The Owl and the Lumberjack : Disappearing Bird Is Symbol in Fight Over Logging Forest

The sign in the Golden Country Store window read: “Gone Fishing.” Next door, hardware store owner Steve Baylen helped a customer fit a 22-cent washer on an old brass fitting, reassuring her that there was no need to buy a whole new faucet.

Up the street, two lumberjacks leaned against a battered pickup, talking and watching as loaded logging trucks lumbered by, heading for the Sierra Pacific mill, the town’s biggest employer.

Hayfork is a one-mill town located in a pretty valley on a branch of the Trinity River, deep in the mountains of California’s north woods. Life in this remote area 100 miles east of Eureka appears laid back and neighborly.

Just below this bucolic serenity, however, there is an environmental donnybrook brewing, one that is drawing national attention to the 2.1-million-acre Shasta-Trinity National Forest that sprawls across all or part of six counties--Shasta, Siskiyou, Tehama, Trinity, Modoc and Humboldt.

Fighting over the environment is nothing new in these mountains, especially here in Trinity County, where the U.S. Forest Service owns 70% of the land. For years the scrappy residents of this county have fought for more wilderness areas, argued over logging practices and outlawed aerial spraying of herbicides, much to the chagrin of the Forest Service and the timber industry.

This time the arguments focus on the northern spotted owl, a seldom seen, fluffy-feathered raptor that lives deep in the old-growth forests of Northern California, Oregon and Washington. Some experts say that continued logging in the old-growth forests (defined as those at least 200 years old) threatens not only the owls but a myriad of other creatures as well.

These old-growth forests--rich biological ecosystems that have developed over several hundred years--are dominated by giant Douglas fir and hemlock and contain dozens of other species of conifers and deciduous trees and shrubs. This diversity creates a leafy, multilayered forest canopy, providing shade and shelter for hundreds of different kinds of mammals and insects.

As in previous disputes in this region, the battle lines are drawn between loggers and mill operators on the one side and environmentalists on the other. And in these small mountain towns so dependent on lumbering, nearly everyone seems to be questioning the Forest Service’s management of the Shasta-Trinity Forest.

The Shasta-Trinity--largest of the 18 federal forests in California--includes Mt. Shasta, 200 miles of scenic rivers, Shasta Lake and the Trinity Alps Wilderness. Recreational use approaches 5 million visitor days a year, making it one of the most popular forests in the nation.

Federal timber sales in Trinity County annually top $20 million, and the Forest Service, as required by law, turns 25% of this money over to local schools and the county road department in lieu of taxes.

In towns like Hayfork, Hyampom and Weaverville, the county seat, the spotted owl has become a symbol in the forest controversy, but people here are quick to point out there’s a lot more at stake than just the birds’ survival.

The real issues are jobs and questions about logging practices. Should federal forests be farmed like San Joaquin Valley cotton fields? Or managed as wild lands where some, but not all, trees are logged and the forests are maintained as diverse ecosystems?

“The spotted owl issue is only a metaphor for all forest practices; the basic issue is whether or not industry can continue to eliminate the natural order for a fast buck,” environmentalist Dennis Corp said.

Logger Jim Stillwell disagreed: “The damn owls aren’t in any danger. Hell, they got wings, but those damn Sierra Clubbers will say anything to stop logging, and that’s my livelihood.”

This debate is being echoed in varying forms across the country as managers of the nation’s 156 forests grapple with how best to use the resources on 191 million acres of federal land. Forest by forest they are coming up with the first land and resource management plans required by the National Forest Management Act of 1976.

From Maine to California, these management blueprints will chart a forest’s course, decade by decade, for the next half century, determining how much timber will be cut and by what method, how many campgrounds will be built, how much wilderness set aside. The plans must also protect watersheds and wildlife and make sure that no bird or animal is pushed to extinction.

Planning can be pretty dull stuff, and the process might have gone largely unnoticed, but for President Reagan’s efforts to fully develop the country’s natural resources. In the case of the Forest Service, the Administration wants to double the nation’s annual timber harvest by the year 2030, a goal that pleases the timber industry but has touched off angry reaction among environmentalists.

