, William Briggle, 1969.
Gaby: In the 1960s and '70s, thousands of kokanee salmon migrated into Glacier every fall. These non-native fish were an excellent food source for bald eagles, so much so that the eagles started to gather in the park every year to feast. [drum hit]
Woman #1: Kokanee salmon were planted into Flathead Lake in about 1916.
Gaby: This is Becky Williams, who was a park naturalist in the 1980s.
Becky Williams: And by the 1930s, some of them had found their way to Lower McDonald Creek. That had ideal spawning conditions for kokanee.
Man #1: Lower McDonald Creek is about 60 miles as the raven flies from Flathead Lake.
Gaby: And this is Dave Shea. He studied the park's bald eagles in the '70s and '80s. [drum hit]
Dave Shea: But they would come this far because the spawning conditions were so good. The cold, clear, clean water. [drum hit, pulsing synth fades in]
Becky Williams: The fry would hatch out and swim down to Flathead Lake and live there for four years. And then come up and spawn.
Dave Shea: Kokanee are actually a landlocked form of the Pacific sockeye salmon, and these kokanee would average maybe 12 to 14 inches long.
Becky Williams: The salmon had a four-year cycle. They would come up and spawn and that was the end of their life cycle. So they'd die.
Dave Shea: But they would show up here in Lower McDonald Creek by the thousands, somewhere between 100,000 and 150,000 every year. So it was quite a phenomenon.
Becky Williams: The dead fish [low rhythmic vibrations fade in] were an easy food source for the migrating young bald eagles. They could just flounder around as they pleased and pick up dead fish off the banks.
Dave Shea: And that's when when the eagles started showing up. [drumbeat starts]
Gaby: During the 20th century, bald eagle numbers were declining, but you could still find them in Glacier with a little luck.
Becky Williams: By the late '30s, there were a number of eagles that would show up there.
Dave Shea: And the first record of bald eagles in any concentration in the park was in 1939, and that's when 37 of them were counted.
Becky Williams: And that number stayed fairly steady.
Gaby: Then unexpectedly in 1962, there was a major congregation of them in the park. Every fall, more and more eagles gathered in Glacier. Even while their numbers remained low elsewhere across the country.
Dave Shea: So a maximum count on one day in a seven-mile stretch was 639 bald eagles.
Gaby: And they kept coming because of an abundant—but non-native—food source.
Becky Williams: There were so many dead fish that on occasion the white-tailed deer would eat fish.
Dave Shea: At one time, the largest concentration of bald eagles—
Becky Williams: The largest concentration south of Canada and Alaska. The word got out and people came from all over the country. [music fades out]
Gaby [to Dave Shea]: How long were you involved in the eagle project?
Dave Shea: Let's see... 1971 through '77 is when we kind of did some preliminary counting. And then from there, from '77 to about '93 is when we were actually doing the research project.
Gaby: In the '70s, bald eagles were rare and declining across the country, so biologists kept track of their numbers in Glacier. To count the eagles, Dave would climb into a canoe at first light. The trees were decorated with fresh snow and there was ice along the bank. As he floated down, he counted each bald eagle he passed.
Dave Shea: At one point, where McDonald Creek hits the Middle Fork, we actually tipped over. We ran into some ice and things there. And then at that point, the road to the Quarter Circle Bridge was all snowed in. So we had to continue on for four more miles down the Middle Fork through the ice [chuckles]. And we did some some hard paddling to stay warm.
Gaby: Dave always paused in front of a big tree that the eagles like to perch in. Later on, when that tree died, Dave thought maybe it was because it had been covered in so much eagle poop all the time.
Dave Shea: [eagle calls] To be able to document the increase in birds, and then ultimately, the decrease, you know, it's pretty, pretty unique situation.
Gaby: The National Park Service deals with these kinds of unique non-native situations all the time. Remember the non-native African oryx in New Mexico that I mentioned earlier? White Sands National Park built a big fence to keep them out of the park. Lots of parks, including Glacier, use herbicides to strategically remove invasive weeds. To help deal with and define these challenges, the Park Service often uses three words. First is the term "native."
Peri: A native species is a plant animal or any other organism that occurs in a place because of natural processes.
Gaby: Second is "non-native."
Peri: Non-native species are plants and animals living in areas where they don't naturally exist. Non-native species are frequently called "exotic," "alien," or "introduced."
Gaby: And finally, there's the term "invasive."
Peri: Invasive species are specific type of non-native species that cause some kind of significant harm. They're a leading cause of biodiversity loss and declines of endangered species.
