My first full field season in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem is off to a bit of a bumpy start. Bad weather delayed the start of our training, a weirdly cold and snowy spring has delayed tadpole development, and, if you've been watching the news, you'll know that Yellowstone National Park has experienced an unprecedented flood event that shut it down completely. More on the floods in a later post.
Instead of driving up on Sunday the 5th and meeting with the National Park Service's Inventory and Monitoring crews for our amphibian training on Monday, the training was postponed to Wednesday due to expected thunderstorms on the Northern Range. We decided to drive up on Monday anyway, giving us one day to do some recon on my sites in the more southerly Grand Teton National Park.
The reason my partner (who is my field tech) and I were set to join the I&M crews is because a lot of my research is overlapping with their monitoring program. Each year, they visit several dozen catchments throughout Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks. Catchments are small watersheds, and within each catchment there are anywhere from 1 to 25 wetland sites. At each site, they survey for evidence of amphibian occupancy and breeding - basically, can they find any adults or tadpoles, and if so, how many? The crews are mostly made up of undergraduate biology students working for the summer, or somewhat recently graduated biology majors. A few are veterans of the program, returning for a 2nd, 3rd, or 4th year, while others are brand new.
It's vital that the new crew members learn to identify each species of amphibian found in the park, of which there are 5. Since I am also conducting visual surveys in my catchments, and trying to match the monitoring crews protocols so we can share data, it was critical that Luis and I learn ID as well. The limited number of amphibians in the park makes this pretty easy. We have one salamander, the Western Tiger Salamander, easily distinguished from the anurans (frogs and toads). There's a single toad, the Western Toad. There is a spadefoot (sometimes called a spadefoot toad), but it is only found in a very restricted area, confined to geothermally influenced water. And there are two frogs: the Columbia Spotted Frog and the Boreal Chorus Frog. These two frogs belong to entirely different families. Chorus frogs are tree frogs in the family Hylidae; they are easily distinguished by their diminutive size, the lack of webbing between their toes, and the little bitty suction cups at the ends of their toes. Spotted frogs, in contrast, are much more aquatic. Belonging to the family Ranidae, they are your classic frog, often seen (or rather heard) jumping into the water with a big "plop!"
Slightly trickier are the tadpoles. Salamanders are still the easiest to distinguish - their larvae (as they are not tadpoles) have large eyes and tiny little external gills that flare out to the side. Toads can also be identified fairly easily by behavior. In addition to being extremely black in color, they don't swim away when you step near them as the others do. This is because toads are toxic and they aren't worried about someone trying to eat them. Chorus frogs and spotted frogs are the most similar, but they can be distinguished by eye placement, tail to body ratio, and (later in the season) size. We did get an opportunity to see a spadefoot tadpole, but due to their restricted distribution in the parks, we aren't likely to see them again unless we specifically go looking for them.
Learning all of this was the objective of our first week in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, or GYE. I was slightly familiar with my amphibian ID from my short pilot season last year, but I definitely needed to practice and it was all new to Luis. Before we drove up to the Northern Range to meet with the monitoring crews and put all of this information into practice though, we had a free day in Grand Teton National Park.
For my research, I am planning to visit 20 catchments. Twelve of these are in Grand Teton National Park; the other 8 are in the southerly portion of Yellowstone National Park. Of these 20, 10 are expected to be influenced by beaver activity and the other 10 are not. Also of these 20, 10 are included in the annual monitoring done by the crews, while 10 are completely new. Because these catchments are new, we have no idea what to expect. No clue what the best route in is, how many wetland sites there are, or if there are amphibians present. So, we decided to spend our Tuesday before the trainings scouting out a few of my new catchments. We didn't worry about looking for amphibians, we just wanted to see how many potential sites we had.
This year was shaping up to be an unusual one, even before the mass flooding in Yellowstone. We'd been warned that the May 1st snowpack, which is a pretty solid predictor of how dry things will be, indicated that up to 40% of wetlands could be dry. Then, we got hit with a very wet and cold May, with high levels of snowfall, that delayed development. So it was extra important that we get a peek at how things were looking down in Grand Teton, since the monitoring crews were more familiar with what was happening in the northern part of Yellowstone due to their home base being Bozeman, Montana.
What we didn't anticipate was having our first day in the field interrupted by a bear encounter!
The first catchment we decided to visit is located nearly a popular trailhead, on land that used to be a ranch. The trailhead runs in two directions; most visitors follow it to the left, up into the Tetons, while we took the much less-traveled right-hand trail.
The trail was narrow, forcing us to walk single-file, and didn't appear to have been used recently. We were in a relatively dense forest, so as we walked, we made sure to call out regularly "heyyyyy, bear" or sometimes just "hey-o!" This is part of typical bear safety recommendations - the last thing you want to do is surprise a bear (or a moose or a bison, to be honest) by appearing in front of it with no warning.
As we walked the trail, we noticed how little-used it seemed to be. Though it was maintained (fallen trees had been cut or moved to the side by maintenance crews), there were no fresh boot prints to be seen in muddy stretches. At one point, we found large, round, black poop in the middle of the trail, which I was pretty confident was bear poop, but it didn't seem overly fresh, so we continued on.
The trail we were following was at a higher elevation than the sites we wanted to visit, which were down in a bit of a valley. Instead of bush-whacking our way through the valley though, we thought it best to follow the trail until we were even with the sites, then descend. We were fortunately in a more open area, and started to follow a small stream down the hill.
A couple meters down hill, we saw a log with another semi-fresh pile of large, black poop in front of it, and several piles of similarly-sized, older poop. We briefly paused, considering this, and then moved on, dismissing it.
Luis jumped over the stream easily, and I was staring at my feet about to do the same, when I saw his whole body jerk upright. He leaped back over the stream, almost stepping on me, and whisper-shouted "there's a bear, it didn't see us" and he immediately started walking back up the hill while whipping his bear spray out of its holster. Bewildered, I followed for a couple of steps, then looked back. All I saw was a large, brown butt, the rest of the bear hidden behind a tree, before I followed Luis back up the hill and down the trail.
He didn't slow down for a good while, but when he did, he explained that he had seen the bear straight-on, ambling casually in our direction while sniffing here and there. He was fairly certain it was a grizzly (and I, by the color of the butt I had seen, agreed) and didn't think that it had seen us. We briefly lamented the lack of picture evidence (oh, misguided priorities), but over the next few days, Luis kept judging the distance to different objects and saying "the bear was closer than that." We eventually concluded it had been about 50 meters away, much too close for comfort, given that Yellowstone's recommendation is 100 meters, and we had made the right decision evacuating the area as soon as possible.
We later learned that the park traps bears in or near that area in the fall, closing it to tourists and most researchers. With that knowledge, and the multiple ages of bear poop that we observed, we're making plans to revisit those sites in the company of a larger group of people.
After our adventure that morning, we stuck investigating potential parking spots for other catchments and drove up to Signal Mountain to get an aerial view of a couple of them. We marked the parking spots on our GPS, and then drove north, to Grant Village, where we were to spend the night before meeting up with the monitoring crews at Gibbon Meadows to bring our amphibian ID skills into practice.
More to come!
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