Spotted owl recovery plan calls for killing barred owls and designating habitat, but allowing logging

Published: Tuesday, February 28, 2012, 8:50 PM     Updated: Wednesday, February 29, 2012, 6:23 AM

 By Eric Mortenson, The Oregonian 

View full sizeRichard Read/The OregonianWildlife officials propose killing barred owls, which are taking territory from spotted owls.

Northern spotted owls earned a place on the endangered species list due to habitat loss from logging and fire, but their biggest nemesis now is an East Coast cousin. 

Larger, more aggressive, more adaptable barred owls moved West in the 1960s, found food and shelter to their liking and have since displaced spotted owls throughout much of British Columbia to Northern California. Spotted owls declined 40 percent over the past 25 years, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service says they may go extinct in some parts of their range if something isn't done about barred owls. 

So it means to kill them. Perhaps hundreds of barred owls will be shot -- "removed" is the gentler agency word for it -- during a 3- to 10-year experiment in tightly defined areas of Northwest forests. Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar said Tuesday the government "can't ignore the mounting evidence that competition from barred owls is a major factor in the spotted owl's decline." 

The fate of spotted owls has been at the heart of the "timber wars" since they were listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act in 1990. Killing one species to benefit another, however, is a drastic action that troubles scientists and activists on either side. 

A draft environmental impact statement to be released soon includes options for capturing barred owls instead of killing them, but experimental lethal control is the most likely alternative, according to scientists. 

The goal is to determine if eliminating barred owls will make life better for spotted owls. In the test areas, scientists will track spotted owl population trends, survival rates and nesting site occupancy with barred owls out of the picture. 

Barred owl removal was one of two major spotted owl recovery projects announced by Salazar and others Tuesday. The government also said it will consider up to 10 million acres of western forests for designation as "critical habitat" for spotted owls. 

The designation, to be finalized in November, does not prohibit logging. Instead, it requires federal agencies such as the Forest Service to consult with the wildlife agency when approving logging, road building or other activity in federal forests that might impact the owl's habitat. Timber industry groups worry the designations will add another layer of review and possible legal challenges to federal timber sales, and question the impact on private land. 

The American Forest Resource Council, based in Portland, said the initial proposal nearly doubles an earlier critical habitat designation. "No one knows if the designated areas are in fact essential to spotted owl recovery, or if spotted owls even use them," the council said in a news release. 

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Salazar said 4 million acres of state and private forests and national parks are excluded from habitat designation, and more land may be removed as the plan is reviewed. He said logging will be allowed even in spotted owl habitat, using the southern Oregon "ecological timber harvest" model established by forestry professors Jerry Franklin and Norm Johnson. 

Salazar said their work shows a way to "move beyond the paralysis and litigation" that have tied forest policy in knots for two decades. 

"Clear-cut vs. no-cut is a false choice," Salazar said. "We can protect old growth and provide timber jobs." 

Wildlife intervention is something else. 

Some point out that wildlife agencies shoot sea lions gobbling salmon at Bonneville Dam and hunt down invasive pythons that threaten wildlife in the Everglades. 

Despite qualms, there is evidence that removing barred owls works. 

In Northern California, wildlife biologist Lowell Diller oversees a federally approved pilot project that in three years has killed 48 barred owls on timberland owned by his employer, Green Diamond Resource Co. In every instance when barred owls were removed from historic spotted owl territory, spotted owls returned. 

"The evidence seems pretty strong in my mind," Diller says. "I'll go out on a scientific limb and say -- at least in this region -- it will work. 

"The question then is: Is it ethically the right thing to do? Does society want us to do it? Is it feasible? Can we physically do it." 

Diller, who has monitored spotted owls on Green Diamond forests for 22 years, favors the experimental removal of barred owls. 

"That's the only way we will know for sure what our options are for recovering the spotted owl," he says. 

He says capturing and relocating barred owls is not an option, in part because zoos and other agencies are not willing to take more than a few. "You can spend literally a week to capture one bird," Diller says. "And what do you do with them after you capture them?" 