Gaby: In this episode, kokanee salmon on their own are not particularly harmful to the rest of the environment, so we won't call them invasive, but they are an introduced or non-native species. Another example in this episode that you'll hear about are lake trout. [hypnotic synth fades in] They are a highly invasive species. In fact, they have devastated Glacier's native fish populations on the west side of the park. It's 1984. Bald eagles are on the endangered species list, and Kay is in town on a business trip. She knows Glacier National Park is nearby, but it's November, so she's not planning to visit. [music fades out] Then one of her chatty coworkers starts talking to her about congregations of bald eagles. He says she needs to go to the park. "Trust me," he says. For most people in 1984, bald eagles are a rare sight. So Kay decides to take a slow drive to the park and the experience changes her life. She parks in Apgar and walks the few hundred yards towards the bridge as the trees open, Kay starts to see the flocks of eagles on Lower McDonald Creek. She stands with a crowd of visitors on the Camas Bridge. A park ranger offers Kay a look through a spotting scope. The lens reveals a bird the size of a child that is ripping apart a bright red fish. There's a hush over the crowd as they listen to the eagles chatter and chatter. [synth fades back in] Kay will eventually move to the area, in part because of her experience with the eagles. When fall arrives, and she drives back into the park to see the eagles, the spectacle and all of the eagles are gone. Decades later, one of our producers, Michael, is confronted about the eagles while working at a visitor center.
Michael: He comes up to me and, you know, I do the normal like, "hey, how can I help you?" And [laughing] he just kind of looked at me and was like:
Gaby: 'the eagles are gone."
Michael: "I'm sorry. [chuckling nervously] I don't know. I don't know what you mean."
Gaby: "the epic congregations of eagles. They're gone now."
Michael: I had no idea what he was talking about. And he just said it with such... confidence.
Gaby: The hundreds of eagles that impressed people for decades. The eagles that brought in television crews, the eagles that rip the heads off of fish, the eagles that made people want to move here—they're gone now.
Michael: He needed some explanation for why this thing not only wasn't happening anymore, but wasn't even remembered. And that was the first time I'd ever learned about the eagle congregation on Lower McDonald Creek. [mischievous piano music fades in]
Woman #2: We all kind of lived and breathed it for a few months in the fall. It was just magical.
Gaby: That's Elaine Caton.
Elaine Caton: I was a freshman, had just moved to Missoula a couple of months before to go to college, and then some friends and I went up one weekend and and, you know, I really didn't know have any idea what to expect.
Woman #3: And, well, it was just spectacular.
Gaby: And that's Mary McFadzen. Mary and Elaine worked together researching Glacier's bald eagles in the 1980s.
Elaine Caton: Many hours staring through spotting scopes together, [music fades out, laughter in background] looking at eagle nests, over the years.
Mary McFadzen: I mean, you know, everybody's like, "oh look at that eagle, look at that one, that one got a fish."
Elaine Caton: Then you could hear the eagles, like, chattering. They'd be chattering. I mean, that's the best word I can think to describe it.
Mary McFadzen: You know, and everybody's pointing things out, and they had spotting scopes. Everybody's got binoculars, and the crowds were just going wild and [laughing] we had to keep people quiet because it's like the eagles are right there.
Elaine Caton: Yeah, I, just like Mary, I remember just being on that bridge [pulsing synth fades in] and being amazed and, you know, it's beautiful and—
Mary McFadzen: And so, you know, from a landscape perspective, it was just it's just gorgeous.
Elaine Caton: You know, you'd get up before dawn and be going out there and watching or catching birds or whatever and—
Mary McFadzen: Yeah, we'd arrive at the bridge and of course there's always people there.
Elaine Caton: —and then when you were frozen, you'd come back and, [chuckles] you know, somebody would give you a hot chocolate and you'd sit around talking about the morning and how it went.
Mary McFadzen: You know, the numbers of people increase throughout the day and we we'd hang out as long as we could. But it was cold on some days. [pulsing synth, decisive drumbeat, low rhythmic vibrations fade in]
Gaby: The eagle congregations were a big draw for tourists, but they also raised a lot of scientific questions.
Elaine Caton: Besides the viewing at McDonald Creek Bridge, there was also a blind, you know, and we did capture birds, to, to mark them sometimes.
Gaby: And because bald eagles were both iconic and a threatened species, park managers wanted to know more about their congregations in the park.
Mary McFadzen: You know, freezing cold, looking for bird tracks. Get to the blind. We have buckets of fish.
Elaine Caton: Not knowing if there were grizzly bears up there in the dark [laughing]...
Mary McFadzen: We'd walk down to the oxbow—
Elaine Caton: So going out there to to set the traps up and—
Mary McFadzen: You know, and then you just setting the traps, your fingers are frozen.
Elaine Caton: —steel jaw traps like those used to catch large mammals. But the hinges, the spring on the traps were loosened so that they didn't close as tightly as they would—
Mary McFadzen: Yeah, using padded leg-hold traps is really standard practice then for trapping all sorts of well, eagles in other parts of the country.
