Dennis Quaid Presents: Yellowstone's Tiny Heroes

This is a hot time of year in Yellowstone country. Everything's starting to get dusty and dry and when these conditions go on for too long it can have a permanent impact. I remember when these trees here were green and lush, but years of drought have taken their toll. Protecting this land in these conditions is hard work, but it's worth it. The Yellowstone region is one of those places that sort of calls to us. It speaks to us in a very special way that leads you to want to help save it. During an expedition for the U.S. Geological Survey in 1871, Dr. Ferdinand Hayden, he saw this region and he knew it needed to be protected and one year later Yellowstone became America's first national park. Every year millions of people come to Yellowstone to connect with the wildness of nature. To keep this land, Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, the way we cherish it, we must adapt to 21st century challenges and the more information we have from experts like the scientists at the University of Idaho and the University of Wyoming, the better prepared we'll be to face the future. The Yellowstone ecosystem is a place of wonder. It is one of the planet's largest intact temperate zone ecosystems, covering 22 million acres across three states. It is an ideal setting to monitor the state of the planet and with nearly three quarters of it public land, scientists and researchers can be given a unique glimpse into our changing world. Yellowstone is a mosaic of habitats large and small. Lodgepole and whitebark pines soar above 10,000 foot mountains. Rivers and wetlands fill the valleys and across the region, dry sagebrush steps stretch into the distance. No matter the habitat, Yellowstone brims with life and it's a complex web of plants and animals that lean on each other to survive, especially when disaster strikes. 1988, wildfires sweep across the region. An abnormally dry summer left the landscape a tinderbox. Over 500,000 acres burned in just three months. 2022, an early snowmelt coupled with heavy spring rains produced one of the most devastating floods in the region's history. Roads are washed out. Locals and visitors alike are evacuated. Sewage lines are broken, polluting the nearby waterways. These natural disasters are a part of Yellowstone's life cycle. Pine trees rely on fire to open their cones and disperse their seeds. Flooding replenishes arid flatlands, but there is one stress nature can't control, humans. The population has doubled since 1970, making it the fastest growing region in the west. A recent survey of residents found they were drawn to the area by outdoor amenities such as hiking, fishing, biking, hunting, and other activities. Between the locals and the more than 4.5 million annual visitors, the landscape has no choice but to adapt to our presence. So how is the Yellowstone ecosystem coping with the modern world? There are no easy solutions to these big problems, but we humans can learn from nature. The heroes who can teach us how this region adapts aren't the grizzly bear, moose, or wolf. It is an unlikely foursome. The red squirrel, the harlequin duck, the pygmy rabbit, and the American white pelican. Each offers clues on what the ecosystem is experiencing and can teach us humans how to adapt. Summertime. Lodgepoles, douglas firs, whitebark pines, trees are reaching toward the sun across Yellowstone's national forest. Within these groves, black bears and martins feed on juniper berries. Raptors like owls and golden eagles nest in the pines. Meanwhile, other birds like ravens look for their next meal among the branches. Work, work, work. Life can seem like a never-ending series of errands for our red squirrel mom. Gathering food, feeding the little ones, guarding territory, it never stops. Red squirrels, both male and female, are highly territorial. Visitors are not welcome, unless you're a potential mate or one of her newborn kittens. Even then, female red squirrels can choose when to be in estrus. These gals aren't alone. Pandas are also picky about mating. When she feels that her home is in shape, she has plenty of food, and some males are worth the effort, she'll go into heat. For one day, she'll mate with as many ideal suitors as possible. Once pregnant, she'll gestate for about a month, then give birth to a litter of one to five kittens. She's a single mom, by choice. The demands on her time will only grow more intense. She'll give birth to just a single litter each year, and those kittens will rely on mom for everything, including protection. Only three in ten red squirrels live past their first year. Illness, weather, and accidents are always a concern, but the real threats come from predators like pine martins, stoats, and raptors. Mom is back to nurse the kittens. They will remain with her for the next two to three months, and when they sleep, she's back to work, work, work, locating and storing food. Mom stores her food inside nature's refrigerator, a midden. It doesn't look like much, but it is a lifeline for the whole community. Grand Teton National Park biologist John Koprowski and graduate student Lauren Wetterau of the University of Wyoming are searching for red squirrels, more specifically red squirrel middens. These rodents and their food stashes are