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“But if your goal is to continue to use the owl for other purposes, like the halting of timber harvesting, then you’re not going to be happy with Option 2,” he says.
“And that’s why some are squawking, because the owl’s never the issue, it’s been a whole bunch of other things. … When you use the owl as a surrogate for something else, that does a disservice to the environment.”
If timber companies prefer Option 2, does that mean environmentalists favor Option 1?
“No,” says the Audubon Society of Portland’s Sallinger. “Neither option is anywhere near acceptable.”
He adds: “This is not a recovery plan, in my mind; this is an extinction plan. … We are encouraging our members and people who are concerned about the spotted owl and our ancient forests to promote the rejection of this plan altogether.”
Sallinger takes issue with the draft plan’s emphasis on the barred owl over habitat loss and argues that neither version of the plan would set aside enough old-growth reserves to increase the spotted owl population.
Worse, he says, the draft plan in its current state is the result of political interference in the scientific process. He believes that the draft plan is dictated by the Bush administration, through a Washington, D.C., oversight committee that included high-ranking members from the Interior and Agriculture departments.
His view is confirmed by recovery team member DellaSala, who is a forest ecologist with the National Center for Conservation Science and Policy, based in Ashland.
Accusations of political interference with scientific findings hold a lot of water in today’s political climate. Interior Department Deputy Secretary Lynn Scarlett is among the Bush appointees who have come under fire in recent congressional hearings.
And in early May, Julie MacDonald, the deputy assistant secretary for fish, wildlife and parks at the Interior Department, resigned under allegations that she interfered with government scientists. She also admitted leaking internal documents to private industry groups.
“The political interference in the recovery plan resulted in a plan that is now out there, that has the potential to do more harm than good,” DellaSala says.
He says that once the Washington oversight committee got involved, the contents of the draft plan began veering away from scientific findings.
He sees Option 1 as a weakened version of what the plan should look like, and Option 2 as “kind of like turning the henhouse over to the fox.”
The Fish and Wildlife Service’s version of events is a little different.
“What they (the oversight committee) asked for was if we could come up with another approach to achieving recovery that would be as viable, be based on the same science, but provide a little more flexibility to the land managers,” Jewett says.
The service estimates that its plan, when finalized, will get the spotted owl to the point where it can be removed from the endangered species list within 30 years.
That claim is “absolutely false,” DellaSala counters.
“As goes the owl, so, too, a host of values that are hitched to old-growth forest,” he says. “It’s about clean water and wild salmon populations that are associated with intact old-growth ecosystems.
“This is more than just the spotted owl,” he adds.
And that’s the one thing on which everyone agrees.
A public meeting will provide information and accept public comments at 6:30 p.m. Wednesday at the Oregon Convention Center, Portland Ballroom, 777 N.E. Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd.
Public comments will be accepted through June 25 and can be submitted to NSOplan@fws.gov or mailed to NSO Recovery Plan, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Ecological Services, 911 N.E. 11th Ave., Portland, OR 97232.
annemariedistefano@portlandtribune.com
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That article [about "incidental taking"]was a rather bleak assessment of anything positive coming out of the Endangered Species Act. Perhaps we need the Judge Redden approach of "do it right", or I will do it for you!! However, that might mean he will have to tear down the dams with his own hands!! Kinda a like the Berlin Wall!! Thanks for the Environmental News reference.
(email verified)
Tue, May 29, 2007 at 05:33 AM
1. The Bush administration is trying to roll-back the clock and put logging before conservation. Both recovery options in the draft plan are a step back from the protections afforded by the Northwest Forest Plan. USFWS should start over and develop a recovery plan that protects all suitable habitat and restores what has been lost.
2. The recovery team should strongly oppose political interference from Bush appointees in Washington DC, and work towards a genuine recovery plan that builds on the protections in the Northwest Forest Plan.
3. The recovery team should take a stand to oppose BLM’s Western Oregon Plan Revision which will pull the rug out from under the integrated FS/BLM owl conservation scheme. BLM intends to eliminate both old-growth reserves and stream reserves which will isolate owl populations on National Forest lands and make it much harder to owls to disperse to and from the Cascades, Coast Range, and Klamath Mountains. Preventing the WOPR should be a top priority, on par with addressing the barred owl.
4. The Bush recovery plan not only proposes fewer and smaller reserves than the Northwest Forest Plan, but the Bush plan also lowers the restoration target in reserves from the current 80% suitable habitat to as low as 50% suitable habitat. This is unacceptable because the spotted owl faces new threats such as climate change and the barred owl. The spotted owl is losing access to some of its habitat due to forest fires and barred owls, so the spotted owl needs MORE habitat protection, not less.
