Nancy Bockino, who heads Northern Rockies Conservation Cooperative’s whitebark pine conservation program, swings a hatchet toward the bark of a beetle-infested brood tree. A trial project she’s spearheading seeks to expose beetles to the elements, ideally reducing adult whitebark mortality during a beetle-driven epidemic that’s getting worse. Photo: Mike Koshmrl/WyoFile
High in the Tetons, whitebark pine devotees go to great lengths to protect the few remaining mature, seed-producing trees from a pine beetle epidemic.
GRAND TETON NATIONAL PARK—An uninvited little chunk of pine beetle larvae clung to Colin Wann’s goggle lens.
High in the Tetons, Wann’s hatchet blade had evidently sent the fatty, sticky globule of opaque insect airborne amid a shower of whitebark pine bark. The tree, likely older than any living human, was dying. And beetles — like the remnant of one that went along with Wann for a ski — are the reason why.
Wann’s hundreds of swipes with the hatchet wouldn’t save these whitebark pines. They were already goners.
There’s a hope, however, that the bark removal effort could ease the severity of a pine beetle epidemic that threatens what’s left of the Teton Range’s whitebark pine stands.
Colin Wann, a technician for the Northern Rockies Conservation Cooperative’s whitebark pine conservation program, describes how pine beetles fatally invade the federally “threatened” high-elevation pine tree. Photo: Mike Koshmrl/WyoFile
How so?
When pine beetles invade a whitebark, they leave behind larvae that turn into the next beetle generation. Even if it’s just a few millimeters thick, the bark of the dying trees offers the native beetle species protection, both from the cold and elements. Remove the bark and the beetles and their progeny both die.
Ecologists in Grand Teton National Park are experimenting with a new pine beetle-killing technique: Stripping the bark off of dying brood trees. That exposes the insects, like the black blob at center, to cold and elements that could reduce the severity of a beetle epidemic that threatens the few remaining whitebark pines in the Tetons. Photo: Mike Koshmrl/WyoFile
At a place like Jackson Hole Mountain Resort, land managers struggling to save the Tetons’ remaining whitebark pines will actually cut and torch beetle-infested trees, known as brood trees. That’s not in the cards anytime soon in the heart of Grand Teton National Park, where the flora of the high peaks is considered “recommended wilderness” — a classification that restricts how humankind can alter the landscape.
Ecologist Nancy Bockino loves whitebark pines, but that’s not why she’s hugging this one. By pressing her cheek into its bark and looking up, she can easily see that the tree has been fatally invaded by pine beetles. If the density of beetle entrances is greater than 2 to 4 per square decimeter, the tree’s a candidate for having its bark stripped in hopes of killing as many beetles as possible. Photo: Mike Koshmrl/WyoFile
Instead of driving up ski-area catwalks and using chainsaws and fire, Nancy Bockino and Wann tour uphill with alpine-touring ski equipment, armed with hatchets and blades. In hard-hit whitebark groves like this one, named “Heart of Winter,” the base of many dying “fader” trees now sport a new look: they’re missing their lower-trunk bark.
“Obviously we’re not getting the whole tree,” said Bockino, who heads Northern Rockies Conservation Cooperative’s whitebark pine conservation program..
She looked around the grove during an early February outing. Seven dying whitebarks in sight had a haircut down low.
“That’s the equivalent of like two brood trees,” Bockino said. “It actually does make a difference, even if it’s hard to quantify.”
Field ecologist Nancy Bockino points out the characteristics of a dying whitebark pine canopy to National Park Service ecologist Dave Thoma, who works for the agency’s Inventory and Monitoring Program. Photo: Mike Koshmrl/WyoFile
Mother Nature was also assisting. Bockino directed the group’s gaze toward the whitebark crown. The bark was spotty and small holes were visible, even from dozens of feet below.
“Woodpeckers are eating them,” Bockino said. “They’re doing it up there, and we’re doing our thing down here.”
Once they’re assaulted by insurmountable numbers of pine beetles, whitebark pines, even those hundreds of years old, don’t last long. “Trees start to fade really quickly,” ecologist Nancy Bockino said. “You can see this one has a lot of orange needles. Within one year, it’s totally red.”
Bockino’s bark-stripping, beetle-killing experiment is just one of many measures being employed in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem to help save whitebark pine, a keystone species that is protected by the Endangered Species Act as “threatened.”
They need all the help they can get. Whitebarks in the Tetons were decimated by a pine beetle epidemic that spanned from 2004 to 2012. The reprieve lasted less than a decade. Another epidemic is now ramping up. Although whitebarks and pine beetles evolved alongside each other, human-caused climate change has upset the natural balance. It now rarely gets frigid enough in fall and early winter — before the beetles are “cold-hardened” — to deliver a devastating blow to the population.
Nancy Bockino tours through the “Heart of Winter” grove of whitebark pines in the Teton Range, a federally protected tree stand that’s being hammered by mountain pine beetles. Photo: Mike Koshmrl/WyoFile
Bockino, who holds a master’s in botany from the University of Wyoming and has fought to save whitebark pine for a quarter century, vividly remembers the last time it happened: Oct. 1-3, 2009.
“Minus 15 across the GYE,” she recalled. “2009 saved all the lodgepole on the [Jackson Hole] valley floor and all the whitebark we have left.”
The black blob on the blade of the hatchet is a dead adult pine beetle. Although a native species, pine beetle epidemics have grown more severe and frequent as a result of human-caused climate change reducing the frequency of early-season extreme cold temperatures. Photo: Mike Koshmrl/WyoFile
In the absence of beetle-killing cold, numbers keep increasing. And whitebarks keep dying. In the Tetons the species is barely hanging on, dependent on stinky beetle-repelling verbenone pouches, plantings and desperate measures like stripping bark off beetle brood trees.
“We have sites like on Teewinot [Mountain], for example, where literally there are 200 green seed trees left,” Bockino said. “It’s because they have a pouch. I’ve lost all the other ones.”
Dave Thoma, an ecologist with the National Park Service’s Inventory and Monitoring Program, slices bark off a dying whitebark pine in the Tetons. Photo: Mike Koshmrl/WyoFile
At the Heart of Winter whitebark stand where Bockino, Wann and National Park Service ecologist Dave Thoma stripped bark, there are only about 200 mature trees total. Many are fading or dead already.
Bockino is working with others on quantifying the success of the new bark-stripping method, debuted this winter, to see if it’s working. In the meantime, she’s hopeful.
“It’s eye-opening to see so many trees stripped,” Bockino said. “It adds up to something.”
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