Elaine Caton: —then we wrapped the jaws of the trap, the ones that would close on a foot with foam padding—
Mary McFadzen: And we take the fish and attach it to a stake in the creek. And then we'd put the leg-hold traps around that—
Elaine Caton: Someone would always put their fingers in and let the traps close on their fingers to make sure it wouldn't hurt. You know.
Mary McFadzen: The theory is that eagle comes in and they would be walking around and pecking at the fish and then take a step and get caught in the leg-hold trap.
Gaby: From the '60s and well into the '90s, [music fades out] park biologists studied and surveyed the eagles, capturing and marking the birds—either with wing tags or a radio transmitter—allowed them to tell the eagles apart, and track them throughout the year.
Elaine Caton: That's one thing about being able to identify an animal is that it suddenly makes it an individual and not just—we like to connect individuals, I think.
Mary McFadzen: —and then when you did catch a bird, you know, someone would be holding the eagle, usually two people—
Elaine Caton: —and put a hood on it, you know, like a falconer’s hood.
Mary McFadzen: And then we'd take them back and, you know, process them, as they say, and take measurements, and if it was a decision made to put a transmitter on it, we put a backpack transmitter on it. If the wing markers were determined, we'd put a wing markers on it, too. And then I think after that, when we're ready to go, we would drive back and release it and everybody would be happy, including the eagle [laughter in background].
Gaby: One of the eagles they caught was a young female. They put bright orange markers on her shoulders that said "A68" so that she could be identified from a distance. She was fit and feisty. So they also put a lightweight radio transmitter on her. [eagle call, mischievous piano fades in] This way, someone could follow her throughout the winter and find all the places she called home. For Elaine and Mary, the scientific spectacle of studying the eagles was... life changing. However, they say the friendships, mentorship, and community that surrounded the research was equally impactful.
Elaine Caton: For me at least, it's really hard to separate, you know, the biology, learning about the eagles and seeing them. But, you know, the people we worked with were on an equal footing in a different way, or they just gave it so much depth... and it was just an amazing experience... in a number of aspects, not just the scientific part of it.
Gaby: Mary and Elaine can't help but bring up Riley and Pat McClelland, a lot. Riley and Pat were biologists at Glacier for a long time, and beloved community members. Their care and support for their team seems almost tangible—even all these years later.
Elaine Caton: And we were sort of their adopted kids. [laughter in background] I mean, they we had Thanksgiving dinners with them—
—they just took care of all of us. Anybody who didn't have any place else to go was invited, a big potluck. And it was great. Yeah. Really extraordinary people.
Gaby: Many Montana communities are tight-knit. And sometimes it can be hard for newcomers to feel connected. But the culture Mary and Elaine found in the community of eagle researchers was very welcoming. So welcoming that they went on to dedicate their careers to Montana bird science and conservation. Even today, they're both still concerned about the future of birds in the state.
Mary McFadzen: But that whole history is amazing. And Rachel Carson, I mean, she was, you know, a woman, a female scientist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. And thank god we [laughing] have a person like that, you know, back then that wrote about it and then people acted on it [hypnotic synth fades in].
Elaine Caton: I mean, we've had such great success in so many ways, for example, with DDT and raptors. But, you know, we've still seen such declines in birds and—
Archival Audio: [eagle call] This is the majestic bald eagle unique to North America—
Gaby: It's 1970. The Cornell Lab of Ornithology releases this film to raise awareness about the plight of bald eagles. Only a few hundred of remain in the Lower 48.
Archival Audio: [string music in background]—emblem of the nation. Bald eagles were once abundant throughout most of the continent north of Mexico. But their numbers have been greatly reduced as they have been forced to retreat from advancing civilization to their last refuges in Alaska, Western Canada, and Florida...
Gaby: The trouble begins with the widespread use of insecticides like DDT, or dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane. The US military introduces it to control mosquitoes that transmit malaria and other diseases to troops in World War Two. Soldiers get dusted in it. It saves millions, maybe hundreds of millions of lives from insect-borne diseases. Then people spray it in their homes and on their sofas and encourage their children to ride their bikes behind the spray trucks. The use of DDT spreads like a weed.
Archival Audio: Many eagles recently found dead have been killed by insecticides which are washed into the water by rainfall and build up in the fish which the eagles eat...
Gaby: But then DDT is linked to cancer in people. It builds up in our bodies, and in animals bodies, and remains for a long time. When sprayed, the toxin leaches into waterways where it's absorbed by the fish that the bald eagles will eat. This weakens their eggshells and kills the next generation of eagles. For other birds, simply destroying their food source: insects, is damaging enough.
Archival Audio: — laws and drastic reduction of the use of persistent pesticides. Eagles may soon be gone from their last refuges. Chosen as a national emblem about 200 years ago...
