Alpine tree could get federal protection

A relatively rare and long-lived species of conifer tree that crowns Northeastern Oregon’s highest mountain ranges might be listed as a threatened or endangered species.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is studying whether the whitebark pine, a tenacious tree that grows at higher elevations than other conifers in the region and can live for more than a millennium, needs protection under the Endangered Species Act.

The Natural Resources Defense Council contends such protection is necessary, due to the whitebark’s vulnerability to insects and disease.

The organization petitioned the Fish and Wildlife Service to list the tree.

The Fish and Wildlife Service decided after a preliminary study that the whitebark pine might warrant protection in at least parts of its range in the West, which includes the Blue and Wallowa mountains of Northeastern Oregon

Now the agency is soliciting information about the pine, including where it grows now and where it grew in the past, and any threats to its survival.

The Fish and Wildlife Service will accept data through Sept. 20.

If the agency decides to list the whitebark pine as either threatened or endangered (the latter means the species faces a greater threat of extinction), then officials would have to determine which places constitute critical habitat.

In those areas — some of which could be places where whitebarks don’t actually grow — the Fish and Wildlife Service could limit or prohibit certain activities.

Although it’s not clear what the local effects of a listing might be, the ramifications are likely to be minor compared with, say, federal protection for the spotted owl.

That’s because whitebarks, unlike the trees spotted owls nest in, have little or no value as lumber, and have never been logged commercially in Northeastern Oregon.

Also, many whitebarks grow in wilderness areas where logging already is prohibited.

And as for trees that stand outside the wilderness, as is the case in parts of the Elkhorns and Greenhorns, the whitebarks occupy habitat so inaccessible that logging or other commercial uses are impractical.

The whitebark, which like its cousins, the white and limber pines, displays its needles in bundles of five, is almost exclusively a tree of the alpine country.

(Limber pines, which closely resemble whitebarks, grow in the Wallowas but not elsewhere in Oregon.)

Whitebarks rarely grow below 6,000 feet, and they can survive above 9,000.

Their domain in Northeastern Oregon includes the Wallowa, Elkhorn, Greenhorn and Strawberry ranges.

Although whitebarks are much less numerous here than ponderosa (three-needle bundles) and lodgepole pines (two needles), Douglas-, grand and subalpine firs, tamaracks and Engelmann spruces, they can be relatively plentiful within their narrow band of high-elevation habitat.

Around Marble Creek Pass in the southern Elkhorns, for instance, most of the trees are whitebark pines.

Whitebarks can endure for several centuries but, because they live in places with a nearly arctic climate and thin soils, they never attain the lofty height of a ponderosa or a tamarack.

A 50-foot-tall whitebark is a giant. The tallest specimen on record in Oregon lives in the Wallowas and measures 72 feet high.

Gary Dielman of Baker City (he supplied the two photographs that accompanies this story) has been a whitebark aficionado for more than 30 years.

“The harsh environment on those cold, windy 8,000-foot summits is reflected in the gnarled, runty whitebarks that grow there,” Dielman said.

In the early 1990s he found a dead whitebark on the ridge above Summit Lake, in the central Elkhorns. The tree’s trunk was exposed, polished smooth by sun, ice and wind.

Dielman started counting the rings. When he finished counting, about 45 minutes later, his tally was 800.

Which is old, certainly, but not unusually ancient for a whitebark, according to Charlie Johnson, who was perhaps the chief authority on whitebark pines in Northeastern Oregon.

Johnson worked as the plant ecologist for the three national forests in the region from 1977-2004.

Johnson, who died in March 2007 at age 63, studied whitebarks throughout his career on the Wallowa-Whitman, Umatilla and Malheur national forests.

He focused on threats to the species, in particular on an insect, the mountain pine beetle, and a disease, the white pine blister rust.

In an interview in 1995, Johnson also explained that whitebarks, particularly trees in the Elkhorns, suffered from a Forest Service policy that was, ironically, designed to protect trees.

That policy was expressed most succinctly in Smokey Bear’s “Only you can prevent forest fires” mantra.

The Forest Service can’t prevent lightning — which sparks about 80 percent of blazes in Northeastern Oregon forest — but the agency has been pretty efficient at dousing those fires for the better part of the past century.

The Forest Service’s firefighting prowess has spared some trees, but it’s also been implicated in the demise of others, including whitebark pines.

The story actually starts lower in the mountains, the realm of lodgepole pines.

There, periodic fires in centuries past kept mountain pine beetles, which have a real affinity for various types of their namesake tree, at endemic levels.

Some of those blazes also climbed up among the high peaks. Flames generally stayed near the ground, not harming the whitebarks but killing the subalpine firs that, given the chance, could crowd out the pines.

But the Forest Service tilted this ecological teeter-totter by putting out most fires before they could fully play their traditional roles.

One result was that mountain pine beetles ravaged tens of thousands of acres of lodgepole pine forests in Baker and Grant counties during the mid and late 1970s.

Inevitably, bugs also spread into the high country, where the whitebarks live.

Dielman recalls a camping trip he made to Twin Lakes, in the Elkhorns, in the 1970s.

He was sitting in camp when he heard a low murmur that sounded like flowing water.

Except Dielman knew there was no brook nearby.

When he went to investigate, he found a whitebark pine being swarmed by pine beetles.

Although beetles didn’t kill every whitebark they attacked, the insects weakened many trees and made them more vulnerable to white pine blister rust.

That fungal disease, which killed millions of white pine trees in Idaho in the first half of the 20th century, also spread into Northeastern Oregon.

Today, as mute evidence of the two-pronged attack of beetle and blister rust, gray skeletons of whitebarks mingle with healthy green trees throughout the Elkhorns and Greenhorns.

Those dead trees could fuel future wildfires, causing the blazes to burn hotter and faster and, potentially, to kill whitebarks that have survived dozens of past, smaller fires.

Neither the pine beetle scourge nor the blister rust outbreak was nearly as severe in the Wallowas as in the Elkhorns and other Blue Mountain ranges, Johnson said in the 1995 interview.

The difference is due in part to the drought of the 1980s being more severe in the Blue Mountains, he said.

The Natural Resources Defense Council, which petitioned the Fish and Wildlife Service to protect whitebark pines, contends that the species is a bellwether of sorts for the effects of climate change.

Because whitebark pines produce large, heavy seeds that aren’t dispersed by wind, the species depends on birds for its propagation.

In Northeastern Oregon the tree has a unique relationship with the Clark’s nutcracker, a black-and-white jay that’s related to the crow and raven.

Clark’s nutcrackers subsist largely on whitebark pine seeds. In exchange, the birds, once they’ve extracted nutrients, drop the seeds, which are still capable of germination.

Other birds also eat whitebark seeds, including chickadees, finches, grosbeaks and blue grouse.

Grouse also feed on whitebark needles and buds.

Whitebark pines are also valuable because their shade slows melting of snow, helping to keep streams flowing during summer drought, according to the Fish and Wildlife Service.