Animals & Plants of Glacier National Park
The 69 animals, plants, and fungi you can find at Glacier National Park, with sizes, diets, and whether you should worry. See the full park guide at Glacier National Park.
Glacier is the mountain heart of the northern Rockies, where grizzly bears and moose hold the valleys and mountain goats and bighorn sheep take the cliffs. Hoary marmots whistle from the talus, beargrass spreads across the meadows, and common loons call across the lakes. Black huckleberry thickets feed the same bears by the end of summer, so the country feels lived in.
Turn this into a game: Play Glacier National Park Bingo →Common questions
Which Glacier animals demand the most space on a trail?
At Glacier National Park, give space to Grizzly bear, Moose, American black bear, Mountain lion, and Elk. Grizzly bear: A grizzly is one of the few animals you must give real room. Moose: A moose looks slow and gentle, but it is one of the most dangerous animals to crowd. American black bear: Black bears are usually shy and would rather leave than meet you. Mountain lion: Confrontations are very rare — even in Yellowstone, with a healthy population, few have ever been documented. Elk: Elk look calm but they are large and wild. (per NPS species pages).
What do the heaviest feeders in Glacier eat?
At Glacier National Park, the most interesting eaters are Grizzly bear, Moose, Mountain lion, and Bald eagle. Grizzly bear eats berries, pine nuts, roots, insects, elk calves, trout. Moose eats willow, aspen leaves, twigs, water plants, pond weeds. Mountain lion eats elk, deer, marmots, porcupines. Bald eagle eats fish, ducks, gulls, small mammals, carrion. (per NPS species pages).
Which Glacier species carries the strangest true fact?
The strangest true thing about Glacier National Park: Columbian ground squirrel: NPS puts it plainly: in the summer, most people find it difficult to visit Glacier and not see one of these rodents. Expect them in any open area, standing guard outside their dens, and squeaking at you loudly. Harlequin duck: A pair of harlequin ducks can mate for multiple years running. One Glacier National Park male, tracked by his leg band, returned to breed with the same female for three consecutive seasons. (per NPS species pages).
Anything here that bites?
Keep away
- American black bear: Black bears are usually shy and would rather leave than meet you.
- Bighorn sheep: Bighorn sheep are shy and would rather climb away than come near you.
- Canada lynx: None realistically — it is rare, shy, and avoids people almost entirely.
- Coyote: Coyotes almost always run from people.
- Elk: Elk look calm but they are large and wild.
- Grizzly bear: A grizzly is one of the few animals you must give real room.
- Moose: A moose looks slow and gentle, but it is one of the most dangerous animals to crowd.
- Mountain goat: A mountain goat looks calm but is a large wild animal with sharp horns, so keep your distance, at least 50 yards, and never get between a goat and its kid.
- Mountain lion: Confrontations are very rare — even in Yellowstone, with a healthy population, few have ever been documented.
- Mule deer: Mule deer look calm and tame, but they are wild animals with sharp hooves, and bucks have antlers in fall.
- White-tailed deer: White-tailed deer normally run from people.
Don't touch or eat
- American pasqueflower: Every part of this plant is poisonous to eat, and the fresh sap can blister skin.
- North American porcupine: A porcupine cannot throw or shoot its quills, but they detach the instant something touches them, and the barbed tips work deeper into skin over time.
- Western toad: Harmless to touch, but the two glands behind its eyes ooze a thick white poison meant to deter predators, so wash hands after handling and don't touch your eyes or mouth first.
Bites if handled
- American beaver: Beavers are shy and would rather swim off than confront anyone.
- American pika: Pikas are harmless.
- Bald eagle: A bald eagle will not come after you.
- Columbian ground squirrel: Harmless, and that is the problem.
- Golden eagle: A golden eagle will not come after a person.
- Golden-mantled ground squirrel: None.
- Great horned owl: This owl hunts small animals at night and will not come after you.
- Hoary marmot: Harmless and often curious, sometimes sunning on rocks right beside the trail.
- Northern flying squirrel: No real risk.
- Osprey: None.
- Red-tailed hawk: None.
- Snowshoe hare: None.
- Western terrestrial garter snake: Essentially harmless.
Everything else on this page is harmless. What each group means.
