In this episode of Headwaters, we visit St. Mary, looking for experiences that are disappearing from the world. After hearing about the legendary St. Mary winds, Michael gets up early to try to see a grizzly bear, and we learn how these animals are faring in Glacier’s ecosystem. Andrew stays up late to visit the St. Mary observatory and learn about dark skies and stargazing in Glacier.
Featuring: Debby Smith, Bob Adams, Tabitha Graves, and Lee Rademaker.
For more info, visit: go.nps.gov/headwaters
Debby Smith: I know I had a number of moments early on working over at the St. Mary Visitor Center, as you kind of get to the edge of the building and the building is no longer blocking the wind. I've had things that just got sucked right out of my hand.
Andrew: That's Debby Smith, she's in charge of among other things, the St. Mary Visitor Center,
Debby: You know, it's also funny, we'll, we'll often get these high wind warnings. I think it was for 40 to 50 mile an hour gusts and maybe even as high as, as 85. And I've, I've told people that, that don't live around here, that that's our weather forecast. And they're like, Oh no, that can't possibly be right. You know, you couldn't possibly have wind that high, but, but we do.
Andrew: How does wind affect people's experience when they're visiting the St. Mary area?
Debby: Partly, it's just about the sort of obvious things like making sure their tents don't blow away and making sure when you're eating lunch, that you're, you have, you know, a hold of everything that, that you brought with you. And then there's also being able to see what the park is like, and whether it's seeing St. Mary Lake on a day that it's really windy with huge white caps. Even sometimes at the St. Mary Visitor Center on really windy days, we'll get the spray from the lake, hitting the windows on the side of the building, because it's just blowing it that far.
Andrew: And the Visitor Center is not right on the edge of the lake there. The wind has to carry that spray over a quarter mile for it to hit the building. When people are hiking in St. Mary, what are some of the effects of wind that they might see in the plants or the landscape?
Debby: One would be flagging on trees. When you see trees that basically all the branches on the windward side are broken off, or they're kind of deformed. So that side that's facing the direction from which the wind is blowing. And then it resembles a flag because all of the branches are just on the other side.
Andrew: Besides the practical side of not letting things blow away. Do you think you've learned anything from the wind there?
Debby: I think a lot of it is just learning about this place. And I mean, there's the obvious challenges that it presents to people like you were mentioning, but I think also the wind is, is something that makes the east side of the park really beautiful, and it makes it, you know, this diverse place and dynamic and harsh and wonderful all at the same time. It just adds to the experience and it, it creates the amazing place that we have on the east side.
Andrew: How does wind affect life in your area? Does it invert umbrellas, sculpt dunes, or drive wildfire? Maybe you hardly think about the wind at all. The way you interact with wind is largely dependent on where you live. In tornado alley, wind is a life-altering force, but in other parts of the country, it might be more of a curiosity. In this episode, we're going to look at two elements that, perhaps like the wind, have been eliminated as a major factor in many people's lives, but that still find a home in Glacier National Park. First, you'll hear a story about the grizzly bears in the park, and then about our dark starry night skies.
Andrew: Welcome to Headwaters - a Glacier National Park Podcast. Brought to you by the Glacier National Park Conservancy, and produced on the traditional lands of many Native American Tribes, including the Blackfeet, Kootenai, Selis and Qlispe people.
Michael: We’re calling this season: The Confluence, as we look at the ways that nature, culture, the present and the past all come together here.
Andrew: And we’re both rangers here. And today we're in the St. Mary Valley. St. Mary Lake is the second largest Lake here and home to some of the most breathtaking scenery anywhere in the park.
Michael: I mean, the view from Wild Goose Island overlook is even on Montana State driver's licenses. It's so beautiful.
Michael: Yeah. I mean, look at your own. It's like the, the shimmery thing in the background that they...
Andrew: Oh, yeah, there it is. Wild Goose Island.
Michael: So we're headed to St. Mary because it is a great place to look for experiences that over time have grown harder and harder to find anywhere else.
Andrew: Yeah, Glacier is in many ways, the last best place for experiences that the rest of the world may once have taken for granted, but have since faded away.
Michael: Today, we're going to focus on two of those experiences. One that it helps to get up early for. And one that it helps to stay up late.
Andrew: Yeah. Something for the early birds and the night owls.
Michael: Now, one thing that makes Glacier special is that we are home to an abundant and diverse range of wildlife.
Andrew: We have 71 species of mammal, 276, different birds, six amphibians, and even three reptiles live here.
Michael: Yeah. And I'm curious what your experience has been Andrew, but as an Interpretive Ranger, it seemed like half of the questions I got from visitors were logistical. Like, where should I hike? Is this campground open? Et cetera. And the other half was about wildlife. Do you have moose here? Yes. Where can I see a mountain goat? That sort of thing.
Andrew: Definitely. You could make someone's whole trip by just pointing a spotting scope at a herd of bighorn sheep.
Michael: But that excitement for wildlife encounters can go both ways, cause some people are thrilled at the prospect, but others are actually scared. Glacier is home to predators like mountain lions and wolves, but the critters most people think about when they're here are bears.
Andrew: [Piano music starts] We have a lot of bears here.
Michael: Both black and grizzly bears.
Andrew: As of 2018, the population of grizzly bears for the whole Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem of which Glacier is a small part, was estimated to be about 1,050 individuals. Of these about 250 to 300 would live in Glacier.