Gaby: Through the 1960s, the voices speaking out against toxins like DDT begin to harmonize. Environmental and social campaigners come together to push for a less toxic society. A scientist named Rachel Carson leads the choir.
Rachel Carson, Archival Audio: And the poison travels from link-to-link of the food chain, and the following springs are silent of robin song. Not because we sprayed the robins directly, but because the poison traveled step-by-step...
Gaby: Carson uses both environmental and social arguments to challenge the use of pesticides. In 1962, she vividly imagines a nightmare spring in which there are no birds to sing. Her revolutionary book becomes sheet music for other activists. [string music fades in]
Archival Audio: CBS Reports: the Silent Spring of Rachel Carson.
Rachel Carson, Archival Audio: They should not be called insecticides, but biocides.
Archival Audio: A spokesman for the chemical industry, Dr. Robert White-Stevens: The major claims in Ms. Rachel Carson's book, "Silent Spring" are gross distortions of the actual facts. The real threat then, to the survival of man, is not chemical, but biological in the shape of hordes of insects that denude our forests, ravage our food supply and leave in their wake...
Gaby: In 1965, agricultural workers in California are vocal about the harm of pesticides on ag workers. Grape pickers go on strike and millions of people boycott grapes in support. Through organizing and protesting, a coalition of farmworkers led by people like Cesar Chavez and the Dolores Huerta—halts the use of DDT on grape farms.
Dolores Huerta, Archival Audio: Okay, "abajos" now. Things we want to get rid of, alright? Down with racism! [crowd in background: "¡Abajo!"] Down with sexism! [crowd in background: "¡Abajo!"] Down with homophobia! [crowd in background: "¡Abajo!"] Down with pesticides! [crowd in background: "¡Abajo!"] Okay, can all of us working together, can we build a society...
Gaby: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who shares a literary agent with Rachel Carson, writes letters of support to Chavez, and gives speeches linking the civil rights and environmental causes together.
Martin Luther King, Jr., Archival Audio: Down to this that all life is interrelated. [hypnotic synth fades in] We are made to live together because of the interrelated structure of reality.
Gaby: In 1972, the federal government bans DDT. Because of DDT and poaching, bald eagle populations continued to decline across the country. This made Glacier's yearly congregations of hundreds of birds special, but also scientifically interesting. A few pairs of eagles were known to live in Glacier year-round. But the hundreds of eagles at the congregation definitely weren't all native to the area. They had to be migrating through. Everyone wanted to know: where were these eagles coming from? And where were they going? To find out, Glacier's biologists followed the eagles all winter long.
Harriet Allen: My name's Harriet Allen.
Gaby: One of these biologists was Harriet Allen.
Harriet Allen: And I worked on the eagle project in 1980 and '81.
Gaby: Elaine and Mary, who we heard from earlier, would catch and mark eagles that were feeding on the salmon in Glacier. Then, it was Harriet's job to track those eagles.
Harriet Allen: Well, it was a huge mystery where they were coming from and where they were going to once they left Glacier.
Gaby: Harriet's work helped confirm that the bald eagles congregating in the fall were not park residents, or at least not native-born ones. They were coming from their summers in Canada and heading south to spend their winters in the United States.
Harriet Allen: It was a very big mystery as to where they went. You know, here they were at Glacier in the fall, feeding on fish, and now they're down here in the desert in Utah, feeding on jackrabbits. And some of these are hatch-year birds, so they're just off the nest that year, so they don't have a memory of where these places are. So somehow, they were communicating.
Gaby: If you did this project again today, it would be a lot easier.
Harriet Allen: Well, it was before we had GPS collars.
Gaby: You'd put a tiny satellite tracker on the eagle and then you'd sit back on the couch and the data would be beamed right into your smart watch. But back then, you had to hold a radio antenna and listen for beeping pulses.
Harriet Allen: So we had to have line of sight to locate the eagles. And they were fitted with transmitters that had two different pulse rates.
Gaby: Whenever the eagles perched:
Harriet Allen: Slower rate.
Gaby: And whenever the eagles were flying?
Harriet Allen: It was a fast pulse.
Gaby: So at the beginning of each fall, Harriet was assigned an eagle to shadow for the winter.
Gaby: Then she waited for her eagle to start migrating.
Harriet Allen: And then waiting until they took off. And they all took off at different times, of course.
Gaby: In 1981, she spent the winter in her Toyota Corolla, trying to stay right behind one of the migrating bald eagles. It was a young bird with orange winged tags labeled A68. But Harriet called her Patience.
Harriet Allen: Patience was one of the first ones.
Gaby: Traveling like an eagle was tough. Harriet had to stick to highways, while Patience could take shortcuts over mountains and across lakes.
Harriet Allen: Luckily, they perch at night so you could sleep at night. There were a couple other birds that went south, and so sometimes you could pick up more than one bird at a time. But you were focused on that particular one bird to stay with them.
