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Bison and Biodiversity: History of a Keystone Species

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Bison and Biodiversity: History of a Keystone Species Spring/Summer 2020 MONTANA NTO PROMOTE ANDa CULTIVATE THEt APPRECIATION,u UNDERSTANDINGr AND STEWARDSHIPa OFli NATURE THROUGHs EDUCATIONt Bison and Biodiversity: History of a Keystone Species Heartbeats & Hibernation | All About Antlions | Birding in Spain and Montana | Visions of Earth MONTANA Naturalist Spring/Summer 2020 inside Features 4 BISON AND BIODIVERSITY: A CASE STUDY Exploring the history of North America’s keystone herbivore BY GIL GALE 8 HEARTBEATS AND HIBERNATION 4 8 IN THE ROCKIES Getting at the heart of surviving winter in Montana Departments BY HEATHER MCKEE 3 TIDINGS 10 NATURALIST NOTES Antlions: A Conversation of Observations 22 12 GET OUTSIDE GUIDE Book review: The Lost Words; 10 nature writing activity; phenology scavenger hunt; Kids’ Corner: tree painting by Lila Farrell; Pablo 4th-grade science projects 17 IMPRINTS Farewell to Lisa Bickell; upcoming exhibits; new summer 24 camp offerings; welcome to 24 Jennifer Robinson; Drop in with a FAR AFIELD Naturalist; As To The Mission; Birding in Spain 2019 auction thank yous BY PEGGY CORDELL 17 19 26 VOLUNTEER SPOTLIGHT MAGPIE MARKET Cover – A Bullock’s Oriole (Icterus bullockii) Alyssa Giffin perches on a branch above Pauline Creek at the National Bison Range on a gorgeous June 27 22 REFLECTIONS day. Bullock’s Orioles are summer residents COMMUNITY FOCUS Visions of Earth in Montana. Photo by Merle Ann Loman, Working for Wilderness: amontanaview.com. The Great Burn Conservation No material appearing in Montana Naturalist Alliance may be reproduced in part or in whole without the BY ALLISON DE JONG written consent of the publisher. All contents © 2020 The Montana Natural History Center. 2 MONTANA NATURALIST ~ SPRING/SUMMER 2020 Connecting People with Nature 120 Hickory Street, Suite A tidings Missoula, MT 59801 406.327.0405 MontanaNaturalist.org Late last summer I hiked, with my husband, son, and three friends, into Kid Lake in the Great Burn STAFF Recommended Wilderness. The Ser Anderson Teaching Naturalist landscape was stunning: rocky ridges Alyssa Cornell-Chavez stretching into the distance, blue sky Front Desk Associate arcing above the glimmering jewel Allison De Jong of the lake, and the scent of fir and Communications Coordinator warm earth and ripe huckleberries Thurston Elfstrom Executive Director infusing the air. A two-hour drive Laura Lee followed by an easy two-mile hike Bookkeeper brought us to a beautifully wild Drew Lefebvre place. My 16-month-old son and Museum Programs Coordinator & Volunteer PHOTO BY KARA HANSON Coordinator our friends’ four-year-old daughter Enjoying warm sun and cool water at Kid Lake in the Pat Little loved it. They ate huckleberries off lovely wildlands of the Great Burn. Front Desk Associate the bushes and splashed in the lake all Jenah Mead Teaching Naturalist afternoon and had to be dragged away, sun-kissed and dripping. Christine Morris These wild places exist in spite of us. Community Programs Coordinator These magnificent, unique landscapes are home to wolverines and pikas, alpine Stephanie Laporte Potts larches and beargrass, glacier-carved valleys and sparkling streams, and so much more. Youth Programs Manager When I visit our wild places, I am constantly in awe of their diversity and allure, and Jennifer Robinson Program Director that of the wild creatures that inhabit them. Mark Schleicher This issue honors such wildness and variety. From biologist Gil Gale’s exploration Development Director of bison and their fascinating history—species diverging and converging and diverging Glenna Tawney again amidst a backdrop of ice sheets and warming periods (page 4)—to a conversation Marketing & Events Coordinator between three naturalists about the amazing adaptations of predatory antlion larvae (page Kelli Van Noppen ID Nature Coordinator 10), from writer Heather McKee’s examination of heartbeats and their relationship to Christine Wren hibernation (page 8) to naturalist Peggy Cordell’s familiar-yet-novel experience of birding Teaching Naturalist in Spain (page 24), we are reminded of how wonderfully intricate and complex our Bailey Zook world is. Our home. Our planet. Teaching Naturalist This year we celebrate the 50th anniversary of Earth Day (page 27): 50 years of Summer Staff recognizing, on a planet-wide scale, the importance of stewarding this beautiful blue Alyssa Giffin marble we call home. Summer Camp Coordinator This spring, this summer, this year, let’s celebrate our planet and this exquisite Breanna McCabe corner of it that we are so very lucky to call home. Let’s celebrate by exploring it, reveling Educational Programs Intern in it, seeking out its wild places and wild creatures and wild flowers. Board of Directors And let’s celebrate by stewarding it—so that all this wild tangle of beauty and Kelley Willett, President diversity is still here when my son is