Andrew: Some bears are gonna spend part of their lives in the parks part of their lives outside of the park. And the black bear population in Glacier was thought to be about 600.
Michael: I've heard that that's more grizzly bears per acre than anywhere else in the lower 48.
Michael: But how do we even know that this place is huge? It's like finding a thousand needles in a million acre haystack.
Andrew: Yeah, it was actually a pretty big undertaking to get those numbers. I actually talked to Tabitha Graves, the scientist who was involved with a lot of this research.
Tabitha Graves: Hi, I'm Tabitha Graves. I am with USGS, I'm a research ecologist.
Andrew: Not only is it a massive area to survey, you have to figure out how to distinguish individual bears. So you don't just keep counting the same ones.
Michael: And I know with birds in these sort of situations, biologists will catch them and mark them with a leg band, some other animals with ear tags.
Andrew: Yeah. But capturing and marking hundreds of grizzly bears would be super expensive and time-consuming, sounds very dangerous, and would probably seriously disturb the animals. So the scientists use some really cool technological advances to measure the bear population in a different way.
Tabitha: Back in 1998, my predecessor in my job, Kate Kendall, started doing research using genetics of bears. She put out strands of barbed wire around some trees in the woods with some stinky lure in the center of it and found out that grizzly bears would go into smell that when they did that, when they walked over or under the barbed wire, a few strands of hair would be pulled out. And in that hair there's DNA in the hair follicle. And from that, you can identify individual bears.
Andrew: With the DNA captured in a hair trap. You could tell how many distinct individuals were around. This initial experiment proved the concept, and then they did a much bigger in 2004.
Tabitha: Where we got a population estimate, it was the first population estimate that had good confidence intervals and was fairly precise. That was 765 animals was the point estimate in 2004...
Andrew: From there, they took the survey even wider. And I cannot overstate how big of a project it is. They were monitoring a ton of hair traps across the whole northern continental divide ecosystem. Michael, do you want to take a guess at how many rub sites they were monitoring for bear hair?
Michael: Well, I imagine they tried to put them all over the park in the different regions. I'm gonna say, maybe like 500?
Tabitha: Um, we had across the whole ecosystem there around 4,000 rub objects per year,
Michael: 4,000? Holy crap, that's a lot!
Andrew: Yeah. And Tabitha told me that this genetic data is useful for a lot more than just those population surveys.
Tabitha: [Music starts] Yeah. That's the cool thing about having genetic data is yet you can not only identify individual bears, but you can actually see who's related to who.
Andrew: For instance, they found.
Tabitha: One male grizzly bear that had 101 descendants. So that included his offspring, his grand Cubs and his great grand Cubs.
Michael: So how's the population doing now?
Andrew: It actually seems like it's still growing in, even in Glacier National Park, which Tabitha said is good news. Tabitha: Well, we were actually surprised that the population was still growing in Glacier Park because the protections have been so strong here for so long. We thought it was possible that it would just be completely stable. Because bears have larger home ranges, it could be that changes that are going on on the Blackfeet Reservation or the Whitefish range are also influencing the number of bears here.
Michael: Wow. That's amazing. But it makes it all the more frustrating that I haven't seen any in the park this summer. I saw one really early in the spring, but once summer started, I mean, I just haven't been able to find them.
Andrew: Have you been out looking for them?
Michael: I mean, yeah, I've driven all over. I did a ton of biking and day hiking. [Music starts] I've gone backpacking collectively for nearly 20 days so far and no bears.
Andrew: Wow, that's... That's pretty bad luck.
Michael: So as a last ditch effort, I thought I'd go to St. Mary along St. Mary Lake is a stretch of open meadows called two dog flats, a place where in the past I've seen bears before.
Andrew: Yeah, me too. It's great habitat.
Michael: And a common piece of wisdom is that if you want to see wildlife, it helps to get up early.
Michael: So this morning I left the house around five.
Michael: [In car] Let's get this over with
Andrew: That's especially true in the summer. When it gets hot in the middle of the day, wildlife like bears are going to be more active around dusk and dawn.
Michael: Exactly, so with that in mind, [music starts] I drove over to St. Mary from the west entrance, a nearly two hour drive, to make it there before sunrise.
Andrew: You don't have the reputation of being a...
Michael: [stammering] No, I'm not very much of a morning person.
Michael: But this was serious business! I can't have gone the whole summer without seeing a bear.
Michael: [In car] That's a promising sign. I just drove through some bear poop.
Michael: So I parked on the roadside pull off, got out my binoculars and scanned the horizon.
Andrew: And binoculars will definitely help. At a distance, it's pretty hard to tell the difference between black and grizzly bears.
Tabitha: So there's eight species of bears in the world and brown bears, grizzly bears, kodiak bears are all the same species. Grizzly bears and black bears are different species. And some of the differences between them are grizzly bears are more oriented towards digging, black bears climb trees more.
Andrew: One of the most common misconceptions is that black bears are all black and that grizzly bears are all brown. The truth is we have brown-black bears, black-grizzly bears. And there are examples of both species that are cinnamon or blonde here in the park.
Michael: So don't rely on the fur. Look for physical characteristics. Tabitha mentioned that grizzly bears like to dig. That means they have huge shoulder muscles that give them a really pronounced hump on their back. Black bears, on the other hand, spend a lot of time climbing trees—which gives them really strong hindquarter muscles and gives them a nice big rump. And there are other little things to look for too: grizzly bears have longer claws, black bears have a straighter snout—but to use any of this information, you have to find a bear in the first place. Which was something after an hour I had not managed to do.
