Bark Beetle Outbreak Not Present Environmentalists Say Foresters Sounded Alarm Just To Sell Timber

The massive beetle invasion never happened.

The Douglas fir bark beetle outbreak forecast by the U.S. Forest Service and the timber industry isn’t materializing.

Foresters overestimated the beetle’s threat to forests and bug numbers appear to be falling, officials on the Idaho Panhandle National Forests acknowledged this week.

“We have found it did not expand to the extent we thought it would,” said Pat Aguilar, deputy forest supervisor. “That’s great. That’s not a negative.”

But environmentalists say the threat never was there - and the forest agency knew it.

The Forest Service used the beetle outbreak to justify logging in sensitive areas that would otherwise be off-limits, they charge.

“It was a conscious exaggeration,” said Barry Rosenberg of The Lands Council in Spokane.

Forest Service comments this week were prompted by criticism from The Lands Council and the Idaho Sporting Congress.

The groups obtained documents detailing a smaller-than-expected outbreak via a Freedom of Information Act request.

Officials from the Colville National Forest were unavailable for comment. Environmentalists say the same conditions apply there.

Because beetle damage dropped more than expected, less timber was logged.

The Forest Service has sold about half of the timber it initially proposed to offer on beetle-infected forests around Fernan, Hayden and Priest lakes.

That’s not a problem for the timber industry, a spokeswoman said.

“Our folks are not going to get upset to learn that an epidemic is not as bad as we thought it might be,” said Stefany Bales, with the Intermountain Forest Association.

Dead trees felled during 1996 ice storms fueled the beetle outbreak, the Forest Service and industry say. The bugs spread by 1998, killing valuable timber and increasing fire danger, officials said.

After an environmental review, local forest officials got permission from agency headquarters to immediately log a 25,000-acre swath of forests in North Idaho and Eastern Washington last summer. Citing extreme fire risk, the Panhandle also got emergency clearance to mark 4,000 acres before public appeals were resolved.

On Thursday, officials said foresters handled already beetle-killed forests appropriately but misjudged the number of trees they expected would fall to future infestations.

That led to scaled-back versions of most of the first timber sales offered within the 25,000 acres. Though original plans for 10 timber sales on the Panhandle called for logging on 10,000 acres, the agency ultimately sold timber off only 5,600 acres, according to agency estimates.

The most striking example is a timber sale called “Quartz Jasper,” which started at about 1,300 acres but ended up at 400. Quartz Jasper sold for $762,000 and holds more than 3 million board feet of lumber, enough to build 300 homes.

Located about 10 miles north of Priest River, the sale area encompasses old-growth Douglas fir and ponderosa pine trees.

Mapping the original sale area in 1997, foresters flew over the area, marking on a map all the dead and dying trees. Then they predicted the forests the bugs would attack, based on a theory that beetles favor big, old trees.

They were wrong, acknowledged Dave Cobb, a forester on the Priest Lake Ranger District who helped plan beetle sales.

Other sales on the district weren’t far off, Cobb said.

“We didn’t have a lot of time to figure out where the bugs were and exactly how bad they were. We did the best we could.”

The story of the beetle invasion unfolded last summer throughout the area on industry-funded television and radio ads and billboards: stands of green trees splattered with the reddish-brown blotches of bug-killed timber.

Potlatch Corp. spokesman Frank Carroll said he’s skeptical that the beetle battle is over, judging by the red patches he’s seen in places like Beauty Creek.

“The reality is it’s a bad beetle kill,” Carroll said. “It’s going to be even worse this spring.”

But Forest Service records show forests are rebounding.

Survival rates in bug-infested forests more than doubled between 1998 and 1999, rising from only 12 percent to 29 percent, according to Panhandle entomologist Sandy Kegley.

It was luck - not logging - that caused the bugs to go away, officials said.

When the beetle outbreak first started in 1998, it was at levels not seen since the 1950s, bug researchers say.

Then last year, the outbreak dropped off fast, surprisingly fast, said Ladd Livingston, forest entomologist for the Idaho Department of Lands. A tree’s natural ability to fight off infection is what checks beetle outbreaks, Livingston said, though sometimes logging select trees can help boost forest health and fend off bugs.

But in this case, logging had nothing to do with the recovery, Livingston said. “They have not engaged that tool.”