Jesse Logan retired in July as head of the beetle research unit for the
United States Forest Service at the Rocky Mountain Laboratory in Utah. He
is an authority on the effects of temperature on insect life cycles. That
expertise has landed him smack in the middle of a debate over protecting
grizzly bears.
You just never know where the study of beetles will take you.
Dr. Logan seems, in fact, to be on a collision course with the federal
government, in the debate over whether to lift Endangered Species Act
protections from the grizzly bears in and around Yellowstone National Park.
The grizzly population in the greater Yellowstone area is estimated to be
at least 600. The population is centered in the park proper, federal
scientists say, where it has reached its likely natural maximum and has
leveled off. But in adjoining stretches of national forest, the number of
grizzlies is continuing to go up by 4 percent to 7 percent a year. Their
resurgence in the past 50 years is why the federal government announced in
2005 the start of proceedings to take them off the endangered or threatened
species list.
Dr. Logan enters the fray on the question of what grizzly bears eat, how
much of it will be available in the future, and where. All that, he says,
hinges on the mountain pine beetle and the whitebark pine.
The tree (Pinus albicaulis) has no value as commercial timber. But gnarled
and bushy whitebark pines anchor the timberline in much of the West. They
hold the soil for other vegetation to get a foothold, and they trap snow,
prolonging the spring runoff.
They are slow-growing trees and may not even bear cones until they are a
half-century old. In the late 19th century, the naturalist John Muir
counted rings in a weatherbeaten example high in California’s Sierra
Nevada. Its trunk was just six inches across. To his astonishment it was
426 years old.
The beetle’s usual targets were once midaltitude lodgepole and ponderosa
pines. But it has begun extending its range as it adapts to warming
temperatures in the Rockies — two degrees since the mid-1970s. As a result,
it has been killing whitebark pines at altitudes in the Rockies and the
Cascades of Oregon and Washington that would have once been too cold.
Beetle attacks have added to the toll taken by a disease called white pine
blister rust. In the northern Rockies, the beetle infests 143,000 acres.
Entire forest vistas, like that at Avalanche Ridge near Yellowstone
National Park’s east gate, are expanses of dead, gray whitebarks.
“We are very worried the whitebarks may be locally extirpated, if not
driven extinct,” said Diana Tomback, professor of biology at the University
of Colorado, Denver, and president of the Whitebark Pine Ecosystem
Foundation, a nonprofit organization. One recent Forest Service study
suggested that in the next century a global warming would reduce by 90
percent the acreage that has the kind of cold and high altitude climate
where the trees now grow.
The plight of trees may not catch the attention of most people. But the
seeds of the whitebark pine, the pine nuts, feed Clark’s nutcracker birds;
red squirrels, which store the nuts underground; and grizzly bears.
“There is this general notion that grizzly bears are omnivores that will
eat anything and do all right, but that’s not the case in Yellowstone,”
says David Mattson, a wildlife biologist with the United States Geological
Survey on the Northern Arizona University campus in Flagstaff.
The diet of the Yellowstone grizzlies changes radically from season to
season. After emerging from dens in early spring, they gorge on elk and
bison calves and adults that died over the winter, or they chase wolves off
their kills. Later in the spring and in early summer, tourists most often
see them in rivers near Yellowstone Lake, where they go after spawning
cutthroat trout.
They eat roots and bulbs, too. But by late summer the bears head for remote
high country. They turn to delicate fare: moths and pine nuts. In alpine
meadows a grizzly can lap up 40,000 army cutworm moths a day from under
rocks where the fat insects congregate during daylight hours.
But mostly the bears depend on whitebark pines. A federally supported
Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team says the tree’s plump seeds, among the
largest of any North American pine, “are arguably the most important
fattening food available to grizzly bears during late summer and fall.”
Loss of the whitebarks, the task force said, would endanger the bears’
survival.
The hefty bears — a male can exceed 700 pounds — do not climb the trees.
They raid messy, cone-stuffed middens on the ground that red squirrels
build as winter storehouses.
Grizzlies in northernmost Montana, Canada and Alaska have a wide variety of
berries available in the fall, and those near the coast have spawning
salmon in the rivers. But when winter looms in Yellowstone, “the whitebark
pines are about it” on the bear menu, Dr. Mattson says.
The Wind River Pines
Because of the close relationship between the pines and the bears, Dr.
Logan has taken up advocacy for the bears as a means of bringing attention
to the overall ecosystem in the Wind River Range in Wyoming. The range is
high, broad, relatively far from the moderating effect of the Pacific Ocean
and exposed to arctic blasts off the plains. They therefore are colder than
nearby ranges. Dr. Logan’s computer models show them resisting a warming
climate longer than other mountains and remaining a refuge for the pines
and the bears.
Earlier analyses that Dr. Logan conducted correctly predicted beetle
movements. In the 1990s, his analyses predicted a northward invasion by
mountain pine beetles from near the Washington-Canada border deep into the
lodgepole forest of the British Columbia interior.
Rising temperatures were revving up the beetles’ metabolisms, and he
surmised that they would soon complete a full cycle of reproduction in one
year. Eventually their reproduction would get in pace with the calendar
well north of their usual range, a condition called adaptive seasonality.
It means millions of adults emerging simultaneously from infested trees.
Like an army roaring out of the trenches, they overwhelm their next round
of piney prey, emitting pheromones that draw more attackers to individual
trees. Forest managers say defenses — quarantines, burning and other
methods — are ineffective over large areas.