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Mammal American beaver
Castor canadensis
North America's largest rodent, a keystone species whose dams reshape whole streams at Yellowstone, Glacier, and ten other parks along the route.
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Mammal American black bear
Ursus americanus
The bear you're most likely to meet east of the Rockies, a strong tree-climber that eats mostly plants and comes in black, brown, or cinnamon.
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Bird American dipper
Cinclus mexicanus
A stream-gray songbird that walks along the bottom of cold mountain creeks to hunt, the only songbird in North America that does.
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Plant American pasqueflower
Pulsatilla patens ssp. multifida
A furry, purple-blue prairie flower that beats the grass out of the ground each spring, blooming before almost anything else is green.
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Mammal American pika
Ochotona princeps
A small round cousin of the rabbit that lives in mountain rock piles at Rocky Mountain, Mount Rainier, and North Cascades, and never sleeps through winter.
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Fish Arctic grayling
Thymallus arcticus
A native trout relative with a tall, sail-like dorsal fin, gone from Yellowstone's rivers for 80 years and only now being put back.
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Invertebrate Army cutworm moth
Euxoa auxiliaris
A gray moth that migrates from Great Plains farm fields to high mountain talus, where grizzly bears flip rocks to eat it by the thousands each summer.
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Bird Bald eagle
Haliaeetus leucocephalus
The white-headed fish hawk that is the national bird of the United States, common along the lakes of Voyageurs and the coasts of Olympic and Katmai.
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Plant Beargrass
Xerophyllum tenax
A mountain plant that is not a grass but a lily, sending up a tall creamy plume only every few years, its tough leaves woven into watertight baskets and hats.
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Plant Big sagebrush
Artemisia tridentata
The silver-leaved, sharp-smelling evergreen shrub of the high desert West, and the main food of the greater sage-grouse nearly all year.
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Mammal Bighorn sheep
Ovis canadensis
A wild sheep of cliffs and canyons, where rams carry heavy curled horns and both sexes cross steep rock other animals can't.
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Plant Black huckleberry
Vaccinium membranaceum
The dark purple berry that feeds Glacier's bears and half the pancakes in Montana, growing on open and burned slopes all over the park.
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Bird Black-billed magpie
Pica hudsonia
A black-and-white corvid with a tail as long as its body, common on fences and roadsides across the northern Rockies and Great Plains.
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Amphibian Boreal chorus frog
Pseudacris maculata
A finger-sized frog whose spring trill fills Rocky Mountain wetlands, and whose cells can freeze solid and still wake up.
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Fish Brook trout
Salvelinus fontinalis
A small, wormy-patterned native fish with red spots ringed in blue, the only trout that truly belongs in the cold high streams of the Smokies and Shenandoah.
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Fish Bull trout
Salvelinus confluentus
A char, not a true trout, that needs the coldest, cleanest water in the mountains, so finding one is itself a kind of water-quality report.
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Bird Canada jay
Perisoreus canadensis
A fearless, fluffy gray bird that glues thousands of food scraps into tree bark with its own sticky spit and remembers nearly all of them through winter.
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Mammal Canada lynx
Lynx canadensis
A rare, snow-adapted wild cat with tufted ears and huge furry paws, living in high conifer forest at Glacier, Yellowstone, and Grand Teton.
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Bird Clark's nutcracker
Nucifraga columbiana
A pale-gray, black-winged cousin of the crow that hides tens of thousands of pine seeds each fall and remembers where to find them again.
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Amphibian Columbia spotted frog
Rana luteiventris
A spotted frog with a pale mustache stripe that stays active under the ice of Yellowstone and Grand Teton ponds through winter.
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Mammal Columbian ground squirrel
Urocitellus columbianus
The squeaking, upright little rodent standing outside its burrow in every open meadow at Glacier, and the animal you are most certain to see there.
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Bird Common loon
Gavia immer
The black-and-white diving bird whose call carries across Glacier's lakes; one in five of Montana's nesting loons is inside this park.
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Bird Common raven
Corvus corax
A big, glossy-black problem-solver that rolls and tumbles over the cliffs of Grand Canyon, Arches, and the desert parks, watching for its next meal.
