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

Judge finds Ore. logging plan withdrawn illegally

Associated Press, 03.31.11, 02:49 PM EDT


GRANTS PASS, Ore -- A federal judge has told the Obama administration it has to go through a public comment period before it can yank the Bush administration's controversial plan to double the amount of logging on federal forests in Western Oregon.

The ruling Thursday does not revive the U.S. Bureau of Land Management's Western Oregon Plan Revision, popularly known by the acronym WOPR.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar pulled it in 2009 because the Bush administration had failed to have it reviewed for endangered species impacts - and it still would have to pass muster over potential harm to salmon and northern spotted owls.

Bob Ragon of Douglas Timber Operators, which filed the lawsuit, says the Obama administration should go through that review step before making a decision.

Timber Industry and Labor Union Challenge Spotted Owl Recovery Plan

The American Forest Resources Council, AFRC,  and the Carpenters Industrial Council have filed a federal lawsuit under the Federal Advisory Committee Act, FACA.  Thanks to AFRC for the excerpt from their January 28, 2011 newsletter.


In 1994, a predecessor of AFRC successfully challenged the so-called "Gang of Four", the forest scientists that crafted the NW Forest Plan for not complying with FACA.  Northeast Oregon Elk Biologist Jack Ward Thomas, who later became Chief of the Forest Service under President Clinton, kept his meetings closed to the public in violation of FACA.  During a deposition in the case, Thomas stated that he shredded garbage bags full of the scientists' work product each evening.  


Thomas was concerned that preliminary information regarding the Gang of Four's plans for the Northwest's National Forests might impact the nation's financial markets.  Although destroying the documents was illegal, Thomas was correct that his forest plan which decimated dozens of rural communities and timber industry firms and workers, did impact financial markets.  

AFRC NEWS                                                                               January 28, 2011

On January 25, AFRC and the Carpenters Industrial Council (CIC), a labor group representing lumber and plywood workers, filed a lawsuit in federal district court in Washington, DC challenging the US Fish and Wildlife Service’s (FWS) failure to follow the requirements of the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA) in the work being done to revise the 2008 spotted owl recovery plan and critical habitat designation.

FACA requires advisory committees, that are not composed entirely of federal employees, to be “fairly balanced” in their membership; that they conduct their business in open meetings; and that written records be kept and open to public inspection. There are specific procedures that an agency must go through before an advisory committee can begin to meet.

The FWS has been using two groups that AFRC believes should be placed under FACA: a Primary Modeling Team and a Modeling Advisory Group. These groups have been working since 2009.

On November 10, 2010, AFRC and CIC sent a letter to Ken Salazar, Secretary of Interior, asking that FWS remedy the problem and not use the advisory groups in the meantime. At year’s end, AFRC received a response from the FWS Oregon office stating their belief that the groups come under an exemption for “recovery teams” in the Endangered Species Act (ESA).

The Draft Revised Recovery Plan proposes for the first time going outside federal land for habitat to preserve the owl, but presents no scientific basis to believe this is necessary or will result in increased owl numbers. The modeling being done by these advisory groups has not been shared with other groups, including the timber industry and environmental organizations. There has been no review or critique of the modeling results to date, and because of this AFRC believes it is vital that light be shed on how FWS and these groups are going about their work.

The FWS announced that they intend to release the Final Recovery Plan in mid-February. It is uncertain how much focus will be placed on the impact of the barred owl on spotted owl populations and the risks of catastrophic wildfire and windthrow. These two factors were shown to be the greatest threat to the spotted owl in the 2008 recovery plan.

The lawsuit asks the court the block the FWS from citing or using any of the recommendations made by the two advisory committees. /Ann Forest Burns

Bob Ragon Op-Ed for the Roseburg News Review 2010

2010 began with most economic forecasters optimistically predicting a 35 % improvement in housing starts. Unfortunately new home construction results were disappointing and dominated by foreclosures and challenging credit markets.

Several world events significantly impacted our timber industry. First was the massive earthquake in February crippling Chile's plywood exports to the United States. As a result panel prices in the US skyrocketed from an average price of $260/Msf to a high of $460/Msf in early May. The beneficiaries were our plywood mills, principally Roseburg Forest Products and the Swanson Group. The run-up in prices was a temporary shot in the arm, but unfortunately the market retreated quickly when Chile resumed exporting plywood in late May.

The second major world event affecting our industry was the entry of China into our forest products market this summer. Russia imposed a 25% tariff on logs exported from Siberia to Chinese sawmills and now lumber and logs from the northwest are in high demand to satisfy China's expanding economy. This is a two edged sword for our industry by improving the overall lumber market but also driving up log costs to our local mills.

Finally Douglas County is now on the Secretary of Interior's radar screen for relief from the gridlock that has brought timber sales from the BLM in southwest Oregon to a virtual standstill. Secretary Salazar convened a one day roundtable discussion in Roseburg in October with a followup meeting in Washington DC in December. Several of our industry leaders including Allyn Ford and Steve Swanson participated as well as County Commissioner Doug Robertson. The lack of federal timber availability remains a key impediment to jobs and county revenues in Douglas County and all of rural Oregon.