much more important to a forest habitat than previously thought. Middens are junk piles. If you talk to an archaeologist, it's a pile of junk, but to a squirrel, it is its lifeblood, right? It is 20 to 40,000 cones that it's going to be eating for six months. Each of those has been clipped by a squirrel one at a time, allowed to fall to the ground, grabbed and then taken back to this midden, and so they're doing all the hard work for lots of other species, and by piling up 20 to 40,000 cones in a single pitcher's mound size midden, many other species can come in then and pilfer them. Chipmunks, lots of small mammals, but also grizzly bears. Deer will come in and root around in them, so they're very likely to have impact on a variety of different species and as a result be kind of a focal point for biodiversity. Oh, wow. Lauren has spotted a good midden right in the middle of a grove of trees with plenty of access points for animals. I think this is a really good site for a camera. I agree. Got a couple of spots where you'll have great vantage point to see anything else that's coming in and using this midden. Studying these middens, seeing what they're like and who's using them and why, I think is really beneficial because then we see just how the ecosystem is working as a whole. To me, that always kind of shows some underlying beauty of it that maybe we haven't even noticed before. If scientists know how the red squirrel impacts its ecosystem, then they will have a better idea on how best to support both the squirrel and its habitat. Lauren will return to this site in the coming months. She will examine the footage from the trail cam and hopes it will reveal new insights on how these structures play a role in the health of the ecosystem. The flowers are in bloom. Once dormant grasses now blanket Yellowstone's valleys. Snow melt from higher altitudes feeds rivers, streams, and ponds. What were once trickles are now steady flowing waterways, and they're just in time. The Yellowstone ecosystem is home to millions of migrating birds and waterfowl. Loons, double-breasted cormorants, herons, egrets, and others travel to the region's wetlands to nest. Harlequin ducks gather in small numbers in Yellowstone and have more than their fair share of admirers. Wildlife enthusiasts and birders marvel at their striking appearance, but they're only here for a few short months in places like Laharty's Rapids. Harlequin ducks mate for life. Their bond stretches across time and geography. While their eggs are still incubating, the male will migrate back to the Pacific coast, leaving the female to watch over their offspring on her own until the end of the summer. The females embark on a fascinating journey west, where somehow across thousands of miles and against all odds, with young children in tow, they once again locate their mate. In and around the Yellowstone ecosystem, migratory waterfowl are in decline. Their nesting sites are threatened by habitat loss and climate change. The decline was too gradual for many to notice, but not everyone. Great hiking day today. It is. This cloud cover is so welcome. Yeah, thanks for planning this today and not yesterday. It was so stonking hot. There aren't many people who know Yellowstone like Doug Smith. Doug is the head biologist at the Jackson Fork Ranch in Wyoming. He's authored numerous papers and books, including one on the birds of the Yellowstone region. Today, he is exploring the backcountry with Ashia Mills and Kara McGarry, a pair of local conservationists and expedition leaders. Do you guys have noticed things changing in this region? Absolutely. It seems like it used to be a lot greener about this time, most years. Like Doug, they've called the region home for many years. They've lived in and explored Yellowstone for most of their adult lives. Well, I've noticed in my work here, working with birds, that there's a lot of curveballs being thrown at birds now because of migration and nesting season. I think that being a bird seems really difficult. One of my favorite birds in Yellowstone is a harlequin duck. I think they're incredible. Beautiful, too. They're beautiful. They go upstream. One of the things that I learned recently is that with the way that our changing climate is affecting river and stream flow, it's getting harder and harder and harder for the ducks to predict when the peak flow happens. They have to do that because they need to nest right near the water's edge for safety, but if they nest too early and the water rises, it wipes out their nest. It's just kind of an example of something you wouldn't really think about. It gives me an insight as to the expanding irregularities and peak flow that they are dealing with. I've seen so many changes here, and it's astonishing. It astonishes me still daily. A lot of the forests that have burned, like the 88 fires. When I first started interpreting the 88 fires, it was like, oh, this isn't going to happen. This is normal, and yes, it's a very fire-dependent ecology, and we know fires burn like that about every 150 to 300 years. Now, the projections are that fires on the scale of 88 are going to burn every three to five years, just limited by no fuel left to burn. What are you guys thinking? What do we need to do here now? I want to be the kind of human