5. The Bush plan de-emphasizes the role of habitat which is irresponsible and misleading. The Bush plan complains that the Northwest Forest Plan reserves can’t stop the barred owl from invading. The truth is that providing more and larger habitat reserves provides the best hope that the barred owls and spotted owls can co-exist. The recovery plan should expand the reserves not shrink them.
6. The recovery plan should prohibit logging in suitable habitat. There is no scientific evidence that logging in suitable owl habitat is beneficial to spotted owls. Owls prefer old-growth forests with high canopy closure and complex structure including lots of snags and dead wood. Logging always simplifies the forest and makes it less suitable for owls.
7. Non-federal forest owners are not doing their part to provide owl habitat, so we either need to significantly strengthen the state Forest Practices Act or increase habitat protection on federal land to compensate for the lack of habitat on industrial forest lands and state lands.
8. Salvage logging after fires will delay recovery of high quality owl habitat by killing seedlings, increasing hazardous fuels, and preventing the development of complex old forests with abundant legacy structures. For millennia forests have rebounded after fire and they will continue to do so. Salvage logging removes the structural legacies that bridge past and future forests. For instance, abundant dead wood supports truffles that feed flying squirrels which are the primary prey of the spotted owl. Unsalvaged forests can help provide high quality foraging habitat.
9. Owl recovery could result in a win-win for owls and people, if the government would adopt a plan that protected all remaining mature and old-growth forests, while shifting all logging to thinning of dense young plantations. This would help restore the forest, while creating some jobs and providing wood as a by-product of restoration.
(email verified)
Tue, May 29, 2007 at 09:01 AM
My solution - kill all the rest of the spotted owls and end the controversy.
(email verified)
Tue, May 29, 2007 at 01:44 PM
Doug,
You say that, "There is no scientific evidence that logging in suitable owl habitat is beneficial to spotted owls."
What about the east side? If I remember correctly, there was a lot of suitable owl habitat destroyed in the B and B fire. Could harvest in the form of fuels treatments not have benefited the owl in that situation? Can silvicultural prescriptions not account for the maintenance and creation of dead wood?
There are no absolutes in forestry! You should be careful when throwing around general statements like that, it gives everyone a window to see your bias.
(email verified)
Tue, May 29, 2007 at 04:49 PM
The real problem with owls and their protection is that people who are nurtured by tenured academic positions, taxpayer payrolls and tax forgiven donations profess to have the answer for protecting owls, but that answer emanates from their guaranteed world of birth to death government sustanence. People and owls who have to work in the real world of supply and demand, predator and prey, are not a part of the solutions offered by the professional owl protectors. In fact, if the owl were to gain some level of stability, all those protector folks would be out of business. So, they invented unrestrained wildfire as a habitat improvement tool, incinerated a million and a half acres of prime Oregon owl habitat to this point in time, and now bemoan a diminishing habitat, blame it on non-existant logging, while it is their ilk that have been the root cause of fewer owls. They and their tagging, radio transmittered research, watching, feeding and generally messing with every owl they find. What kind of life is that for an owl? The whiners are still in the Big Zoo mentality, and rural Oregon is still without a replacement economy because the owl lawsuit folks don't even let thinning of planted trees happen, let alone any other activity by which a human could eke out a living, even one at the bureaucrat and environmental protector level. The environment is an urban legend going under urban concrete daily, and the tyranny of that voting majority has placed an economic jackboot in the necks of rural Oregonians. The owl is the heel of that boot.
(email verified)
Wed, May 30, 2007 at 12:06 AM
The Draft Recovery Plan is an admission of total failure. After 13 years of the bogus Northwest Forest Plan,
1. The spotted owl population has crashed 40-60%.
2. Millions of acres of spotted owl habitat has been permanently destroyed by mega-fires, including the largest fire in OR history.
3. "Continuity" throughout the range of the spotted owl has been punched with holes as large as 500,000 acres.
4. Rural economies in OR and WA have been crippled for over a decade, for nothing.
Every goal of the original spotted owl plan has been missed by a lightyear. The situation is worse now in all respects. The Draft Recovery Plan is a litany of failure.
Setting aside more "old-growth" habitat for incineration in mega-fires is the OLD plan and it failed. The NEW plan promises more of the same bogus failure, plus nutjob biologists blasting away at barred owls (which, btw, are NOT aggressive and DO NOT predate spotted owls).
As long as we continue to listen to bogus, fraud, pseudo-scientists who actually know absolutely nothing, then we will continue down this road to holocaust and extinction.