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Mammal Coyote
Canis latrans
The wild dog you're most likely to hear at a national park — a coyote, at home in the desert, the mountains, and the edges of towns.
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Plant Douglas-fir
Pseudotsuga menziesii
One of the tallest trees on Earth, not actually a true fir, whose cones carry little three-pointed flaps a Native story calls the tails and legs of hiding mice.
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Mammal Elk
Cervus canadensis
A large deer of mountain meadows whose bulls grow branching antlers and, each fall, bugle a high whistling call across the valley.
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Plant Engelmann spruce
Picea engelmannii
A high-elevation spruce with scaly bark and sharp, squarish needles, whose Colorado stands have lost more than a million acres to a beetle since 1996.
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Plant Fireweed
Chamerion angustifolium
A tall pink-purple wildflower that is often the first color to return to a burned mountainside.
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Plant Glacier lily
Erythronium grandiflorum
A nodding yellow spring flower whose bulb is such important grizzly bear food that the bear's digging can grow bigger flowers the following year.
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Bird Golden eagle
Aquila chrysaetos
A dark brown eagle with golden neck feathers that hunts rabbits and hares across open country, nesting on cliffs in Denali, Death Valley, and Great Basin.
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Mammal Golden-mantled ground squirrel
Callospermophilus lateralis
A chipmunk-lookalike ground squirrel with a reddish-gold head and shoulders and no face stripes, common on rocks and trailsides from Glacier to Mesa Verde.
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Bird Great horned owl
Bubo virginianus
A big night hunter with feathery "horns" and a deep hoot, found from the saguaro desert to the Everglades, hunting after dark on silent wings.
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Mammal Grizzly bear
Ursus arctos horribilis
A big brown bear of the northern Rockies and Alaska, marked by a hump of muscle over its shoulders and long digging claws.
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Bird Harlequin duck
Histrionicus histrionicus
A slate-blue and chestnut sea duck that breeds by diving and bracing in fast mountain whitewater instead of calm water.
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Mammal Hoary marmot
Marmota caligata
The big silver-gray ground squirrel of the high meadows at Mount Rainier, famous for the sharp whistle it gives when danger is near.
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Plant Indian paintbrush
Castilleja miniata
A scarlet mountain wildflower that steals water and food from its neighbors' roots, and whose bright color comes from leaves, not petals.
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Bird Killdeer
Charadrius vociferus
A shorebird that lives nowhere near a shore. At Badlands we never saw one. We heard it call its own name across the campground.
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Fish Kokanee salmon
Oncorhynchus nerka
A landlocked sockeye salmon that spends its whole life inside Crater Lake, turning bright red to spawn without ever swimming a mile toward the ocean.
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Fish Lake trout
Salvelinus namaycush
A large, deep-water char with a forked tail, native at Glacier but an invasive species anglers must kill on sight in Yellowstone and Grand Teton lakes.
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Plant Lodgepole pine
Pinus contorta var. latifolia
The thin-barked pine covering 80% of Yellowstone's forest, some of whose cones only open in the heat of a fire.
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Mammal Moose
Alces alces
The largest deer in the world, a long-legged giant you might see wading in ponds at Grand Teton, Isle Royale, Denali, or Rocky Mountain.
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Bird Mountain bluebird
Sialia currucoides
A sky-blue thrush of high, open country, the only bluebird seen regularly above 5,000 feet, nesting in lava-rock crevices at Craters of the Moon.
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Mammal Mountain goat
Oreamnos americanus
A white, shaggy climber with black horns that lives on the steepest crags and pumice fields high on Mount Rainier, where almost nothing else can walk.
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Mammal Mountain lion
Puma concolor
A tan, solitary big cat found from Glacier to Mesa Verde, called cougar, puma, or panther by region, and rarely seen at all.
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Invertebrate Mountain pine beetle
Dendroctonus ponderosae
A beetle about the size of a grain of rice that tunnels under pine bark and can turn a mountainside red at Yellowstone, Glacier, and Rocky Mountain.
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Mammal Mule deer
Odocoileus hemionus
A western deer named for its big mule-like ears, common along canyon rims and desert washes in Grand Canyon, Zion, Yosemite, and Saguaro.
