Search For Threatened Bird Criticized
An opponent of logging in the Elk River Canyon says the U.S. Forest Service didn’t look hard enough for marbled murrelets, a threatened bird that is blocking logging on some old timber sales.
“They didn’t get serious about finding birds until I embarrassed them by finding them first,” said Jim Rogers.
But the Siskiyou National Forest says that it lived up to its responsibilities under a protocol for determining whether the elusive birds are nesting in a particular stand of timber.
“We’ve gone way beyond protocol,” said Sue Olson, spokesman for the forest. “We’ve made sure that our wildlife biologists can go out with Jim and ascertain, so I get a little bit defensive about any criticism about what we’ve done out there. I think we’ve gone way beyond what’s called for.”
Rogers has lived for more than 20 years in the Elk River Canyon. He uses a canoe to get to his cabin and makes his living doing contract jobs for the Forest Service and timber companies.
Rogers understands that timber has to come from somewhere, but believes that the Elk River watershed is not the place. He points to the value of salmon and steelhead that spawn in the Elk River and the unstable geology that makes the canyon vulnerable to erosion.
Knowing that finding marbled murrelets could block logging on parts of the Father Oak and Toastberry timber sales, he went looking for them last May. He found them in the two units where he looked. There are 10 units in the two sales.
The Siskiyou was still in the process of surveying 12 timber sales that had been held up over concerns for murrelet nesting when Rogers presented his findings, said Mike Lunn, supervisor of the Siskiyou.
After hearing from Rogers, the Forest Service did additional surveys and confirmed birds in five of the 10 units on the Father Oak and Toastberry sales.
A surveyor for Scott Timber Co, which bought the timber in 1990, found no birds at all.
Nesting areas for birds protected under the Endangered Species Act can’t be logged.
Certified as a marbled murrelet surveyor, Rogers said the Forest Service would have found at least two more units occupied if they had done a better job of looking. He said he found birds on one unit by hiking into a brushy area to look for them, while the Forest Service contractor surveyed the same unit from an easily accessible site on a road.
Lunn said the Forest Service begins a survey from sites along roads, but when it spots a bird, it goes deeper into the woods to identify a specific stand it is occupying. The protocol doesn’t require them to find a specific nest.
Marbled murrelets spend their lives at sea, but nest in old-growth forests as far as 50 miles inland. They don’t really build a nest. They lay their eggs in a mossy depression on top of a large branch high in a tree.
Spotting murrelets entering nesting areas is very difficult. They fly in at 65 mph at dusk. The nests are even harder to find. Only 70 have been found in the Northwest out of 5,000 areas where the birds are known to nest.
As a result, the government has set up a protocol for determining that murrelets nest in an area without actually having to find a nest. The timber industry has challenged the protocol in a lawsuit, claiming a salvage logging bill signed into law last month demands proof of an actual murrelet nest to hold up a sale.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service declared the bird a threatened species in 1992 due to the loss of nesting habitat to logging and mortality at sea from gill netting and oil spills. The agency this year proposed protecting 4.4 million acres of forest in Oregon, Washington and Northern California for murrelet nesting, including 3.4 million acres of federal land.
The sales in question are left over from 1990, when Congress specially authorized them in the midst of the battle over the northern spotted owl, a threatened species. They since have been held up while biologists check them for murrelet nesting.
C.J. Ralph, a biologist who helped write the marbled murrelet protocol, said if evidence of a nest is needed to protect a stand of timber, most nesting areas would be lost, leading to a 75 percent to 80 percent decline in murrelet populations.