Gaby: But it was also intimate. They spent their days together. Harriet and Patience both traveled light, picking up food as they went. The two of them tracked south and southwest, until they hit the Idaho-Oregon border. For a while, Patience rested on a big island in the middle of the Snake River.
Harriet Allen: Well when Patience went south into Idaho, she would perch everyday on this big cottonwood tree on the island, I could watch her from the other side. At one point, I lost the signal. I thought "well, she's taken off. She's gone further south, probably." And so I got a small plane chartered to go up and look and see if I could find her. And oddly enough, I was getting the signal I could pick up a very weak signal. Still back on the island. And so that was very odd. And it was also in a fast pulse. And immediately... I was concerned.
Gaby: So remember, fast pulse meant the transmitter was horizontal. That usually meant the eagle was flying, except Patience wasn't. So that could mean one of two things: the transmitter fell off... [building tense synth] or something worse.
Harriet Allen: When I was flying, I was listening for her signal. And once we confirmed that it was coming from the island, then we landed the plane and knew we had to get on the ground. I couldn't get out to the island because I didn't have any way—I didn't have a boat. And so I had to go find some biologists that worked for Oregon. And they took me out to the islands in a boat. And then we tracked the signal.
Gaby: The island was uninhabited. But a local rancher kept some livestock there and had also been using it as a garbage dump.
Harriet Allen: And that's when I found her in this garbage dump buried under a piece of metal siding. You know, like they use on houses, and trailers? And it was covering her up, but it didn't block the signal. Which—it was really sad to see her like that in a garbage... pit.
Gaby: The bird that Harriet had named Patience and spent endless hours watching was dead.
Harriet Allen: He had livestock on the island, and he was afraid that—she hadn't done anything—he was afraid that was gonna get his livestock. So. He drove up under the tree and shot her.
Gaby: The poacher killed Patience because he thought she was a threat to his livestock.
Harriet Allen: They had taken the wing markers off of her, but thankfully didn't see the transmitter.
Gaby: Harriet retrieved Patience and helped collect evidence at the site.
Harriet Allen: There was some paperwork that we found in the dump that had this name on it, and he ended up saying, yes he had shot the bird.
Gaby: The person who shot and killed Patience confessed. The case went to court and Harriet testified about Glacier's eagle research. The poacher was sentenced and fined $2,500, which in 2024 would equate to about $9,000. The court ruled that about half of that fine would go to support Glacier's bald eagle research.
Harriet Allen: It was six-months suspended jail sentence. And a lot of people came in to testify in support of him in all about his character and how much he loved wildlife. Sometimes people define wildlife differently. [hypnotic synth fades in] I was... devastated to find her like that. It was just a shock to lift up the piece of metal and see this beautiful, majestic bird. Placed in a garbage dump. [eagle call]
Gaby: It's 1987, in a small town just outside of Glacier National Park and lots is happening. [music fades] The headlines in the paper read "Horse Dies on Trail." "Fish-full Thinking: Kokanee Hotspots." And "Shrimp in Water. Non-hazardous." The last one catches my attention. Here's the first line: "With every mouthful of water you swallow, you are ingesting a mouthful of tiny freshwater shrimp." The director of the lab that is testing water samples says, "eating the shrimp is no more harmful than eating fish. There's lots of microorganisms in water. The shrimp just show up because they're bigger." The city says that its tests are consistently coming up 100% safe. Mysis shrimp are cold water loving and can be almost too small to see, but not quite. Sometimes called "opossum shrimp," they are not native to this area. If you have a goldfish, you might even buy a kind of mysis shrimp as pet food, being advertised as "excellent for all types of fish!" Except for perhaps one. But we'll get to that. The town chemically treats its drinking water, but somehow the newspaper says the shrimp survive the chlorination process. [drum hit] Eventually, they will upgrade to a filter system that removes things like shrimp. [drumbeat starts] Stick with me here because things get kind of weird. Two decades before the news article on shrimp in the drinking water, these shrimp are introduced into the waters of Flathead County. And some fisheries managers are hoping that the beloved kokanee will eat them and get bigger, more populous. Everyone loves the salmon migration and the eagle congregations. Why not make a good thing better? As the years go by, the kokanee are not eating the mysis shrimp. They would. But the problem is the shrimp are nocturnal, and the kokanee are active during the day. They miss each other, like the sun and the moon. To make matters worse, the mysis shrimp starts spending the nights eating the kokanee's favorite food: zooplankton. As if this all wasn't bad enough, another introduced fish—lake trout—are happy to stay up late eating shrimp. Then, as the lake trout get bigger, they start eating the kokanee. The whole system devolves rapidly. And by 1989, the kokanee virtually disappear from Glacier and the lake trout take over the watershed. With this new food source, the lake trout population expands. They go from being a troublesome invader to an all out invasive crisis. The lake trout spread throughout Glacier and caused major declines in native fish populations. To put it all more simply, the eagles are native. The kokanee the eagles are eating are not native. The shrimp which the fish won't eat are not native either. The shrimp were introduced to make more kokanee. But because ecology is complicated and weird, the opposite happens, and kokanee populations crash. With the kokanee gone, the eagles no longer have a reason to congregate in Glacier, [pulsing synth and bass fade in] so they don't [drumbeat starts]. The glorious congregations of bald eagles that everyone came to see, the eagles that made communities of scientists and naturalists, that brought attention to DDT, that inspired people to migrate with them all winter in their Toyota Corollas... the eagles that made people love birds—they're gone now.