Jack Dumbacher, a California Academy of Sciences curator who worked with Diller in the early years of the project, says there is debate about how barred owls arrived in the West. Some believe their migration paralleled human movement and development, which provided trees for habitat. 

"If they made it out here fair and square, then maybe it's a natural event we should watch unfold," he says. 

On the other hand, the spotted owl is an important species and the law requires officials to protect them from major threats. 

"It's not all just biology that comes to play here," Dumbacher says. "There are some real ethical issues about what role we ought to be taking." 

--Eric Mortenson

Where were they 20 years ago???

By Ralph Saperstein, NWTimberBlog

The Oregonian published an Editorial “Taking an ax to rural Oregon”.  In the piece the authors admonish President Obama’s Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, who during a recent trip touting President Obama’s Jobs Plan, predicted an end to county timber payments.

 

“Listening to Vilsack, it's not clear that he or anyone else leading the Obama administration fully understands the challenges of keeping county governments and schools operating in places where the U.S. Forest Service owns more than half the land and about the only economic activity it generates is whatever is spent putting out the wildfires that flare every summer.”

 

No kidding.  Since President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore came to Oregon to hold a timber summit in 1994, the federal government has failed to address the reality of rural Oregon’s dependence on the scientifically sound management of our federal forestland.

 

Instead, President Clinton’s Northwest Forest Plan has failed to maintain the economic and social viability of the rural communities in the Pacific Northwest.  Lately, elected officials urge continuing county timber payments. 

 

They decry the “broken promises” of discontinuing the county timber expenditures, or welfare payments, for all Western Counties that have lost the economic activity federal forestlands once provided.

 

This scream of “broken promises” misses the most important point.  The federal government, through the Departments of Agriculture and Interior promised rural communities that they would provide a Sustained Yield of raw materials for the independent timber industry.

 

Through the sale of timber, the federal forests would generate county revenue for schools and roads, and family-wage jobs for foresters, loggers, truckers, tree planters and thousands of mill workers.  That ‘community stability’ is the real broken promise of every Administration since the timber crisis began in the 1990’s.

 

Worse, while rural communities have been thrown under the bus, the forests continue to lose Northern Spotted Owl and other fish and wildlife habitat as a result of burning from uncharacteristic wildfires that result from the exclusion of scientifically sound forest management.

Taking an ax to rural Oregon

Published: Wednesday, September 28, 2011, 4:15 PM     Updated: Wednesday, September 28, 2011, 4:18 PM

By The Oregonian Editorial Board  

 

It's just as well that Portland was Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack's only Oregon stop on his tour this week promoting President Obama's jobs act. No audience in rural Oregon would have appreciated Vilsack's bleak view of the future of federal payments to counties.

Vilsack predicted that the expiring program that provides a lifeline to timber counties in Oregon and 40 other states will not survive the congressional supercommittee and its charge of making at least $1.5 trillion in spending cuts. If he's right -- and we hope he's not -- the payments arriving in Oregon in the coming days will be the last.

 

Brian Feulner/The Oregonian

 

If those payments are not renewed, and nothing is done to promptly provide the counties with more revenues from public forests, Oregon will have a rural catastrophe on its hands. Federal payments pay for essential services across timber country; without them, some county governments are likely headed for default.

Listening to Vilsack, it's not clear that he or anyone else leading the Obama administration fully understands the challenges of keeping county governments and schools operating in places where the U.S. Forest Service owns more than half the land and about the only economic activity it generates is whatever is spent putting out the wildfires that flare every summer.

Yes, there's a federal budget crisis. But the argument for support of communities surrounded by public forestlands has not changed in more than a century. One way or the other, through timber receipts, direct payments or another source -- the government is obliged to share the costs of schools, roads and other public services in places where federal ownership of land cuts deeply into local tax bases.

The Agriculture secretary repeated a lot of the same tried-and-failed economic ideas of the past 20 years -- that yet another forest rule will get things moving, that recreation is the answer for rural counties, that there's more money and investment coming, just you wait, from energy and other activities.

