Huckleberry Harvest May be Down

Tabitha Graves can’t say this will be a bad year for huckleberries, even though four of the five sites she is monitoring in the West Glacier area show berry production is down 75 percent to 95 percent from last year.

But the fifth is showing the same number of berries as 2014, when a bumper crop was produced after a wet, cool spring.

And Graves, a research ecologist with the U.S. Geological Survey, doesn’t yet know what the huckleberry crop at higher elevations — where bushes are just popping out from under snow — will be like this summer.

"It could still be a great year if the berries at the higher elevations grow," Graves says.

The fact that she’s watching — and watching closely — means the day may come when she will be able to predict with some certainty what huckleberry lovers can expect.

Of course, the huckleberry lovers Graves is concerned with will never read her research or decipher the predictability maps she hopes to produce.

This is all about the bears. In Glacier Park, huckleberries constitute 15 percent of the diet of grizzlies and black bears.

If you can predict when and where huckleberries will be plentiful, you can predict where bears will likely be at that time.

In a Glacier National Park forest, just a short walk from her office near park headquarters, Graves has set up one site where it’s easy to show people how she and her collaborators are gathering data for their huckleberry research.

There, she kneels next to a plant that has more tent caterpillars chewing on its leaves than berries hanging from its branches.

She counts five caterpillars, and three berries, on the bush. In 2014, Graves says, a bush of this size would have had at least 20 berries, an estimate she also calls “conservative.”

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