Michael: [From the field] Now, the first thing I've seen that isn't a bush, is a deer bounding through the field.
Andrew: You can't find any bears there. Nope. How long did you wait?
Michael: [From the field] I’m parked like on top of a pile of bear poop. So I know that they come through here, but there's been nothing.
Michael: But I didn't want to throw in the towel that easy. Just a few miles away, the trail to Otokomi Lake started. A trail I've also seen a bear on. So I decided to try my hand at seeing a bear while hiking. And with very high hopes of seeing bears earlier in the summer, I interviewed one of Glacier's resident bear experts. Could you introduce yourself?
Bob Adams: Sure. [Music starts] Well, Michael I'm Bob Adams and I have been here in Glacier as a seasonal ranger for, specifically 44 seasons before this.
Michael: Bob is a legend in Glacier. After serving in the military, he came to Glacier on a whim in 1966, went on a day hike to the Sperry Chalet and wound up meeting his now wife, Carolyn.
Bob: And I did a lot of hiking up to Sperry. In fact, I've packed a half gallon ice cream, solid with dry ice and packed it up to Sperry. I think that's the only reason that Carolyn and I ended up together. I don't know.
Bob: The ice cream, you betcha.
Michael: More or less, he's been here ever since wearing a variety of hats. He staffed entrance stations, campgrounds done law enforcement, but he spent most of his time as the lead bear management ranger in Many Glacier.
Bob: I haven't counted up exactly the number of years, but it's been about 25 to 30. I would say as bear management ranger at Many.
Michael: A job that often direct contact with bears, even deciding if a trail needs to be closed for bear danger. But to hear him say it, the job is mostly about people.
Bob: My emphasis is in meeting the public and trying to educate the public every day on the trail about bear safety certainly, and safety around the large animals and safety in regard to other environmental hazards of the park.
Michael: I figured he'd be the perfect person to ask about how to safely see a bear on trail.
Bob: The ideal situation, in my estimation for seeing a bear—black bear or grizzly—is when it's way more than a hundred yards away from you, up in a hillside or down in a valley. It's a pretty exciting experience to get that chance and to have a few minutes to stop and look and get out your binoculars.
Michael: Seeing wildlife from a safe distance is obviously the best scenario for all involved. Seeing animals up close can be a different story.
Bob: Moose are very large animals, maybe a thousand, 1100 pounds with a brain the size of a Walnut. I mean, nothing could go wrong I'm sure.
Michael: If you're in its personal space, any animal or person for that matter will respond more dramatically. So keeping wildlife at a distance is step one. In fact, park guidelines state that you should stay 25 yards from herbivores like deer and mountain goats and a hundred yards from predators like bears.
Andrew: Which is easier said than done on a lot of trails in the park. It's pretty rare to be able to see anything, let alone a bear from a hundred yards away. Twists and turns in the trail mean trees and rocks can block your view.
Michael: Exactly. And while it's never ideal to be up close and personal with a bear, the worst case scenario is to surprise one. Something you can easily imagine happening around a blind corner. So the best thing to do while hiking is to regularly let them know you're there.
Bob: To minimize the likelihood of encountering a bear, or surprising a bear, is to make noise when you travel. That means using your voice to call out. It's not conversation. People say: "Oh yeah, we're talking, we're talking." Okay. Sometimes your conversation carries quite a distance if the wind is blowing, but usually it does not.
Michael: [yelling, from the field] Coming through.
Michael: Bears, have an incredible sense of smell. They are believed to be able to smell things from over a mile away. But their sense of hearing is about as good as ours.
Bob: I, in Glacier Park, am just obnoxiously known for my presence, I guess. Every 50 yards or so I'll shout out, especially around a blind corner where there's high noise from wind or a waterfall or a stream nearby. You want bears to know you're in the area, because bears' natural inclination is to move away from people. Even though they are accustomed to our presence, they have no interest in really getting up close and personal with us, so give them that opportunity.
Michael: [yelling, from the field] Heyo!
Michael: So making noise is a must. Even if it feels a little silly, sometimes.
Andrew: Making noise has helped me avoid surprising bears, but it won't always prevent you from running into them.
Michael: You're right. Sometimes even if they know you're there, you might still see them.
Bob: We get reports all the time—every summer, every week—in the visitor center. "Oh, the bear was coming toward me. It was charging me!" It was lots of different things in their perception, but the bear usually is just walking toward them and they are petrified. And you and I can understand how that might be. If you've never been around a bear, maybe even in a zoo, this is, this is daunting. And if the bear for example is walking on the trail towards you, or is coming up behind you on the trail. And that's when they really get excited because they are sure the bear is after them. It's very personalized. It's not the case, the bear is moving where it wants to go, the trail is the easiest way for the bear to travel.
Andrew: One time a few years ago, I was leading a ranger hike up to Avalanche Lake, and we were all stopped talking about the trees—and someone very calmly tapped me on the shoulder and said that there was a black bear coming down the trail. It made total sense. Why would the bear want to bushwhack through the brush when there's a trail that's clear right there?
Michael: Precisely. And Bob has advice if you ever find yourself in that situation.