the age I am now. When his children have children, Stephanie Lambert, Vice President Peggy Christian, Secretary and grandchildren—and beyond. So that, a hundred years in the future, they can splash Katie Guffin, Treasurer around in Kid Lake in the Great Burn Wilderness, because it’s still there, and still wild. Hank Fischer Ian Foster Here’s to this planet, to our wild places, to us. Here’s to actively loving it all. Sarah Megyesi Rick Oncken Rick Potts Dr. Allison Young Allison De Jong Montana Naturalist Art Director Eileen Chontos EDITOR [email protected] SPRING/SUMMER 2020 ~ MONTANA NATURALIST 3 “Intraspecific diversity is the raw material of evolution" —DR. C. CORMACK GATES, IUCN AMERICAN BISON STATUS, 2010 BISONBISON ANDAND BIODIVERSITY:BIODIVERSITY: A CASE STUDY BY GIL GALE When the fires of August 2000 roared across the Bitterroot Valley and up over the Continental Divide, they left behind an intriguing relic exposed in the ashes high in the Anaconda-Pintler mountain range. The discovery by one of the fire mop-up crews of a bison skull at over 8,000 feet triggered some interesting questions about what a plains bison was doing in a high-elevation forested zone so distant from any typical habitat. Did this animal represent something more significant than a wandering oddity? It turns out that drives the life and bison history and death of the major genetics are a bit more ice ages. Periodic complex than many long-term shifts of us Montanans of the earth’s plate were probably aware. tectonics, its orbit In our time, on the Historic around the sun, and North American its tilt, coupled with continent, there are Range of occasional massive two subspecies of volcanic eruptions, all bison, the plains bison Bison interact to produce (Bison bison bison), a bewildering which dominated the assemblage of Great Plains biome, past and potential and the northern long-term climate latitude wood outcomes for the bison (Bison bison Plains Bison Range planet. athabascae), adapted to Chemical, the boreal forests and Wood Bison Range geological, and meadow complexes Overlap paleontological of western Canada evidence show that OF WES OLSON COURTESY and into Alaska the four previous MAP: (see historic range map). The bison skull other species in the story that gives us a planet-wide ice ages weren’t brief. They exposed by the 2000 fire was most likely a lesson about the evolutionary process and ranged in duration from 20 to 300 million plains bison. However, a few thousand years the importance of biological diversity. years. Yet within each of these long ice ago, it might have been a plains bison or a A Utah Department of Natural ages there were multiple warming breaks wood bison or a hybrid of the two. Resources geological survey report (Major called interglacial periods (lasting many tens The story of how bison arrived at their Ice Ages, 2010) reminds us that, believe it of millions of years) when ice sheets and current subspecies genetic configuration or not, we are actually still in the fifth major glaciers retreated and the earth got much coincides with the story of the advance and ice age of the planet’s history. You would hotter than it is now. Inevitably, cooling retreat of the ice sheets and glaciers of the have to time travel back over two billion periods returned and glaciers and ice sheets Pleistocene and Holocene Epochs, starting years (yes, that’s “billion”) to witness the surged back over lost ground. In North two and a half million years ago and lasting beginning of the first major ice age. America, we are only about 10,000 years right up to the present. And bison serve as Our planet hosts an inherent into one of the shorter warming interglacial just one featured character among countless dynamism on the grandest of scales that periods, the Holocene Interglacial. 4 MONTANA NATURALIST ~ SPRING/SUMMER 2020 The current climate change Wood vs Plains Bison: Unique Adaptations trend gripping the earth is a wild card that humans have Hump structure: The sharper angled hump of the wood bison added to the deck. Even the supports a more massive musculature that enables it to best computer modeling can’t WOOD BISON sweep aside the deeper snows of the northern boreal forest/meadow grassland accurately predict how this ecosystems to reach hand is going to play out. But the grasses and sedges the probability is high that it beneath. will have a lasting effect on the evolutionary process and biological diversity consequences on a global scale. Looking at the trend of the previous four planet-wide ice ages and the Wool: long-term warming periods No thermal between them, things were Leg placement: window present. destined to get a lot hotter over Back of hump. Heat dispersal is not as important the next many thousands of Size: Larger—mature bulls up to as heat retention. 2,600 pounds. Larger mass in colder years anyway, but the human- northern latitudes reduces heat loss caused climate change effects BISON: RUFUS46/COMMONS.WIKIMEDIA.ORG (Bergmann’s Rule).
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