The result in Canada turned out as bad or worse than Dr. Logan feared. It
may be the largest forest insect blight ever seen in North America, and it
seems nowhere near its peak. It covers a patch running about 400 miles
north-south and 150 miles across. Officials expect 80 percent of British
Columbia’s mature lodgepoles to be dead by 2014.
Loggers are frantically cutting lifeless trees for lumber before they rot.
Funguses carried by beetles stain the wood a blotchy blue. Lumber mills
promote it as stylish “denim wood.” In 2002, high winds carried the beetles
through the Rockies and into the Alberta plain. They appear poised to sweep
east to the Atlantic through Canada’s jackpine boreal forest.
In 2001, Dr. Logan set up an observing station at a broad stand of
whitebark pines at the timberline at Railroad Ridge in the White Cloud
Mountains of Idaho. He expected a beetle infestation, but not for a while,
and planned to collect data before the insects showed.
Almost immediately, in 2002 and 2003, telltale patches of “red top” trees
appeared. Today virtually all the mature whitebarks there are dead. “It was
the most magnificent whitebark ecosystem I’d seen,” Dr. Logan said. “It
broke my heart.”
New computer projections done by Dr. Logan and Jacques Régnière of the
Canadian Forest Service based on recent climate and other data for the
mountain West show most whitebark pine forests being wiped out as warming
continues. But the Wind River Range is projected to stay cold until 2100 or
so, which, if the model is right, means they could be a refuge for
grizzlies forced out of areas where the trees die.
The exercise produced a map on which most of the realm of the whitebarks,
previously out of reach of mountain pine beetles, turns red as the computer
calculates ever-warmer decades ahead. A recent trip there showed that so
far, the Wind River Range is, in fact, fending off beetle attack. Dr. Logan
and several environmental groups, including the Natural Resources Defense
Council, argue that the Wind River Range should be included in areas in
which grizzlies are protected.
The government’s plan to ease Endangered Species Act protection for
Yellowstone’s bears does not mean an end to local and federal conservation
measures for them. A detailed plan has been put together by the Fish and
Wildlife Service and the states of Montana, Idaho and Wyoming. It includes
close surveillance of bears and maintenance of their population at no fewer
than 500 adults, and continued full protection in a 9,300-square-mile
“prime protection area” that includes and extends out from the
3,300-square-mile national park.
A far larger area farther out, including the Wind River Range, is
designated as suitable grizzly bear habitat but would be subject to state
and local regulations.
But Dr. Logan’s projections shows devastating whitebark damage from the
beetles in the government’s core area for grizzly protection by the end of
the century. He says that the government’s recovery area “is completely out
of touch with what is actually happening.”
Government biologists say the official plan can be adjusted if the
whitebarks go into serious decline and the bears are not able to adopt an
adequate replacement diet of roots or other late-fall food. And if the Wind
River Range to the south does turn out to be the bears’ best refuge, that’s
where they’ll go.
“A lot of that area is wilderness already,” said Chris Servheen, grizzly
bear recovery coordinator for the Fish and Wildlife Service office in
Missoula, Mont. “The bears will move in there regardless of what our rules
say, and the beetles don’t care what regulations we have either.”
He also argued that even outside the proposed primary protection area,
state authorities had “signed up” to help protect the bears. And if things
turn seriously bad, he said, the government can relist the bears.
Bear Activism
Bear supporters are already lining up to oppose the near-certain delisting.
“The federal government has a core recovery area that it says is adequate,”
said Douglas Honnold, managing attorney for Earthjustice, a Montana-based
group. “Jesse’s work, and his is not the only such analysis, suggests that
this is flat-out wrong. The federal government has a head-in-the-sand
approach.” Mr. Honnold promised a federal court challenge.
Another bear supporter, Lance Craighead of the Craighead Institute in
Montana, says that “the Winds may be critical. Our own work, and Jesse’s,
all say the whitebark pine will last there longer than it will anywhere.”
Many believe that if the delisting goes forward, bear hunting will follow,
particularly in the Wind River Range. Livestock interests, as well as
hunters and some back country backpackers, do not want to share the land
with grizzly bears. Wyoming’s published bear management plan, set to go
into effect as soon as the bears are off the federal list, declares that
significant presence of grizzly bears will not be permitted in much of the
range, including nowhere in roughly the southern half.
One management tool, it says, is “hunter harvest.” Fremont County, which
includes the Wind River Indian Reservation, has declared grizzlies “an
unacceptable species” and resolved to protect its residents.
In an essay Dr. Logan wrote before the trip into the Winds, he said that if
it confirmed a potential bear refuge, “we can efficiently allocate
protection and reconstruction strategies.” It will be costly, he wrote, but
it would be “inconsolable to simply walk away from a problem that is
largely our making.”
During a break on the trip’s second day, high on a pass called Kirkland
Ridge, Dr. Logan said: “As for active management to encourage bears here, I
don’t know. That’s a policy to be developed. But look, this is clearly a
special place, a special ecosystem. It is all connected, we know that, from
the plains to the mountain tops.”
In the end, of course, the discovery of places that will resist warming
effects may only buy time. “It’s all about global warming,” Dr. Logan said.
“I can’t say if the beetle will stay out of the Winds for all the next
century. I don’t know how long it will take. But one thing I do know. If it
keeps on warming, they’ll get nailed there too. The trees can’t move
uphill, you know. They’ll run out of mountain.”