Bob: What we as visitors, hikers, should do is move slowly away from the bear, back up slowly. And if you find a spot on the trail that's safe for you to get off, on the downhill side of the trail—not over a cliff, but where you can walk down five or 10 yards and just stand still—the bear is going to walk past you. That's what the bear is going to do. It may turn and look at you. You may feel more comfortable, and it's perfectly okay to get out your bear spray and have it in your hand, but do not plan to discharge it at the bear. Uh, that's just going to stir things up. There's no need to do that.
Andrew: That's how it's happened in my experience—just moved my group off as far as we could, and the bear just strolled right past us and kept minding its own business. But he also mentioned bear spray.
Michael: He did. Bear spray is the number one recommended deterrent for diffusing or preventing bear encounters. Easier to use, and shown to be even more effective than firearms, but what is it?
Andrew: Well, it would be a dangerous mistake to think of it as a repellent like mosquito repellent. You do not want to spray it on yourself. What it is is a high volume, high concentration, high pressure can of what's essentially pepper spray.
Michael: And having been on the wrong end of an accidental discharge. It is not fun to deal with personally.
Bob: This stuff is very effective, very effective if used properly.
Michael: Emphasis on, IF YOU USE IT PROPERLY.
Bob: Because most people do not take the time to learn a couple of things about bear spray. One is when one should use it. And how.
Michael: So if you're visiting the park, you should get bear spray, but you should also head to a visitor center to learn how to discharge it.
Andrew: Yeah. [Music starts] During the summer, we would lead twice daily bear spray demonstrations at the Apgar Visitor Center—using a can of inert spray that doesn't have the pepper in it to show people the ropes.
Michael: There are some basics like knowing you've got five to seven seconds worth of spray in there, and knowing where to aim.
Bob: You just have to aim it correctly. You want to aim it down so that it hits the ground in front of the bear that's moving toward you, so it rolls up into the bear's face. You don't want to aim it straight at the bear's face because it comes out in a cone shape pattern—half of that bear spray would go over the top of the bear's head, you don't want that. And you don't want to do this when the bear is 30 yards away or 20 yards away, it is not effective.
Michael: Armed with that knowledge, you can prepare for an instance when it would be needed.
Bob: If you surprise a bear, which is the most likely scenario for getting hurt by a bear—especially a sow with cubs— coming around a blind corner, and you have not been making noise or whatever. It didn't work. You're at 20 yards from the bear or less. And suddenly that bear comes at you. That bears moving 44, 45 feet a second. I mean, you don't have time to think about this. While you are aiming at the bears chest and at its paws, you're going to discharge that spray. You could give it a short burst [short spray sound] as soon as you get that out of your pack. Give it a half second or so if the bear is at 20 yards—within a very short time it's going to be on you, discharge the whole thing in his face. I mean, [longer spray sound] just hold it down.
Michael: With a face full of bear spray, that bear is going to scamper off in search of a quiet place to wait out its new whole head hangover. In a little while, they'll be just fine and you'll be long gone. The stuff just works.
Bob: You have to have that bear spray somewhere where you have actually gone through the physical motions of putting your hand on that spray and ripping the velcro. You should be able to get that out in one to two seconds. It can be done, but you need to practice that.
Michael: I have never once needed to use my bear spray, but even still, I had Bob's advice in the back of my head on the way to Otokomi Lake. Making plenty of noise, being observant and keeping my bear spray handy. But I still hadn't seen any wildlife—that is, until I rounded the corner, got to the lake itself... Where all of a sudden, just 20 feet from me—a fish jumped and splashed in the creek.
Michael: It kinda scared me! What?
Andrew: You knew, what you were implying. It happened.
Michael: Okay, believe me, I was disappointed too. I ate lunch there for 30 minutes. Eventually started down to the car with my proverbial tail between my legs. I didn't see any wildlife on the hike out either. Only a few other hikers going the other way.
Andrew: Well, don't beat yourself up too much.
Michael: Yeah. Well, something else Bob had said was reverberating in my head, the whole hike out, no matter how badly I wanted to see a bear:
Bob: Most people are going to walk up any given trail at Many Glacier or elsewhere in the park, and they're not going to see a bear—either a black bear or a grizzly bear—they just aren't.
Michael: Just because they're more common here than elsewhere doesn't mean you're going to see one. And even if more times than not you don't see one, you always have to be prepared in case you do. Because normally, you see them when you least expect to. [In the car] I see people stopped! [In the studio] Sure enough. I had given up all hope as I began my long drive back home. I mean, I'd been out for nearly 12 hours. But before I could even drive out of the St. Mary Valley, I noticed cars parked at a roadside pull out.
Michael: And I thought back to one more thing. Bob had mentioned. Bear Jams.
Bob: And a lot of them are just happy to see them from the roadside, which creates some other problems: Bear jams.
Andrew: And not jam like jelly, right?
Bob: The piling in of cars along the road—
Michael: Seeing a lot of cars parked in the road, or at a pullout with no trailhead, is usually a sign that somebody spotted an animal. And animal sightings are exciting, but these bear jams can be problematic.
Bob: Preventing bears from even crossing the road to get to water because there are 30 to 40 cars parked, solid.
Andrew: People, essentially acting as a barrier between the bear and food or drinking water.
Bob: People out of the cars and advancing toward the bears. I mean, it's— It's hard being a bear, [sound of car honking] I guess you could say.
Michael: With a roadside bear sighting, if you're the one driving and you spot it and nobody else has seen it yet: what should you do?