that my ecosystem would want to have. People aren't going away, so it's really a matter of us learning how to live in the ecosystem that we're lucky enough to live in and be kind to it rather than be all take and no give. If we have people moving in that are helping and creating solutions, things like, you know, the Upper Yellowstone Watershed Group or Wild Livelihoods and really like, you know... Community-based action. Exactly. Talking to our neighbors. Grassroots. Yeah, I think that's the key. I also see a lot of solutions in what people are doing, and I feel like I'm just right in the midst of it. You know, for example, we've got a lot of ranchers here who are changing the way that they do things to build soil and sequester carbon, and so there's a lot happening here. Yes, the change is obvious, but also the response is quite apparent here, and I find that really reassuring, and I want to be part of that situation too. While the challenges are great, the locals' commitment to their mission is even greater. 300 miles away, scientists are examining how climate change is affecting one tiny creature and its environment, Idaho, the northwest corner of the Yellowstone ecosystem. The Sagebrush Step has come alive. These steps are located on the leeward side of the mountains. It has significantly less precipitation than the other side of the slope. There is far more to the landscape than meets the eye. Its dominant plant is the sagebrush, an evolutionary triumph. It has adapted to these rocky, water-starved islands by keeping its roots close to the surface and spreading wide. Native Americans have long used sagebrush leaves in traditional medicine. Toothaches, rheumatism, stomach problems, and other ailments treated with brute teas or bandages of soaked leaves. Even the smoke or steam emanating from the sage has a purpose—to purify the air. The bush can grow from 6 inches up to 15 feet or more. Its sweet-smelling canopy creates a unique microhabitat. Rattlesnakes and birds use the sagebrush for shelter. While it is toxic to many animals, pronghorn and mule deer can tolerate it when they nibble on its leaves during winter. But no animal is as closely associated with sagebrush in our popular imagination as the sage grouse. It is the largest bird in the grouse family and can be found throughout the West. They are famous for their mating rituals and their dancing. Scientists consider sage grouse an umbrella species that represents the conservation needs of an entire habitat. In other words, when we protect the sage grouse, we also protect all the plants and animals around it. And one of the creatures benefiting is the subject of an ongoing study by a team of local scientists. Eastern Idaho. The University of Idaho's Janet Racklow and Fiona McKibben, along with Mitchell Parsons of Utah State, are searching for the pygmy rabbit. They're joined by Fiona's baby, Arthur, who is experiencing his first outing as a field assistant. So these guys can be really hard to find. So one of the best ways is just to keep around the burrow system, so not to go right into it, look in and kind of look for those areas of disturbed soil. OK. Mitch is really good at it. He's been doing this for a few years. This area, we've been working at this area for about 20 years, and some of these burrow systems have been active for almost that entire time. The pygmy rabbit is the only native rabbit species that digs its own burrow, and it prefers to do so among the sagebrush. Pygmy rabbits are a little bit unique among rabbits in North America. They look kind of like a small cottontail without the tail, and they're quite a bit smaller. As the name implies, they're the smallest rabbit in the world. They max out at about a pound. But they're really unique for a couple of reasons. One is that they feed primarily on sagebrush, and sagebrush is a pretty toxic plant. The reason it smells so great is that it's full of chemicals that are meant to deter herbivores from eating them. The only other vertebrate that can eat sagebrush to the same degree as the pygmy rabbit is the sage grouse, and those are both endemic to the sagebrush ecosystems. The other thing that's pretty cool about them is that they're obligate burrowers, that they always dig and create these pretty complex residential burrow systems, and other North American leopards don't do that. Just saw a rabbit. Pygmy rabbits actually really have an outsized effect on the sagebrush ecosystem, and around their burrow systems, they tend to urinate and defecate, so they're putting nutrients into really nutrient-poor soils. They're digging, they're foraging, and they actually end up increasing sagebrush reproduction, sagebrush seed production. They increase the germination of sagebrush seedlings. So they're essentially farming sagebrush in this environment. They also, because they're pretty patchy and they're digging these burrows, they're creating habitats that are used by a large number of other species. The University of Idaho team is beginning a two-year study to explore how these vulnerable animals adapt to a changing environment. Understanding how pygmy rabbits respond to climate change, to the climate and the thermal environment, can really help us to make predictions about what's going to happen to them as the climate continues