Music: [mischievous piano, distorted archival audio saying "Today's national park system is both more and less than it might be" plays then fades out slowly]
Gaby: Before all of this, before the peak counts of eagles, and before the kokanee salmon populations crashed in the late 1980s, there existed an unpopular opinion: that the salmon didn't belong in the park. [music ends] In 1969, the State of Montana proposed introducing another species of non-native salmon into the area: the coho salmon. Unlike the kokanee, who eat zooplankton, coho salmon eat other fish. Glacier's managers strongly opposed the idea. They worried that if the coho were introduced, they would eat the park's native fish. The park superintendent said they wouldn't be so concerned if the coho only ate the kokanee. That same year, 1969, park biologists started looking at ways to remove the kokanee salmon from the park. Some thought that since they were not native, they should be kept out or kicked out. The first idea was to simply construct a large barrier that would block the migrating salmon from entering the park. A kind of fish dam. But that never went anywhere. The next idea was chemical. The plan was to pour a chemical called "morpholine" into the water to "imprint" the baby fish. Then four years later, when those fish were returning to spawn, they would pour the chemical into a different creek outside of the park. If it worked, the salmon would go there instead of into the park. But this idea was never implemented either. And when the salmon migrations eventually collapsed, it was not because people tried to stop them, but because people tried to encourage them. [hypnotic synth and eagle calls]
Mary McFadzen: You know we'd go and there just be a few eagles, like 30 or 40 or something, you know, just low numbers. And it's like "aw." So we cherished each one we got to count [laughing] because there were so few of them.
Daniel: The local newspaper, Hungry Horse News, in August 1987: "Kokanee salmon are the most popular fish in northwest Montana. But the fishing in Flathead Lake this year is, in a word, terrible."
Elaine Caton: I mean, it's funny. People always think they can—we can make things better, right, by doing more stuff.
Dave Shea: It was kind of a gradual thing, [music fades out] but it was certainly... a big difference in something that had been going on for for all those years and then suddenly was not.
Harriet Allen: At least to not let that be forgotten. That was an incredible aggregation that occurred at Glacier and it was a huge thing during those years. And then all of a sudden it was gone.
Daniel: Biologists counted only 144 fish on Tuesday, and they say that bald eagles may not stay long, because of the limited food source. October 7th, 1987.
Elaine Caton: Even though they were non-native, they had provided this amazing food source for eagles.
Becky Williams: Many of them probably still use this general route flying south. But there wasn't any big Thanksgiving feast for them like there used to be.
Daniel: What's the kink in the food link? The annual Bald Eagle Convention has failed to materialize so far this fall. But one must remember the entire eagle salmon attraction was man-induced. Even if it's not a natural occurrence, the Eagle Show is fun to watch, and it's popular. We hope the salmon fix this sudden kink in the food chain. October 21, 1987.
Elaine Caton: Also just provided this opportunity for people to learn... thanks to the work of the naturalists and the biologists, you know they could learn about animal migration and... I don't know. So it was so it was hard that way. I mean, it was tough.
Becky Williams: And it probably put a major adverse impact on the young eagles because they no longer had a food source that was so easily accessible.
Dave Shea: Yeah, it was another exotic species in the park. So even though the whole thing was not natural, again, it was a really important thing for these endangered birds, a really good source of of nutrition for 'em at a critical time of the year.
Daniel: Glacier National Park Interpreters wait for Eagle Viewers at McDonald Creek. A lack of significant numbers of eagles this fall has caused a drop in visitors to the area. November 1987.
Harriet Allen: I think recognizing how quickly something like that can be lost when you think, " Oh no, they'll be here forever and here's so many." And—but I think it's an important part of Glacier's story.
Gaby: The most eagles ever recorded in the park's congregations was in 1981. Remember, Dave counted 639. But six years later, when he got back into his canoe, a lot had changed. The weather was the same, but the salmon were gone. And so, for the most part, were the eagles. The big tree, now dead from all the eagle poop, only had one eagle left on it. The paper ran a photograph of rangers standing all alone on the once-packed Camas Bridge. The headline read "Empty Bridge."