(email verified)
Wed, May 30, 2007 at 03:35 AM
Credible science should drive our decisions on how to manage our lands, water, and economies! This is not about owls vs. people - it's about short term economic interests pusing for bad decisions! There are enough dense fire-prone second growth forests to provide timber and jobs. Local economies would benefit and our last remaining ancient forest ecosystems would be preserved for our children. Let's embrace credible science and figure out solutions that benefit the environment and our economies. Dismantling the laws that preserve old-growth forests does neither.
(email verified)
Wed, May 30, 2007 at 03:40 AM
BTW, Doug, I have thinned in spotted owls stands and the owls liked it! and are still there 15 years later!
If you would like to see that forest and take measurements and record data like a real scientist, I'd be happy to help you make that scientific report, and so we can put to bed the gross canard that thinning and owls do not mix. It's a lie, and we can disprove it scientifically together.
(email verified)
Wed, May 30, 2007 at 03:41 AM
And truffles?????
Are you telling me you actually believe that spotted owls are dependent on truffles????
This is the kind of weirded-out, bogus urban myth tripe that has FAILED to protect owls. Let's all come back to Planet Earth and talk about it here, not on Mars.
(email verified)
Wed, May 30, 2007 at 03:46 AM
Response to Doug Heiken's Point #3:
Doug said, "BLM’s Western Oregon Plan Revision which will pull the rug out from under the integrated FS/BLM owl conservation scheme. BLM intends to eliminate both old-growth reserves and stream reserves . . "
Facts:
BLM's Western Oregon Plan Revision is a process to make decisions about future management. NO DECISIONS HAVE YET BEEN MADE. Right now an EIS is being prepared to look at a wide range of alternatives. Some of the alternatives will maintain the "old-growth reserves" he refers to.
All of the alternatives being studied predict more old-growth habitat in the future on BLM lands than what exists now.
The revised plans must contribute to the recovery of the northern spotted owl.
Want the facts? Participate in the public review process when the draft plan and EIS is released this summer! http://www.blm.gov/or/plans/WOPR
(email verified)
Wed, May 30, 2007 at 05:01 AM
Mike D.
you are misguided.
1. spotted owls continue to decline partly because of lingering impacts of the severe overcutting of the 70's and 80's. The fragmentation of habitat contributed to continued predation from great horned owls, more competition from barred owls, and less dispersal habitat available when areas burn or are logged (yes, old growth logging in spotted owl habitat continued between 1994 and the present).
2. Millions of acres in Oregon have not been 'permanently destroyed' in 'mega-fires.' This kind of hyperbole and innacuracy shows how far from reality your other arguments are likely to be. While spotted owl habitat can be destroyed in fires, spotted owls are also known to inhabit burned forests and this is well documented in Oregon (even so called 'catastrophic' fires). Second, if we don't salvage log after fires, we leave behind important old growth structural components that will actually lead to more suitable spotted owl habitat more quickly than can be created by logging and replanting. Large, dead standing trees that salvage logging removes are actually critical components of the types of old growth forests spotted owls love.
3. If you are concerned about habitat continuity, I hope you would favor more sacrifice made by private industrial forestland holders such as Weyerhaueser, Boise Cascade and others to set aside old forest habitat to provide corridors between areas of federal land for the owls to use.
4. You can't pin rural economic decline in Oregon on the spotted owl. All through the 1980's when logging levels were skyrocketing - timber employment was plummenting due to mechanization in the industry and log exports. Even now in Oregon, private timber companies that log 80 - 90 % of the trees cut in the state can still export whole raw logs overseas. They are also able to get far more wood out of each log than they could 10 years ago, also needing fewer people for the work.
The key to rural economic self suffiency is economic diversification. Logging will always be a part of rural Oregon, but its time to get over the idea that ramping up logging, particularly in old growth forests on public land, is the only way rural Oregon can survive.
Those old growth forests bring other businesses to the state as well as tourist dollars. They also protect water quality for downstream communities and businesses. Further, private industrial timberland owners in rural Oregon also pay pennies on the dollar in property taxes even as some rural Oregon counties also enjoy the lowest property tax rates in the country and have not raised them in years to help generate local revenue. Even though many rural counties are facing the loss of timber payments, some of these same counties rejected efforts to raise local property taxes to help make up some of this revenue. With all this it gets tiring to hear the same old refrain: blame the spotted owl.