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Mammal North American porcupine
Erethizon dorsatum
A slow, quill-covered rodent that climbs into the treetops at Theodore Roosevelt to eat twigs, and North America's second-largest rodent after the beaver.
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Mammal Northern flying squirrel
Glaucomys sabrinus
A nocturnal glider of old-growth conifer forests that eats mostly underground fungus and, under a UV light, glows bubblegum pink.
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Bird Osprey
Pandion haliaetus
A fish-hunting hawk that dives feet-first into open water and flies off with its catch turned head-forward like a torpedo.
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Plant Ponderosa pine
Pinus ponderosa
A tall western pine whose sun-warmed bark smells like butterscotch and vanilla, and which drops its low branches so ground fire can pass safely beneath it.
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Plant Quaking aspen
Populus tremuloides
A white-barked mountain tree whose flat-stemmed leaves shiver in the lightest breeze, turning whole hillsides gold each fall.
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Bird Red-tailed hawk
Buteo jamaicensis
The hawk most often recorded in Yellowstone. We watched a hawk take a pika near the Roosevelt cabins and could not tell you which hawk it was.
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Bird Rufous hummingbird
Selasphorus rufus
A copper-orange hummingbird that flies farther, relative to its size, than almost any other bird on Earth, from Mexico to Alaska and back every year.
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Bird Sharp-tailed grouse
Tympanuchus phasianellus
A prairie grouse that dances on open ground at dawn, stamping its feet and inflating purple air sacs on its neck to attract a mate.
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Mammal Snowshoe hare
Lepus americanus
A forest hare whose coat flips from brown to white on a clock set by daylight, not by snow, and whose oversized feet work like actual snowshoes.
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Bird Steller's jay
Cyanocitta stelleri
A deep-blue mountain jay with a black crest and a loud voice, the campground bird that will eye your sandwich at Yosemite, Sequoia, and Crater Lake.
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Plant Subalpine fir
Abies lasiocarpa
A narrow, spire-shaped high-mountain fir with smooth gray bark and flat, soft needles, moving in wherever fire has stayed away long enough.
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Bird Varied thrush
Ixoreus naevius
A ringing single whistle from deep, shaded old-growth forest, and a bird so well hidden most visitors only ever hear it.
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Bird Western meadowlark
Sturnella neglecta
A grassland songbird with a yellow throat and a black V on its chest, the state bird of Montana, Wyoming, and North Dakota.
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Reptile Western painted turtle
Chrysemys picta bellii
A smooth-shelled turtle with red-striped legs that basks on logs in northern lakes and survived being nearly frozen as a hatchling.
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Plant Western red cedar
Thuja plicata
The great rainforest tree of the Northwest Coast, called the tree of life, used by Coast Salish and other nations for canoes, longhouses, and baskets.
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Reptile Western terrestrial garter snake
Thamnophis elegans
A slim, striped snake found from stream banks to talus slopes across ten of these parks, and the most commonly seen reptile in several of them.
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Amphibian Western toad
Anaxyrus boreas
A stout, warty toad that walks instead of hopping, with poison glands behind each eye, ranging from lowland ponds to mountain lakes across the Cascades.
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Plant Western wheatgrass
Pascopyrum smithii
A blue-green prairie grass whose underground rhizomes weave a tough sod — the official state grass of North and South Dakota.
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Fish Westslope cutthroat trout
Oncorhynchus clarkii lewisi
Montana's state fish, a headwater trout with a red jaw slash, restored to Yellowstone and Glacier streams after nonnative stocking nearly wiped it out.
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Mammal White-tailed deer
Odocoileus virginianus
The most common large mammal in eastern parks, running through the woods and waving a white tail like a flag when it bolts.
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Bird White-tailed ptarmigan
Lagopus leucura
A small alpine grouse that turns pure white in winter and nearly vanishes against rock and snow above treeline in the Rockies.
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Plant Whitebark pine
Pinus albicaulis
The twisted pine at Glacier's treeline that feeds grizzlies and Clark's nutcrackers, holds the snowpack in place, and is dying faster than it grows.
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Fish Yellowstone cutthroat trout
Oncorhynchus clarkii bouvieri
A native trout with a red-orange slash under its jaw, the fish that fed the whole web of life around Yellowstone Lake for thousands of years.