to warm up and as they continue to lose habitat. And this can really help with their conservation and preserving ecosystems where they occur and where they might be able to continue to occur, because some of those habitats may become too hot for them to persist. Temperatures are increasing in the American West. Over the last two decades, temperatures have been as high or higher than in the last 20,000 years. There was also 25% less snowfall. It may seem like a small change, but the impact on the landscape has been substantial. Understanding the climate adaptability of pygmy rabbits, it can actually serve as a model system for other species. So we know a lot about pygmy rabbits and there's more to learn, but if we can sort of figure out how they're adapting to climate change, that can help us with other similar small-bodied mammals and help us understand how other species might react to a changing environment. So we've got three traps out, right? Yeah. Yep, we got one here. They're not that easy to catch, actually. They're more difficult than a lot of other types of rabbits. Does it look like a juvenile? It's tiny. It's a juvenile for sure. It's pretty surprising when we did start to tag and collar these animals, they move a lot more than we thought. Oh my gosh, it's so cute. One of the things we learned is that they can disperse as juveniles really far, you know, much farther than we anticipated. And that suggests that those populations may be connected and may have a greater chance of surviving. This is just a juvenile. So we're not going to collar that one, you can see. What's kind of nice about it though is, see how clean those ear margins are? It's one of the ways you can tell it's a young of the year. The ear margins are pretty clear. These are the collars we would use. And it's a VHF collar. And that's the size of an adult neck. The problem with young ones like this, because they're growing so fast, we can't put the collars on them. You see a pygmy rabbit and it fits in the palm of your hand and you're like, oh, it's so cute. But that little one pound rabbit is having a pretty big impact in terms of how this ecosystem functions and what that might mean for the other species that use it. So I'm going to release it back into the burrow. Janet and her team will continue tracking these rabbits to see how they cope with a hotter, drier habitat. Her data and the work on sage-grouse and other creatures in the sagebrush habitat will inform how to coexist in a changing 21st century. Life in the wild has always been about the struggle for survival. Over time, by studying the animals that make this glorious place their habitat, we can gain a better understanding about how we can all thrive. Every animal, every human. For the scientists and locals who call the Yellowstone ecosystem their home, they know that to preserve this wonderful landscape also means we need to understand and find solutions to difficult problems. As summer pushes onward, the landscape grows drier. For a place where summer rainfall is rare and growing rarer, meltwater from the winter snow is essential. A recent report noted that summer precipitation dropped an average of 14 percent in recent years, increasing the threat of wildfires. In the alpine forest, the red squirrel has been busy. Raising her kittens and defending her territory. Now seven weeks old, the kittens are ready to leave the nest. But mom, I bet, won't be too heartbroken. She may allow one daughter to stick around the area, but at some point she'll chase the others away. You could say that the mother squirrel is task oriented. So little time, so much to do. She's got to keep filling the midden. She's, oh, 15,000 cones short. It's still intact, but she can't rest on her laurels. Winter will soon arrive on schedule, but in Yellowstone, fires often come unannounced. Even for the red squirrel, survival is the name of the game. Lauren Wetterau is back, seeing how the habitat is using a midden as a resource. All right, let's see what we got. We've had these cameras out for about a month now. And the point of these cameras is to see what animals have been coming around to the midden, what they've been doing, how many animals come by. So at this specific site, the midden that we just picked up a camera at, that midden is probably 30 to 50 years old. It's got a really good mound structure. It's got a lot of cones, seed debris, tunnels, all the things that make a midden a really good ideal midden location. Middens are like a central supermarket for this neighborhood. And like human grocery stores, they can indicate how well the community will bounce back after a natural disaster, like a wildfire. The red squirrel is more than just a food source for its owners and neighbors. Wildfires help with regrowth and regeneration of understory, of trees. Different animals need different levels of understory, so fires help kind of rotate that out sometimes. If you have middens in that forest ecosystem, as well as natural, occasional fires, those are probably both indicators that the habitat is doing just fine. Scientists have discovered that if a midden survives a wildfire or other natural disaster, the nearby habitat will bounce back far quicker than it would without one. Understanding how these middens survive can teach us how