Bob: Well, I can tell you what you should do perhaps. And I'll tell you what you're going to do. I know what you're going to do, you're gonna stop—you're going to call the kids to the window, and if it's no more than that, at least you're going to be there clicking from the car. And of course, once you do that other cars pile in and then the thing goes pretty quickly to chaos, or certainly can. What you should do is take a look, slow down, take a look, keep moving. That's what we'd like people to do. It never happens. [laughs]
Michael: But amazingly, that afternoon, everyone had pulled safely off the road into a large pull off that didn't interfere with traffic in any way and had binoculars trained up the hillside where over a hundred yards away, two grizzlies were foraging.
Andrew: Really? That's awesome!
Background: [In the field] We came across someone else who had spotted him when he was further down the mountain. Yeah. Oh that's huge! [laughing]
Michael: I mean, it was the perfect bear encounter. They were enormous, for one, like the one bear was scarily huge. They were far away, and we weren't bothering them in the slightest.
Andrew: That's really good to hear.
Michael: And people there were clearly absorbed by the experience. One couple set up a spotting scope to share with everyone so you could see them really clearly. And many were seeing a grizzly bear for the first time.
Background: [In the field] I was looking—I thought it was going to be darker. Me too. Well the back is dark, and the front is light.
Michael: As fun as it is, to make sure I didn't add to the parking problem—after I got a good look and talk to the few people I got back in my car and I kept driving. Now, I spent all day trying to find a grizzly, and I was mesmerized when I did—along with everyone else at that roadside pull off. But as we hinted at earlier, seeing a grizzly bear, hasn't always been that rare of an experience.
Bob: Most people know that the range of the grizzly was vastly larger. I think it stretched back almost to the Mississippi River if you go back 300 years or so.
Michael: Through 200 years of hunting and poaching, the grizzly population of the lower 48 was reduced by as much as 99% compared to 1800 levels. Today, thanks to conservation efforts like the Endangered Species Act and even protected lands like Glacier, they're no longer on the brink of extinction—but they are still far less common than they once were.
Andrew: And as exciting as it is to find one today, bears aren't just here for us to see. This isn't a zoo. They play a really vital role in the ecosystem. Here's Tabitha Graves again—
Tabitha: They have effects on, on lots of different parts of the ecosystem because they dig for roots a lot, particularly in the spring, in the fall, they're actually digging up the soil and that's actually a kind of nutrient cycling. They might eat huckleberries for instance, in one place. And then because they can move such large distances, being large animals, they are really important for seed dispersal.
Andrew: They regulate prey populations, breakdown logs—really the list goes on and on. Their role in this ecosystem is enormous.
Michael: The fact that we not only have them here today, but that thousands—millions of us each year can share this place with them, speaks to the strides we've made in bear management. Which as Bob put, it used to be... well, different.
Bob: Oh, bear management has changed quite a bit. Oh, will you indulge me a little story?
Michael: Go right ahead. A story from Bob's first season as an employee in 1967.
Bob: We patrol rangers, road patrol rangers, would cruise through the campground in the evening because they invariably had bear problems. [Music starts] Because there were no bear-proof cans, garbage cans. They just had regular 50 gallon galvanized cans and people left their gear, their stoves, their food, their ice chests out.
Michael: So bears could get into these things and learned that they had food in them.
Bob: You could find out where the bear is cause you hear people shouting and banging on their pots and pans: "Hey bear, Hey Hey Hey!" Bang, bang, bang. So we know where the bear is, so we cruise up. And we had a really fun tool in those days, crazy—we could have died using this. But we had a shaved off wooden baseball bat behind the backseat. We'd jump out with a baseball bat, and shout at the bear and run up and whack it in the, but I'm, I'm not kidding you with a baseball bat a black bear. When it's sitting there at the table, you know, going through somebody’s ice chest.
Michael: Wail on it. And that bear would take off like a rocket and go up the nearest tree. And we'd say, "okay, job done. We're moving on." Guess what? 15 minutes later, bear's down working the campground again. Now that was bear management in '67.
Andrew: No way. That's, that's crazy.
Michael: I mean [laughing], I lost, but this era, this technique of bear management is dangerous for more than just the ranger carrying the bat. Visitors were injured or killed by bears that started to see us as a source of food. And more bears had to be euthanized too for this behavior. Understandably things are different now.
Andrew: We've definitely changed quite a bit.
Michael: Bob covered a lot of ways that we can alter our behavior in bear country. But how can we affect bear behavior?
Andrew: Yeah. Well, thanks to the research of Tabitha and a lot of other scientists, we understand bears a lot better today than we did during Bob's story 50 years ago.
Tabitha: Yeah. We did a study that we called nature versus nurture.
Andrew: And it used that same genetic data that we discussed earlier.
Tabitha: We were trying to understand how grizzly bears become habituated. What we did is we looked to see whether their mothers also had a history of conflict and whether their fathers also had a history of conflict. We found that offspring who got into trouble were more likely to have mothers that got into trouble. And this is consistent with what we know about bear life history: young bears stay with their mothers for a couple of years. So there's an opportunity for them to learn how to get into trouble basically, or how to learn those associations of humans and food in the early years.
Michael: Okay. So let me get this straight. Cubs with habituated fathers who get into food, et cetera, they don't become habituated, but the cubs that have habituated moms do?
Andrew: Exactly. And what this means is that since a bear's father doesn't raise it—its only contribution is genes—the behavior isn't inherited.
