Glacier National Park's citizen scientists count goats, loons and eagles in 2020

Summer 2020 brought a field season like no other to Glacier National Park's Citizen Science Program. Volunteers and staff had to judge the health of several charismatic indicator species while working around the COVID-19 pandemic. An article by Anna Moser on the National Park Service's site looks back at how they did it.

A closed park and new tools

Glacier was closed through spring and early summer. In that time the park's Research Learning Center kept citizen scientists active outside the park boundary through the Huckleberry Phenology project, giving volunteers a new training video and introducing them to the Survey123 mobile data-collection app. It also launched a refined Survey123 form for the Common Loon project, so that citizen scientists could record loons on lakes outside Glacier.

Pandemic restrictions limited summer fieldwork to previously trained Volunteers in the Parks (VIPS), select outreach groups and staff. Small outdoor training sessions refreshed volunteers on data-collection protocols and introduced Survey123, and staff who do not usually do fieldwork, such as interpretive rangers, were trained to help. Volunteers collected data at accessible sites across the open parts of the park, while staff covered the east side, which was closed to the public in 2020 because of the Blackfeet Nation's concerns about COVID-19.

Most of the small volunteer force worked on the Common Loon and High Country Citizen Science projects, gathering data on the size and distribution of the park's populations of Common Loons, mountain goats and bighorn sheep. Two outreach groups also took part: a Montana Conservation Corps crew and a group of Groundwork USA youth volunteers.

Two outreach crews

The Montana Conservation Corps (MCC), a regular partner of the National Park Service, runs hands-on conservation service programs for young adults. A seven-person MCC crew came for two hitches of fieldwork, in July and September, and trained in citizen science before heading out to survey mountain goats and loons. It also spent a day on the Dragonfly Mercury Project, a multi-park program in which citizen scientists collect juvenile dragonflies for mercury analysis. At Johns Lake the crew pulled on waders, stirred up the plant and sediment layers just below the surface of the water, and caught aquatic invertebrates to pick out dragonfly larvae. The samples went to the U.S. Geological Survey Contaminant Ecology Laboratory in Corvallis, Oregon. The results give mercury levels for Glacier and the ecosystems around it, which helps in understanding the potential health risks of mercury contamination.

The Groundwork USA group was nine high school students and two leaders. After a short training they surveyed several lakes for Common Loons. Every member heard a loon call for the first time, and they watched a loon act territorially toward a hawk and an osprey at Winona Lake.

The counts

Even with only a fraction of the volunteers it sees in a typical year, the program reached every designated goat and loon field site in 2020, visiting many of them more than once.

Mountain goats photographed during a 2020 survey: one rears up on its back legs, front legs in the air, while another walks by. NPS Photo/Jessi Mejia.

In all, 62 volunteers made 162 mountain goat and bighorn sheep surveys. The highest bighorn count in a single survey was 12, at Pitamakin Pass, and the Nyack Beaver Woman Lake site had a high count of 24 mountain goats in one survey. Across all survey sites, 320 mountain goats and 80 bighorn sheep were spotted.

The year's loon population produced nine chicks on six lakes. Volunteers also saw loons on several unexpected lakes, among them Grinnell Lake, Lower Two Medicine Lake and Lake Ellen Wilson. Nesting took place on lakes where earlier nesting success is documented. After compiling nesting histories, staff determined that nesting has occurred on 17 lakes inside the park and six outside it since 2006.

Staff also set four remote cameras around known nesting sites to take time-lapse photos of nest disturbances. They installed them in the spring, while the park was closed and human disturbance was least likely. The batteries died before hatch dates at several lakes, but the cameras recorded hawks and eagles perched on or near nests at two lakes.

Survey apps

Besides the Common Loon survey app already in use, a new draft app for mountain goat and bighorn sheep surveys was released in 2020. Volunteers piloted it in the field and helped staff work through questions and quirks, feedback the program calls essential to make it an effective, user-friendly tool. Survey123 also lets staff pinpoint wildlife observations on the map more accurately, which opens the door to new analysis later.

Golden eagles in the fall

As migration season and cooler weather arrived, trained VIPs finished the field season with the annual Hawkwatch Citizen Science Project. At the Mount Brown Hawk Watch site the first trek up was on September 10. By October 15, when snow piles of more than two feet made counting somewhat challenging, volunteers had counted 1,450 migrating golden eagles, with a highest single day of 316 on October 2.

At the Lake McDonald Lodge Hawk Watch site, observers, many of whom have been counting eagles there for decades, saw 412 golden eagles from September 22 until the article was written. The highlight came on October 20, when the sun finally broke out after significant snowstorms and volunteers and staff documented 173 golden eagles making their way to warmer places in the south.

The program thanked the VIPs and park staff who took part and said it hoped to welcome its full group of citizen scientists back the following summer.

Sources

• National Park Service, Glacier National Park, Citizen Science Persists in the Face of COVID-19, by Anna Moser; the article's four photographs of volunteers, crew members and staff are not carried, and the youth group's home cities are left out; the goat photograph is credited as printed, NPS Photo/Jessi Mejia; rewritten in hubnx's own words.