to support vulnerable habitats. In this way, red squirrels are a bellwether for an entire ecosystem. They actually are really, really great for their ecosystem that lots of other animals love and sometimes need to use to also have resources and get their daily needs met in terms of nutrition. They are a feisty and important part of the ecosystem by helping other animals get the resources they want. As the summer winds down, migratory animals move toward their wintering grounds. Searing temperatures and limited rainfall push ungulates like bison and elk to more fertile terrains. Migratory waterfowl are also preparing for their next move. For harakuan ducks, it means a journey of up to 1,100 miles to the Pacific coast. They'll leave behind nesting grounds facing an uncertain future. One doesn't think of the American white pelican in a high-elevation mountainous environment. But this breed, different from its brown cousin of the Gulf of Mexico, travels 952 miles yearly from its wintering grounds in California. Biologists have identified four active nesting sites in Montana. One is on Lake Yellowstone on tiny bits of land called the Mali Islands. The birds form large colonies anywhere between 500 to 4,000 pairs. Scientists slowly recognized a decline in the pelican population. The cause? Flooded nesting sites due to earlier snowmelt. The birds were forced to modify their route or, sadly, nest in potentially lethal locations. Many locals decided to give birds new options and protect and preserve these valuable watersheds. The Teller Wildlife Refuge sits at the border of the Yellowstone ecosystem. As the valley sort of shrinks in on this river bottom here, you know, these places, people become appreciative of them because this is a spot where wildlife can roam freely without conflicts. Spanning more than 1,200 acres, this landscape is slowly being restored to its original state. It's a place to learn about coexisting with nature and to explore solutions to the habitat's most vexing problems. Teller Wildlife Refuge started in 1988 and it's been managed as a non-profit ever since. Most of the property is under conservation easement, so fortunately wildlife have a lot of ability to roam up and down the river bottom here. Thousands of Yellowstone's migratory birds stop at Teller's wetlands during their annual spring or fall migrations. With other watersheds drying up this time of year, it's a safe haven. We do a lot of wetland restoration work. We can manage wetlands, dig out wetlands to create new open water for migrating waterfowl. We have opportunities to come in and make sure that we can flow our water rights through at the right amount of time so that we've got the best wildlife habitat there is. Another chance for us to store water, raise the water table for the property up, allows us to bank water for later in the year. And then most recently, the newest wetland project was a mitigation project where we've come in and created a new nine-acre emergent wetland. This is the wetland that is the result of the mitigation work that was done when the Hamilton Airport expanded. They damaged nine acres of wetlands when they expanded that airport and they had to offset that somewhere. It's a diverse mix of wetland grasses. You're starting to see reed canary grass come up. You're starting to see some bulrush come up. You're starting to see this change in species content and it's just a different type of habitat. Still provides a tremendous amount of wetlands resources. I mean, we'll see ducks and geese and pheasants out here. We've seen the sandhills and the moose. You see a lot of amphibians in here now. Prior to this project being put in, this was just a pretty well cheatgrass-dominated old ag field. When they put this in, raised the water table, you can see it started to choke out the cheatgrass. We're starting to get these wetland species coming in. And for us, it just adds to Teller's mosaic of habitat offerings. I mean, it really is a unique project that was put in. The work at the Teller Wildlife Refuge is just one example of public and private entities coming together to bring positive change to the region. Change that respects the need of both humans and the natural world. Doug Smith has come out to meet with a pair of local advocates. Wendy Weaver is the Executive Director of Montana Freshwater Partners, an organization dedicated to preserving and restoring streams and wetlands throughout the state. Jeff Reed is a leader for Wild Livelihoods, a cooperative of businesses and individuals that pursue opportunities and face challenges in Yellowstone's entwined economy and environment. So we're sitting here kind of almost in the middle of the greater Yellowstone ecosystem. But now we have this issue of people are moving in. Everybody wants their 10-acre ranchette. They want to keep the grizzly bear, the wolf and the bison and the elk. You guys are on the front lines with a new way of thinking, to my mind, because a lot of the Yellowstone ecosystem is federal land. Roughly 70% is public land. But that 30%, I think, can make or break the greater Yellowstone's future. Yeah, a lot of our work is around keeping it resilient and doing restoration projects, streamside projects that keep it clean, cold, connected and complex. Private landowner, this is 200 