Michael: Okay. So cubs must be taught this behavior by their moms.
Andrew: Yeah, exactly. So Tabitha told me that this realization emphasized how important it is for visitors here to properly secure their food.
Tabitha: Yeah. Our research really highlights the need to prevent food conditioning from happening in the first place because there could be kind of these longer-term effects that could be passed down from mother to offspring. So it's really important to put your food away, make sure that you're storing all of your attractants safely at night inside of a hard-shelled vehicle or in a bear box in some place that keeps the foods and attractants away from bears.
Michael: Wow. Talk about the butterfly effect. I knew it could affect our bears today, but if it gets in the hands of a—or the paws of a female bear...
Andrew: She's going to teach it to her cubs and they'll teach it to their cubs and so on. So it's really important that we always secure our food and trash. It can affect generations of bears.
Michael: So as we've learned this information over time, the park's bear management policies have evolved. Given the same situation [Bob laughing] this summer, you probably wouldn't use the shaved off baseball bat.
Bob: No, we wouldn't use the baseball bat. Absolutely not.
Michael: Sawn-off baseball bats have given way to a variety of safer and more effective tools that rangers can use to teach bears, to keep their distance from us. There's cracker rounds, bean bags, rubber bullets, and also infrastructure set up to know how and when to close trails or campgrounds to prevent encounters in the first place. But like Tabitha mentioned the most important tool that has kept our wildlife as wild as can be in a place with 3 million visitors a year is food storage.
Bob: All foods, all things that are associated with foods kept away at all times, except mealtime. That's the mantra.
Michael: And the result of all of this is that today in Glacier, you just don't see grizzlies in a dumpster. You don't see bears in the campground running off with bratwurst or breakfast pastries. You see them up on a hillside foraging for huckleberries, chasing ground squirrels, sliding down snow. And that difference is important.
Background: Oh that's huge! [laughs]
Michael: The next time you come visit, read up on our food storage regulations. Buy, carry, and learn how to use bear spray and embarrass your friends and family by making noise on trail.
Michael: [yelling] Good morning!
Michael: Because you might not see a bear. Heck, you probably won't see any. But what if you do? After all, where's the fun in a guarantee?
Andrew: After the break, our final story.
GLACIER NATIONAL PARK CONSERVANCY
Andrew: Each episode, we seem to cover at least one thing that like this podcast wouldn't be possible without the support of the Glacier National Park Conservancy.
Michael: With the help of some friends over there, we got the number of executive director, Doug Mitchell, and decided to call him up out of the blue to ask about these projects.
[Phone numbers being dialed, dial tone]
Andrew: For this episode, we wanted to ask about their support of astronomy programs.
Doug Mitchell: Glacier Conservancy, this is Doug.
Andrew: Hey Doug, it's Andrew and Michael here.
Doug: Oh, the mad podcasters. How are we doing over there today?
Andrew: Pretty good. But, uh, we've, we've got an issue. We were hoping you could help us settle it. We've been arguing all day about whether the morning or the evening is better here in Glacier National Park.
Doug: Michael, make your case.
Michael: So I think that the evening is better because there's nothing worse than having to get out of bed early in the morning. And it's a lot easier to stay up late and the sun doesn't even set it seems like till 10:00 PM at some points in the summer. So that's why I think it's better to stay up late.
Doug: All right. Very good. Andrew, counterpoint.
Andrew: Well, I've got to say the morning is the best time to be out in Glacier National Park. You get out early, the sky is all lit up with the sunrise. You really can just get going on your day and enjoy all the beautiful scenery. In the evening it's cold, you're sleepy, you can't see much. So, in my opinion, you've got to get out early when you're in Glacier.
Doug: Wrong! Michael, you are the winner. No doubt about it. [Michael laughing] For those of my age group, that is a Saturday Night Live ripoff. We love the evenings here at the Glacier National Park Conservancy because there's so much programming that goes along with the night sky. So evening is the right answer.
Michael: Woo! Told you...
Andrew: Well, I should've known Doug would come down on your side since the Glacier National Park Conservancy funds so many dark sky and astronomy programs in the park.
Michael: Yeah. I'm going to be holding this over his head for the rest of the day.
Doug: As you should, as you should. You are the king, long live the king.
Michael: All right. Well, thanks for the time, Doug. We'll talk to you later.
Doug: Thank you guys. Call anytime. Cheers.
Andrew: And we're back. One of the things I think is so unique about this place is that people have a chance to interact with wild animals that are in their natural habitats. It's an experience that would have been really common for our ancestors, but to most modern people, it's just really not part of life anymore.
Michael: That's interesting to think about. For thousands of years now, knowing how to interact with large carnivores that could kill you would have been an essential skill, but at some point, it just stopped being part of most people's lives.
Andrew: Yeah, it's so interesting to think about these situations that were part of what it was to be a human for hundreds and hundreds of generations. So long, that knowing how to respond to them is literally inscribed in our DNA. One of the amazing things about national parks, in my opinion, is that they connect us to universal ideas of what it means to be human. Visiting a place like Glacier National Park allows you to see and feel the same things that millions of other people have seen and felt here over thousands of years.
Michael: I think another example of what you're talking about is looking at the night sky and the Milky Way. For millennia, the Milky Way was just what the night sky looked like. Humans that looked up at the night sky, saw the stars and planets and galaxies. In fact, when our nation chose its flag, stars were used, because no matter where you lived in the United States, the night sky was a universal experience. But since then, for most people, that experience has faded away. So I think you should check that out.