“We’re going to use better technology to grow more trees, get more bang for our buck,” said George Dunlop, an assistant secretary of agriculture. The Administration’s goal for federal forests in California would increase the harvest to 2.8 billion board feet a year, a 75% increase over what is now being cut.

Opposing the timber industry’s and Administration’s goals are all the environmental big guns: the Wilderness Society, Sierra Club, National Audubon Society, Natural Resources Defense Council and National Wildlife Federation. Joining with local groups, they have formed a coalition to challenge each forest plan in federal court, if necessary.

“The primary issue is what kind of forests are we going to have in the future,” said Robert Turnage of the Wilderness Society. The society has singled out the Shasta-Trinity Forest for “intensive analysis largely because of the importance of the forest’s roadless resources,” said its senior counsel, Peter Coppelman. The coalition is asking for a moratorium on all timber sales in the forest’s roadless areas not already protected by wilderness status.

That request came after the Shasta-Trinity Forest released a draft of its proposed land and resource management plan for public comment last summer. The draft--a voluminous document weighing more than 11 pounds--was so cumbersome, poorly written and riddled with errors that everyone, top forest officials included, agreed that the plan was almost unreadable.

The draft proposals appeared to remove thousands of acres of old-growth forests from timber sale plans while opening up potential wilderness areas for logging and other uses, causing both the timber industry and environmentalists to protest. But because of the draft’s imprecise language, questions were raised about what the plan is actually proposing. And all parties concerned, even the loggers, objected to environmentally damaging timber-harvesting policies set out in the plan. One timber man said, “They’re asking us to use a meat cleaver when a sharp knife would be better.”

Plan Tossed Out

Timber industry leaders asked that the plan be tossed out. Forest officials agreed and ordered planners to start over, a process that will take at least another year, possibly two. Environmentalists are protesting the delay, saying it is nothing more than a tactic to allow current, unacceptable logging practices to continue unabated.

At the heart of the controversy are the old-growth forests, many of them in the 342,000 acres of roadless areas that were once considered and rejected for wilderness classification and are now being opened up for timber sales before the proposed plan is finalized. Forest officials say when Congress passed the California Wilderness Act in 1984, these lands were “released” for development.

Bulldozing roads into the forest and felling trees are “irreversible actions,” Coppelman protested. “The fate of the most significant roadless areas in the forest may well be sealed long before the Forest Service adopts a final management plan.”

Contract logger Clarence Rose, a member of the California Board of Forestry, is also a critic of the plan, but from a different perspective. He said, “The plan foundered on confusion, that’s true, but all the environmentalists want to do is stall road building while they try to get more wilderness.”

Rose, who each year cuts and hauls 3,000 truckloads of logs to Trinity County mills, feels the wilderness issue has already been settled. “ Enough is enough,” he said, pointing out there are 480,000 wilderness acres in the forest now. Too much land has already been withheld from production because of the competing demands of various forest users, he said.

The Reagan Administration agrees and has ordered national forests in Northern California to draw up plans for opening more land for timber harvesting. The Shasta-Trinity Forest is cutting 185 million board feet of lumber a year; under the goals called for by the Administration, that volume will be pushed up to 321 million board feet by the year 2030, an increase of 73%.

The Shasta-Trinity draft plan calls for a more modest 48% increase in timber yields over the next half century, Forest Supervisor Robert Tyrrel said. And to reach even this more limited goal, the forest will have to rely heavily on high-tech tree farming methods known as clearcutting, he said.

Clearcutting Plan

Clearcutting is essentially tree farming. The goal is to grow wood faster by creating a mosaic of even-aged timber patches across the forest, each patch ranging is size from 30 to 60 acres. At the outset, all of the salable timber is cut from each patch, and the remaining vegetation is knocked down and burned. The clearcut land is then planted with a fast-growing species of pine or fir, and the area is sprayed with an herbicide that kills the competing vegetation but does not harm the conifer seedlings. Each patch can be harvested every 70 to 100 years.

