The release of the final revised Recovery Plan for the Northern Spotted Owl has sparked concern in the timber industry over what impact it could have on future timber harvests.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) will use the recovery plan to work with land managers in the Pacific Northwest including the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management (BLM), as well as other federal and non-federal landowners, to advise them on habitat management activities that can benefit the spotted owl and contribute to improved forest health. Recommendations included in the Recovery Plan could potentially affect around 20 million acres of U.S. Forest Service lands and about 2 million acres of Bureau of Land Management lands.
Top priorities of the recently unveiled plan include protecting the best of the bird’s remaining habitat, actively managing forests to improve forest health, and reducing competition from barred owls, which have moved into the spotted owl’s range in Washington, Oregon, and northern California.
Many in the timber industry have long been concerned over what the plan would mean for timber harvests from both federal and private lands in the Pacific northwest. Even after the release of the plan, there is still worry that it will lead to further reductions in sustainable timber harvests without benefiting the spotted owl.
“The BLM Medford District is struggling to provide approximately one-third of the annual timber volume promised under the Clinton Northwest Forest Plan,” said Tom Partin, president of the American Forest Resource Council. “This recovery plan will likely lead to further drastic reductions in available timber supply at a time when many rural Northwest communities face 15-20% unemployment and the remaining mills are hanging on by a thread.”
The plan does say that habitat protection in areas slated for potential timber harvests on federal lands, and possibly non-federal lands in areas of the owl’s range where federal lands are limited, will likely be needed for the recovery plan to succeed. However, the plan also recommends more active forest management, such as fuels treatment, thinning, and restoration to enhance habitat. Paul Henson, the FWS team leader for the recovery plan, said that although it is not geared toward providing logging guidance or recommendations, the agency is very sensitive to the issue and has done its best to reconcile the recommendations in the plan with some of the goals that the Forest Service and BLM have outlined for also maintaining timber harvest compatible with recovery goals.
“We feel strongly that the Endangered Species Act says we need to conserve the ecosystem as well as the species,” Paul said. “And if forest health truly is a goal, then there should be more active management of these forests and areas where that forest health is at risk. And that provides some opportunity for timber management that we feel actually should be encouraged as opposed to discouraged.”
The Northern Spotted Owl has become symbolic of a decades long struggle between the timber industry and conservationists since it was listed as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act in 1990. Because a formal Recovery Plan was not finalized until 2008, for many years the FWS utilized the Northwest Forest Plan (NWFP) which withdrew 87% of 24 million acres of federal land from active management. According to the AFRC, this reduced the long term sustained harvest from 4.4 billion board feet to a projected 1.1 billion, with actual annual sale quantities rarely exceeding 700 million board feet, resulting in the closure of hundreds of mills. Despite the significant reduction in logging, the spotted owl population has continued to decline. Litigation in the last several years led to the remanding of the 2008 recovery plan and the most recent release of the final plan.
For more information on the Spotted Owl recovery time line or to read the full revised plan, visit www.fws.gov/oregonfwo.