Andrew: Well, I have been wanting to go stargazing, since the night skies are so well-preserved here, but I'm not sure I can really get myself to stay up late enough.
Michael: I mean, it's worth it. The park has an observatory even now. So, there's more you can see. You won't regret the missed sleep.
Andrew: [Sighs] All right, I'll do it. [Break as music fades in] Armed with two cans of iced coffee, some high energy music, and my microphone, I drove across the divide from my Apgar office to Glacier's observatory at the St. Mary Visitor Center. [Knocking sound] There, I met Lee Rademaker, the ranger who spearheads Glacier's astronomy program,
Andrew [Talking to Lee]: Hey, Lee. Good to see you.
Andrew: As he started up the observatory and aimed the telescope. I asked him some questions about Glacier's night sky program.
Andrew [Talking to Lee]: First of all, what do we mean by dark skies? [Observatory machines humming in background]
Lee Rademaker: Dark skies are more than just a night sky. Dark skies are really about a sky that lacks light pollution - straight light that shines up into the sky that creates a sky glow. And they are getting rarer and rarer.
Michael: Okay. So light pollution is extra light that is making the stars less and less visible?
Andrew: Yeah, that's right. And having dark skies is actually pretty impressive.
Lee: So in the biologic realm, basically every single organism that lives on the surface of this planet has evolved with a day-night cycle. Our internal workings rely on that day-night cycle to reset the clock. And it's not just, you know, things with eyes. Plants are also impacted by light pollution, or by a lack of dark skies.
Michael: All right. That makes sense. Plants and animals are used to dark nights. If light pollution makes the night brighter, it can throw things off.
Andrew: Yeah. But there are cultural impacts, too.
Lee: Culturally, dark skies are really important. Throughout time, societies around the world have relied on the skies to help tell stories, to help know when animal migrations are going to occur, know when the seasons are coming. The sky has really helped them kind of predict the world around them.
Andrew: For Lee, the dark skies are one of the best parts of working in Glacier National Park.
Lee: To me, dark skies are an opportunity to discover. It's an opportunity for things like mystery and awe.
Andrew: And sharing that sense of discovery with visitors is really rewarding.
Lee: It's really kind of fun, because a lot of people that come to the park have never had the opportunity to experience truly dark skies. They often are in a sense of disbelief about what they're actually seeing. And on more than one occasion, people have thought that we were tricking them when we were showing them Saturn through a telescope. They're just kind of blown away and into disbelief. That's a really fun experience for me to be part of.
Andrew: Glacier National Park has made a massive effort to expand the opportunities for visitors to experience dark skies here. All of which culminated in Glacier, with Waterton Lakes National Park in Canada, being designated the world's first transboundary Dark Sky Park.
Lee: The process of becoming an International Dark Sky Park was pretty extensive.
Andrew: The park started by hosting night sky interpretive programs. Then a lighting inventory was conducted, looking for lights all around the park that unnecessarily shine up into the night sky. These lights were then replaced with less polluting and more efficient lights.
Lee: And we were able to do that with the help of the Glacier National Park Conservancy.
Andrew: In the midst of this process, the building we find ourselves in right now, the Dusty Star Observatory, was constructed.
Lee: We're inside of a SkyShed POD MAX, 12-foot dome observatory. So it's that kind of classic observatory shape that you've seen in pictures. And in the center of the building is a big steel pier. And sitting on top of the pier is the telescope mount. This mount controls where the telescope points.
Andrew: As a Dark Sky Park, Glacier has a lot of astronomy programs for people to attend, mostly in the months of July and August, at the Apgar and St. Mary Visitor Centers.
Lee: And we have astronomers set up that can help people experience the night sky using telescopes, binoculars, and other, even just, kind of, you know, sitting out on a lawn chair and looking up and having an astronomer point different objects out to you, that you might see with your naked eye.
Andrew: As we talked, the skies darkened, and by about 11:30, the Milky Way emerged, and stars began to carpet the entire sky above us. It was time for the fun part. Lee pointed the telescope at the planet Saturn. I should note that the telescope in the Dusty Star Observatory is a type called an astrograph.
Lee: Which is a fancy word for a telescope that you typically don't look through with your eye. And it focuses its light down through the back of the scope, where we have a camera that is able to project, or send, these images off to the computer.
Andrew: Which is why you'll hear us referencing a screen rather than an eyepiece. I carefully watched as Lee aimed the telescope.
Lee: So, right now, Saturn has popped up on the screen. And right now it just looks like a really bright white oblong shape. I'll see if I can fine-tune it a little bit to make those rings come out...
Andrew: In no time the planet came into focus.
Andrew [Talking to Lee]: So cool though, you can very distinctly see the rings.
Andrew: Well, Saturn was super cool. I was really hoping I could convince Lee to show me the comet NEOWISE, which was at its most visible the night I was out there. That particular comet only comes by about every 6,800 years. So it's really no exaggeration to say that seeing it in this telescope would be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. After a few minutes of adjustments, Lee got the comet squarely in the telescope sights and it didn't disappoint.
Lee: So now you've got the nucleus of the comet on the left side of the screen, and the tail stretching out to the right.
Andrew: [Talking to Lee]: Oh my God. Yeah, that's really impressive. He talked me through what I was seeing here.