acres. It's hard to take care of. And so working with NGOs like Wendy's, where they understand the private landowner's interest, but they have expertise in restoration, it just makes it so much easier to get stuff done. So everybody wants to live along this river. How do you work through that? That's a huge part of our work, is trying to educate people on what living near a river means and giving her space to move so when it floods, she can move across the floodplain and reduce damage from those floods. The way we traditionally built and lived along a river no longer works. Let's talk about a project. The flood of 22, right? It was above our heads right now. So where we're standing, the river was above it. And my neighbors here are ranchers. They own a lot of open space. There's a lot of elk that go in there, lots of habitat. And the flood went way over in their pasture, ripped out their pasture, ripped out the fence. And Wendy and I sat down and a group of other people, and we said, what are we going to do? Like, how can we help? So we talked to them, said, can we help you with the fencing replacement? Can we do some wildlife-friendly fencing? Can we plant sand willows? Do you know how hard it is to plant sand willows? It's really hard. But when you get them planted, they'll go forever. So that's what it's about. If you love this place, then something bad happens, a 500,000-year flood. You actually go do something about it. You don't wait for a check or a handout. You just go do it. It's really important for us to also remember the more of that work that we can do proactively, then that will help mitigate future impacts from floods. Yeah, and you know how important this is to the fly-fishing industry, this river. And without those willows on the banks, what don't you have? You don't have salmon flies. And we've seen, 50 years living here, the salmon fly population has dropped drastically. And what are you not going to have if you don't have bugs? You're not going to have an economy, a fly-fishing economy. Well, I think that's one of the challenges we face and many communities face that are high amenity areas with beautiful mountains, and we are close to the park. We have rivers. People want to come here for this beautiful place. And in that nature, they are loving it to death. Something needs to change so that the influx of people is balanced with the investment and the resources it takes to maintain those. I was raised here. I raised two boys here. And God help me if I don't feel responsible to make sure that that next generation and 10 generations from now don't come here and just stand in awe. So you wouldn't know it, but this is part of the greater Yellowstone ecosystem. This is a mix of wildlife, wild lands, and humans. And it's a new challenge for this area because previously, that way is Yellowstone Park, the world's first national park, about 150 years old. And the surrounding public land, that's what was all that was needed to protect this great intact temperate zone ecosystem. But now it's been discovered and people have moved here. Friends of mine who moved here 30, 40 years ago used to drive this valley and not see a light. And now you can't go anywhere without seeing a light. So things are changing and how we continue to provide for people but keep the integrity of the ecosystem intact is the new challenge for the 21st century. Native Americans called this the land of the burning mountains. And if you've ever been to Yellowstone, that's easy to understand. There's hot pots and geysers and thermal activity everywhere. Knowing that, it's easy to see why Native Americans would treat this land with such reverence. Now we're in the 21st century, there's a lot more people here and the environment is going to have to adapt. The people who call this ecosystem home, scientists, business owners, conservationists are facing these issues head on. They're learning how animals are adapting and how we can too. There is so much more to learn. Kara said it for all of us when she said, I want to be the kind of human that my ecosystem would want me to have. Let's be that kind of person together. The Yellowstone region occupies a special place in the hearts and minds of millions of people throughout the world. It's a place of great beauty. Underneath a big sky, we can, all of us, reconnect with the beauty of the natural world. I'll never forget the first time that I came to this area. It felt like home. It's one of the largest intact temperate zone ecosystems on earth. That's what makes this place so damn special. So whether you're a rancher trying to raise sheep on the open range or a new arrival just seeing this land for the very first time, Yellowstone is a place worth protecting. And it takes all of us, not just scientists and conservationists, but people like you and me. And by working together, we can make sure that this place, the Yellowstone ecosystem, can offer peace and solitude for generations to come. Thank you. The Yellowstone ecosystem. It's the planet's largest nearly intact temperate zone habitat. Rugged, symbolic, iconic. Now it's under threat. Allies have come together working every day using cutting-edge science to protect this unique ecosystem. Find out more at savingyellowstone.org and join the movement to protect this land.