Daniel: Kokanee numbers are low and eagle visits are likely to be few as well, leaving Glacier National Park without its major fall attraction for a second year in a row. It looks depressingly similar to last year. September 1988.
Becky Williams: I feel lucky. And when. There wasn't climate change threat like there is now. I think everybody in my generation feels the same way. And we... regret that younger generations won't experience what we did. So that makes activists out of some people.
Gaby: The congregations on Lower McDonald Creek have disappeared and those eagles have dispersed and found different migration stops. But in the decades since the 1980s, bald eagles have made a comeback. What was once a species on the brink of extinction is now a relatively common sight.
Woman #4: This is truly a historic conservation success story.
Gaby: That Secretary Deb Haaland, the first native person to lead the Department of the Interior.
Secretary Deb Haaland: The bald eagle has always been considered a sacred species to American Indian people. Similarly, it's sacred to our nation, as America's national symbol. The strong return of this treasured bird reminds us of our nation's shared resilience and the importance of being responsible stewards of our lands and waters that bind us together.
Gaby: In the 1960s, scientists estimated there were fewer than 500 nesting pairs of bald eagles in the United States. Today, thanks to continued conservation efforts, there are over 70,000 nesting pairs—out of a population that numbers 300,000. [hypnotic synth starts, eagle call] It's 2022 and I'm moving from Florida to Montana. My new coworkers and neighbors greet me with so much kindness and generosity. They pick me up from the tiny local airport and show me around. We go to the grocery store together and in the parking lot I'm greeted by bumper stickers—and they're pretty widespread. "Don't California My Montana." "Montana's Full. Go Back to California." [music fades out] But one particular sticker really gets to me: "Keep Out Invasive Species." It has outlines of several states, including Florida. As in, people from those states are outsiders, invasive species that do not belong here, and that they—meaning me—should be kept out. Or kicked out. What does it mean to be from somewhere? When do we start to call a place home? And how do we know that we belong? An eagle born in another country can be native to glacier. A fish that's never left local waters can be invasive. Where I'm from, there are parrots. And they are native because I was born in Venezuela, where parrots have lived longer than people, but I grew up in Florida, where the parrots have arrived only recently. So, when I'm asked, it's often easier to say I'm from Miami. Both those things are true. I'm from Miami, and I'm from Venezuela. And actually, from a bunch of other places too. In a piece for Orion Magazine, Anjali Vaidya wrote: "I look like no one in my family photos. I look like all of them, [waxwing and Swainson's thrush birdsong fade in] I don’t fit categories well [hypnotic synth starts]—but scratch the surface, and none of us do.”
Gaby [to Woman #5]: Everyone has brought up how good it felt to be here in the fall, even though it's cold. Even though it's a little quieter and it's a time of change. How good it felt to just be here in this community and to feel like they belonged and that they... had a purpose.
Woman #5: There is definitely a sense of community I have, [American robin song, music fades out] but I still feel this really deep connection with the park, even though I haven't worked for the Park Service for so many years.
Gaby: Ellen Horowitz guided hundreds of visitors to see the bald eagles during their fall congregations.
Ellen Horowitz: I'm Ellen Horowitz. [voices audible in background] I'm a former Glacier National Park naturalist. I started with the Park Service in 1981 and worked in the park through 1993 [red-breasted nuthatch in background].
Gaby: She led walks and made a papier mâché kokanee salmon for kids to look at. She set up spotting scopes and shared binoculars.
Ellen Horowitz: We'd usually have two scopes set up out here when there'd be a lot of people. And there were times when it could be pretty, pretty crowded. It was busy. I mean, there were just—there was one day it was like, "Hey Doug, you rea—you realize we have reached a thousand people. I mean, a thousand people have come out here to see this! "
Gaby: Eagles migrating in the fall was the center of her year in Glacier.
Ellen Horowitz: I mean, there was always a sense of like, this is something really special. You know, this is something to be really respectful of. And so, of course, we encouraged people to just like, you know, be as quiet as they could. But, you know, you can only do so much as far as that goes because it's exciting. When you see eagles, it's like, "woah."
Gaby [to Ellen Horowitz]: Wow.
Ellen Horowitz: It was yours for that little bit of time. You know, it belonged to you. That you could just have this opportunity to just look out and to see, you know, the eagles sitting that close to you and without disturbing them.
Gaby: On a late summer morning, the two of us walked along the creek where she used to guide visitors to see the eagles.
Ellen Horowitz: I'm just looking right now at this old stump. [Gaby laughing in background] Oh my gosh. That tree growing out of it is so tall. I remember when it was this big.
Gaby [to Ellen Horowitz]: [laughing] you remember that tree?