Lee: The NEOWISE is a fairly green hue and actually has a greenish ion trail. Every comet has two tails as it approaches the sun. One is the tail kind of made up of the dust and gas that's kind of blasted off of the core of the comet. And then a second one is an ion tail, that's formed from the interaction between the comet and the solar wind. And so the ion tail is kind of this greenish-blue, and then the comet itself is more of a kind of a greenish, emerald-almost color.
Michael: Wow, I'm so jealous! I told you it was worth staying up late. Did you get a picture?
Andrew: We did! Here, check it out.
Michael: Oh wow! You could really see the tail and everything! We should put that on the park's website for listeners, too.
Andrew: That's a great idea. We can get it up there. By now, as we looked at the comet, it was getting really late. The excitement of seeing the comet had given me a rush of energy, but I knew it wouldn't last forever. And Lee had to work early the next morning.
Lee: It may be time to call it a night on this fairly successful image, I have a seven o'clock shift tomorrow.
Andrew: I gotta drive back to West Glacier.
Andrew: You can enjoy the stars on any clear night in Glacier, even if you're not able to make it to an astronomy program. All you really need is a clear view of the sky. Lee recommends bringing some warm clothes, maybe a lawn chair and a pair of binoculars can help too. And he said that if you can't make it to an event, with a smartphone, you can...
Lee: Download an app and point it at the sky, and learn a little bit more about what there is up there.
Andrew: If you decide to check out the stars while you're here, and you definitely should - it was well worth staying up for - it's important to think about leaving no trace with stargazing. Lee reminded me that Leave No Trace principle seven, "be considerate of other visitors," means taking an effort not to shine bright lights where people are stargazing. If we take these simple steps to leave no trace, we can make sure that there's continued opportunities here to be part of this ancient human tradition of viewing the night sky.
Lee: Today, when you look up at the night sky, you're not just seeing the stars. I think you're really connecting to that, that shared humanity and that shared culture.
Michael: It sounds like you had a great night. I'm really thinking now about all the ways that people, and our lighting, clashes with the natural dark skies, and how it hasn't always been that way. So I called Darnell Rides At The Door, an Amskapi Piikani, or Blackfeet, Tribal member that I met in another episode, to learn more. And she pointed out the observatory's name, Dusty Star, is actually a Blackfeet term for a comet. Darnell Rides At The Door: Those are comets and we call them dusty stars: iszika-kakatosi.
Michael [Talking to Darnell Rides At The Door]: The concept of a, of a dusty star, might've been especially relevant this year with the comet NEOWISE. My coworker Andrew got the chance to go look at that in the St. Mary Observatory.
Darnell Rides At The Door: Oh, how awesome!
Andrew: Oh yeah. That makes total sense after seeing it. Comets are, like...just...dusty stars!
Michael: Yeah. Darnell told me that the Blackfeet language is a very visual one.
Andrew: You know, it's interesting to think about the last time that comet NEOWISE passed by Earth, some 6,000 years ago, Blackfeet people were probably looking at it up in the sky and calling it by that same word,
Michael: The things we talked about today, seeing grizzly bears and the Milky Way, are just a few of the countless unique experiences you could have here.
Andrew: Yeah. You can also find here some of the last alpine glaciers in the contiguous U.S., endemic plants that occur nowhere else in the world, and opportunities for solitude and quiet that are becoming increasingly rare.
Michael: [Music starting] Heck, if you could prove there's a better place on earth to pick huckleberries, I'll eat my shoe.
Andrew: These are opportunities for people to connect with the natural world that may disappear forever if we're not careful.
Michael: So it's our collective job now to make sure that the types of experiences we talked about today, like seeing a bear, viewing the stars in the night sky, are possible for people for another 6,000 years.
Andrew: I think that if we can learn to come together as a community, we can do it, but it's going to be a big job.
Michael: Yeah. I think we're up to it.
Michael: That’s our show for today—If you’re interested in learning more about bear safety or astronomy programs in the park you can find links in the show notes for more info.
Andrew: Thanks for listening!
Renata: Headwaters is a production of Glacier National Park with support from the Glacier National Park Conservancy. The show was written and recorded on traditional Native lands. Andrew Smith and Michael Faist produced, edited and hosted the show. Ben Cosgrove wrote and performed our music. Alex Stillson provided tech support Quinn Feller designed our art Renata Harrison researched the show [Background: And researched the credits!], Lacy Kowalski was always there for us, and Daniel Lombardi and Bill Hayden were the executive directors. Support for the show comes from the Glacier National Park Conservancy. The Conservancy works to preserve and protect the park for future generations. We couldn't do it without them, and they couldn't do it without support from thousands of generous donors. If you want to learn more about how to support this podcast, or other awesome Conservancy projects, please go to their website at glacier.org. Of course you can always help support the show by sharing it with everyone you know— your friends, your family, your dog... And also leave us a review online. Special thanks this episode to Debby Smith, Darnell Rides At The Door, Tabitha Graves, Bob Adams, and Lee Rademaker. In this episode of Headwaters, we visit St. Mary, looking for experiences that are disappearing from the world. After hearing about the legendary St. Mary winds, Michael gets up early to try to see a grizzly bear, and we learn how these animals are faring in Glacier’s ecosystem. Andrew stays up late to visit the St. Mary observatory and learn about dark skies and stargazing in Glacier. Featuring: Debby Smith, Bob Adams, Tabitha Graves, and Lee Rademaker.
