Where Many an Owl Is Spotted

IN JANUARY, the United States Forest Service (USFS) set aside 7 million acres for the northern spotted owl. The cost—from 33,000 to 100,000 well-paid logging industry jobs—is comparable to last month’s GM layoffs of 74,000 auto workers. But the owl requires these “dwindling patches of the West’s virgin forests” to survive, as the Wall Street Journal once reported.

Misreported, actually. There is an impressive array of evidence that spotted owls are thriving on millions of acres of privately and publicly managed second-growth forests—the kind that grow up after logging. This evidence was acknowledged by the report of the Jack Ward Thomas Committee (composed of owl experts from USFS, the Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management and National Parks Service) which, however, declared the owl a “threatened species” under the terms of the Endangered Species Act and recommended setting aside vast old-growth reserves. But to do so, it had to ignore its own finding that “forest structure is more important than tree age” in determining a habitat’s suitability for the owl.

JR

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James Owen Rice

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Endangered Species Act

IN JANUARY, the United States Forest Service (USFS) set aside 7 million acres for the northern spotted owl. The cost—from 33,000 to 100,000 well-paid logging industry jobs—is comparable to last month’s GM layoffs of 74,000 auto workers. But the owl requires these “dwindling patches of the West’s virgin forests” to survive, as the Wall Street Journal once reported.

Misreported, actually. There is an impressive array of evidence that spotted owls are thriving on millions of acres of privately and publicly managed second-growth forests—the kind that grow up after logging. This evidence was acknowledged by the report of the Jack Ward Thomas Committee (composed of owl experts from USFS, the Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management and National Parks Service) which, however, declared the owl a “threatened species” under the terms of the Endangered Species Act and recommended setting aside vast old-growth reserves. But to do so, it had to ignore its own finding that “forest structure is more important than tree age” in determining a habitat’s suitability for the owl.