The use of herbicides is controversial. Environmentalists claim these toxic chemicals kill wildlife, pollute rivers and cause birth defects in humans. In addition, they say, clearcutting destroys the biological diversity of forest lands and creates erosion problems that silt up the streams, destroying the spawning grounds of salmon and steelhead, so important in the Trinity River system.

Environmentalists filed a federal court action against continued use of herbicides in the Pacific Northwest in 1983, winning a temporary restraining order against continued use of these chemicals until the Forest Service can prove them environmentally safe. Use of herbicides in California forests was suspended by Zane Smith, regional chief of the Forest Service, pending completion of an environmental impact study.

Confident that this study will show herbicides can safely be used, Shasta-Trinity planners are proposing that 94% of the timberlands be harvested by using the clearcutting method. Environmentalists are fighting for “an herbicide-free alternative” to clearcutting because it also causes serious erosion problems that silt up the area’s rivers.

Forest officials acknowledge that clearcutting is more damaging to forest lands than the selective logging of mature trees, which leaves the natural forest intact. However, clearcutting produces more wood and is necessary if timber harvest goals are to be met, according to Tyrrel, the Shasta-Trinity supervisor.

Opposition to Clearcutting

Even timber industry officials are opposed to the use of clearcutting on 94% of the timberlands, according to Tom Walz, timber manager for Sierra Pacific Industries’ Hayfork mill. “A variety of harvesting methods should be used,” he said. “Timber harvesting does disturb the ground (causing erosion and stream siltation), but we can minimize such damage by our cutting practices.”

Walz is also critical of the forest’s spotted owl plan that calls for setting aside 72 “territories” for the birds in old-growth forests, each territory covering 1,000 acres. The idea of losing that much mature, harvestable timber was bad enough, he said, but even worse is the way the Forest Service is going ahead with this protection before the plan is complete.

This spring Sierra Pacific was halfway through logging off a 12-million-board-foot sale when an owl nest was found. Rangers stopped the logging. Caught without a supply of logs, Walz said, “We came within one day of having to close down the mill.” That would have put 168 people out of work, he said.

Down at Alice’s Restaurant, where “spotted owl soup” is sometimes on the menu, the mood was summed up by owner Alice Ackerly: “We ought to save the owl, sure . . . but the mill here is vital. . . . This would be a ghost town without the loggers.” Her owl soup, by the way, is nothing more than chicken noodle, she said with a laugh.

This species of owl-- Strix occidentalis --is a hot topic of discussion in Hayfork. Loggers, some of whom earn up to $33 an hour, tell you that it does not even appear on any endangered species lists. But rangers will explain that the species is threatened because years of logging old-growth forests has dramatically reduced the solitary space the birds must have to survive.

Experts say the northern spotted owl is part of an ecosystem dependent upon old-growth forests. Up here, the owls prey on flying squirrels that, in turn, feed on kind of fungi that grows only on ancient trees. Without the trees, the ecosystem’s fragile web of life is broken, ecologists explain.

Estimate of 2,000 Pairs

Ornithologists estimate that there may be 2,000 breeding pairs of spotted owls in the Pacific Northwest and Northern California. No one knows their number for sure. Even the amount of space that each pair of owls need is disputed, with estimates ranging from 300 acres up to 4,400 acres per breeding pair.

From Washington’s Olympia Peninsula to the California north woods, forest planners are proposing to remove 1.8 million acres of old-growth forests from production, according to the Northwest Forest Resource Council, an industry group. The council contends this withdrawal will cost the taxpayers $9 billion in lost timber sales, will result in the closing of lumber mills and the loss of 4,800 jobs.

“Those numbers are a sham. The issue is not the owl versus jobs,” said Wilderness Society President George T. Frampton Jr. He accused the industry and the Forest Service of using inflated numbers that overstate the impact. “The economic issues are serious and must be considered,” he said, “but the Forest Service can preserve owl habitat and minimize the economic impact. Hopefully they can do it without eliminating any existing jobs.”

Frampton said the owls are not only important because they are a threatened species but also because they are an important “indicator species.” The owls’ existence in the centuries-old forests provides a measure of how well the delicate web of life is being maintained within these disappearing ecosystems, he said.