Ellen Horowitz: Oh gosh! Yeah, I do. I don't know how tall that tree is now. Six feet, maybe more?
Gaby [to Ellen Horowitz]: Probably.
Ellen Horowitz: But it was probably—I remember when it was six inches! And all of the little forget-me nots-that were flowers... gone feral!
Gaby: [footsteps] As we're talking, Ellen really can't help but notice everything and everyone around her. When I ask her a question, she first looks around and then responds.
Gaby [to Ellen Horowitz]: What was it like walking this trail with people who had never seen something like this and had just gotten their orientation?
Ellen Horowitz: I, I don't remember that so much. But what I do remember walking through was this European mountain ash tree, right here. And I remember... often stopping at this tree—bears would sometimes... they would have been out here, ahead of us. But I do remember talking about some of the marks on this tree because I just—I love it. And—
Gaby [to Ellen Horowitz]: Oh wow. You can really see them.
Yeah—you can see where... deer may have been rubbing some antlers, here's marks from sapsuckers right here.
Gaby [to Ellen Horowitz]: These sort of perfect ovals, all in a row.
Ellen Horowitz: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just perfect and just...
Gaby: And suddenly, it feels like I'm the visitor. And Ellen is taking me back in time to one of her programs.
Ellen Horowitz: There are—there's a couple of native mountain ash, but—
Gaby [to Ellen Horowitz]: They're smaller, right?
Ellen Horowitz: They are lot smaller, yeah. The European mountain ash tend to grow tall like this. Yeah. There's also some maple trees right here that are not our—
Gaby [to Ellen Horowitz]: Right.
Ellen Horowitz: —native maple. So I probably would have talked about—mentioned it, but not... not dwell on it particularly. And so this would have been planted by someone, you know, maybe who had a cabin here. And the same with the maples. I wouldn't call this tree, you know, an invasive, or the maple. And I try to be careful with with saying like "non-native plants" because not all non-native plants are invasives.
Gaby [to Ellen Horowitz]: Mhm.
Ellen Horowitz: I do see a difference. I don't know that I necessarily think of a non-native species as being bad. I just notice it as... and think about in terms of "how did this get here?"
Gaby [to Ellen Horowitz]: I love that. I think that's something that I've been thinking about a lot with this story is that... I'm trying to move into calling them "introduced species" because I think it implies that they have a story, and that people had a role in how they got here.
Ellen Horowitz: And I love that you call them introduced. I'm going to start using that one. [Gaby laughs] I think it's way better.
Gaby [to Ellen Horowitz]: Yeah!
Ellen Horowitz: Yeah, it is. Yeah, It doesn't mean that they're bad, you know, it's just... they're there. And you know who planted them. Now, those are the—some of the things I think about. [eagle call]
Gaby [to Ellen Horowitz]: Totally. [eagle calls, water sounds, gasp] Look who it is.
Ellen Horowitz: Oh, you got—wow! Okay.
Gaby [to Ellen Horowitz]: [laughing] And right there, that's a bald eagle!
Ellen Horowitz: Yeah, hello eagle. [Gaby laughs] Good spotting! [starting string music of "Runaway" by Frank Waln fades in]
Gaby [to Ellen Horowitz]: Aw. Ellen's waving hello. Hello!
Ellen Horowitz: Wow. That was so... perfect.
Gaby [to Ellen Horowitz]: [laughs] Aw. Wow. The white on its head and tail are so crisp.
Oh yeah, and some of those last flaps before going out of view—that tail... just seemed to shimmer. Yeah. That was neat.
Gaby [to Ellen Horowitz]: Incredible.
Gaby [to Ellen Horowitz]: Yeah.
Music: ["Runaway" plays with red-breasted nuthatch birdsong in background]
Gaby: This show is only possible because of donations to the Glacier National Park Conservancy. Learn more at glacier.org. If you liked this episode, share it with a friend who might appreciate it. Also, we'd love it if you gave us a rating and review in your podcast app. Frank Waln makes our music and Stella Nall created our art. Check them out on Instagram. Headwaters is made by me, Gaby Eseverri, Daniel Lombardi, Peri Sasnett, Madeline Vinh, and Michael Faist with support from Lacy Kowalski, Melissa Sladek, Elizabeth Maki, and Sofia Britto. Thanks to our good friends in Glacier's Cultural Resources Program, including Jean, Anya, Keiko, Sierra, Brent, and Kyle. We couldn't make the show without them. This episode was inspired by the talented Anjali Vaidya. Special thanks to Harriet Allen, Lisa Bate, Dr. Elaine Caton, Steve Gniadek, Ellen Horowitz, Mary T. and Riley McClelland, Mary McFadzen, Genevieve and Dave Shea, Kay Stone, Becky Williams, Dr. Vita Wright, and University of California Television. This episode is in honor of the whole McClelland family. Thanks for listening.