Well, new forest rules have come and gone, all to no particular effect. And while some communities -- Bend, Sisters, even Joseph -- have made themselves over into tourist towns, recreation hasn't proved an economic panacea. It hasn't helped, either, that the feds have cut spending on recreation.

Look, no one likes county payments, which are more or less welfare checks to over 700 counties. All these places would prefer jobs and sharing logging revenue and other strong economic activity from neighboring federal forests. Before Congress and the Obama administration leave county payments on the cutting-room floor, they have an obligation to deliver real alternatives.

There are promising ideas. Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore., is promoting a plan to separate productive forests formerly owned by the O&C Railroad into two trusts, one that would protect old growth, the other that would be available for active commercial harvest. Others have proposed creating a new payment formula based on factors such as the counties with greatest need and rewarding counties for actions that bolster forest goals, such as reducing development near fire-prone areas.

Oregon's timber counties are surely open to change. But all these reforms seem distant, and the last county payment checks soon will be in the mail. It's wrong to cut the counties off before anything is done to increase revenue from forests, especially now, when rural communities are fighting for their very existence.

US Agriculture official: Sawmills needed to help Forest Service fight bark beetles

Thanks to Doug McDonald, Timber Data Co.

COEUR D'ALENE, Idaho — A viable timber industry is needed to help the U.S. Forest Service deal in an economical way with bark beetle infestations that have been ravaging forests in the Rocky Mountain West, an official with the U.S. Department of Agriculture said.

Robert Bonnie, a senior advisor to Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, said Thursday that the Forest Service is relying on the timber companies to thin stands of unhealthy, crowded trees.

"The Forest Service is going to have to pay someone to do it, if they can't sell that timber," Bonnie told a receptive audience at a small-diameter log conference in northern Idaho, The Spokesman-Review reported. "We need forest management for the health of the landscape and the economic stability of rural communities."

But officials say many rural communities have lost sawmills due to various reasons, including a sagging U.S. housing market.

John Konzen, county commissioner in Lincoln County, Mont., said a lack of sawmills there means trees cut on the Kootenai National Forest are trucked out of state for processing. The nearest mill is at Moyie Springs, he said.

The Forest Service last year pledged $54 million to fight bark beetles, which since the late 1990s have killed 5,550 square miles of lodgepole pine and spruce forest in the Rockies. The money is intended to thin trees to reduce wildfire danger near rural communities while restoring watershed health.

The beetles are blamed in Idaho for killing trees from Lolo Pass to Lookout Pass along the Idaho-Montana border.

The costs of thinning projects escalate if the Forest Service has to pay someone to do it rather than selling the timber, Bonnie said.

Conservation groups are starting to understand the role that timber companies have in keeping forests healthy, and taking part in collaboration efforts, he said. If fewer timber sales are delayed through legal action, mills have a steadier stream of timber from federal lands, Bonnie said.

That allows timber companies to continue operating and strengthen local communities, he said.

Jonathan Oppenheimer of the Idaho Conservation League said one of the main problems with attempting to log beetle-killed stands is that it's not profitable for timber companies.

"The fundamental core issue with pulling out beetle-killed timber is that it generally doesn't pay its way out of the woods," Oppenheimer told The Associated Press on Friday.

Conservation groups are looking at areas where collaboration is possible, he said.

"In general, we need a multifaceted approach," Oppenheimer said.

The destruction caused by beetles also extends farther south down the Rockies.

A recent aerial survey by the U.S. Forest Service and the Colorado State Forest Service showed the epidemic has spread across 4 million acres of trees in Colorado and Wyoming, devastating entire forests in Colorado's Summit, Grand and Eagle counties.

There's some indication that the timber industry is responding.

A Utah company plans recently announced that it intends to operate a sawmill in Encampment, Wyo. — a small town near the Colorado border — to process beetle-killed trees from the Medicine Bow National Forest.

Thompson Logging of Kamas, Utah, said it expects to employ 15 to 18 people by mid-April at the sawmill, The Rawlins (Wyo.) Daily Times reported this month.

Company President Terry Thompson said he expects to be able to operate for years in the area because of the massive amount of beetle-killed timber.