(email verified)
Wed, May 30, 2007 at 05:29 AM
to Judd Lehman:
regarding the B and B fire. A year after the fire, several known spotted owl nests had not been reinhabited, though it is not known whether some of these spotted owls relocated or died. The Deschutes National Forest is at the very edge of spotted owl habitat, making the population very susceptible to disturbance events more common to the eastside, but less common the westside where most owls live.
One of the main problems with the B&B fire was the patchwork of 10 year old young stands left behind from the clearcutting heighdays of the 1980's next to old growth stands that are naturally mixed conifer. No amount of thinning in the older stands could have prevented the massive flare ups in the monocoluture young stands that carried flames up into the canopy of the older stands. However, fuels reduction near Camp Sherman was important in helping make sure no houses in that community were lost in the B and B fire. That's the crux with fuel reduction efforts - we need to focus on areas near communities first (there are years worth of work to do on this alone, not to mention periodic maintenance), and not tinker around in the middle of the old growth miles from the nearest community. In fact, projects in the old growth take away agency resources from projects near communities.
Also, B and B was very much a weather driven fire. With high winds, that shifted direction daily, it is very clear that 'fuel' was not the only issue in that fire.
Lastly, the Forest Service's plan after the B and B fire has been devastating - logging large diameter ponderosa snags that will take three hundred years to replicate, crushing three year old tree seedlings and leaving behind small diameter trees and slash that weren't merchantable. Nonetheless, they declared this a benifit for forest health and fuel reduction - go figure.
(email verified)
Wed, May 30, 2007 at 05:46 AM
No, Shroomer, it is you who are wrong, on almost every count.
1. "Lingering impacts" means nothing, nor does "fragmentation" or "dispersal habitat'". The DRP cites multiple evidence that spotted owls prefer edge, anyway. There has been no recorded "competition" from barred owls, although great horned owls, peregrine falcons, goshawks, and golden eagles DO predate both spotted and barred owls. And whatever marginal "old-growth logging" has occurred in the last 13 years, it has been dwarfed the millions of acres of old-growth forest destroyed by holocaust.
2. Spotted owls are not "known to inhabit burned forests." This is a falsehood without foundation. The alleged documentation does not exist. Radio tagged spotted owls have been recorded flying through burns, but they do not nest or forage there.
More importantly, the old-growth forests of Oregon did not arise from the ashes of catastrophic forest fires. The eco-babble about structural components belies ignorance about the actual historical forest development pathways. Our forests arose in concert with frequent, regular, anthropogenic (Indian-set) fire. Those fires gave rise to open, park-like forests, which are the only kind that produce old trees.
What is arising from the ashes of the B&B and Biscuit Fires is brush, incendiary brush tat will burn again in a dozen or so years. The second fire will eliminate conifers entirely from the burned area, and result in permanent sclerophyllous chaparral. Those areas will never be old-growth forests again.
3. I do not favor "more sacrifice" given that all the prior sacrifices did not work and were for nothing. If we have to sacrifice something, let's sacrifice a goat, or perhaps your job, career, home, etc. Truffler.
4. The Big Lie about mechanization in the Timber Industry caused our economic collapse, and not curtailment of a $5 billion per year Federal harvest, is so old and rotten that it stinks. Everybody in rural Oregon knows the real truth.
5. Tourist dollars! That's as feeble a falsehood as truffles! No tourists come to Oregon to wade out through the tickbrush into the Burns to marvel at the standing dead snags where forests used to be. Raising taxes on people who have lost their jobs and are facing foreclosure of their family homes, in order to "pay" for the incineration of "spotted owl habitat" where they used to work, is frightfully mean-spirited.
6. The B&B Fire was an arson fire.
7. Everything you know is wrong. What is presented as science is false. The proof is the failure of this kind of fallacious nonsense to protect anything since inception of the Northwest Forest Plan.
(email verified)
Wed, May 30, 2007 at 09:37 AM
With all these "facts" on this blog it is hard to keep up the these contradictory "facts"? How about this fact, the barred owl has almost completely removed spotted owls from our three National Parks with the range of the spotted owl. Thats right! Olympic, Rainier and Redwood National parks with all their old-growth habitats is where barred owls are kicking the spotted owls but the worse.
So what is the solution. Create more old-growth? The Northwest Forest Plan and our National Parks are nothing more than a biological trap. And the biologists that continue to advocate creating these biological traps will get the credit for leading the spotted owl closer to extinction.
(email verified)
Thu, May 31, 2007 at 12:31 PM
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Re: Saga of the spotted owl not over yet
The spotted owl and others may never receive true recovery. Red this
http://www.world-wire.com/news/0705280001.html
"Leeona Klippstein"
(email verified)
Tue, May 29, 2007 at 01:05 AM