Washington and Northern California. The court action, Norman says, forced “an honest consideration of the new science” that drew attention to the dramatic decline of an entire ecosystem due to decades-old logging practices. She points to a 1988 Department of Fish and Wildlife survey of the national forests and Bureau of Land Management timber lands as “a real eye-opener.” “It was made clear how quickly the forests would disappear,” she says, due to unchecked clear-cutting. “Unsustainable past logging levels had to decline, regardless of spotted owls.” The declaration of the spotted owl as threatened “was the impetus we needed to make policy changes” in forest management, she says. Lee Webb, a retired U.S. Forest Service wildlife biologist, had boots on the ground in the Rogue River National Forest (now Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forest) between 1975 and 2004. In 1975, when he landed his job with the Forest Service, timber was king, and management policies were more about harvesting timber. During the logging industry’s heyday, more than 15 billion board feet of timber was cut each year from private and public lands in Oregon, Washington and Northern California. The spotted owl listing, Webb says, “changed things for sure.” Logging operations in mature and old-growth forests were constantly challenged, and timber sales scrutinized to see whether they “ran afoul of the Endangered Species Act,” he recalls. The northern spotted owl, which prefers areas with large trees with broken tops, deformed limbs or large cavities for nesting, is “a good indicator species,” says Webb. Because of the owls’ diet of flying squirrels, wood rats, mice and other small rodents, and its appetite for other birds, insects and reptiles, they are “a good indicator of the overall health of the ecosystem in which they live,” he says. Dwyer’s landmark ruling also upheld protections for other species, including the marbled murrelet, but it was the spotted owl that became the “poster species” of the timber wars. During her 16-year tenure as Jackson County commissioner, Sue Kupillas saw the listing of the northern spotted owl as a threatened species in 1990 and heard 60 | Sunday, April 24, 2016
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Four protesters, from left, Steve Marsden, Mike Roselle, Kevin Everhart and Pedro Tama, stop a bulldozer from carving a road at Bald Mountain on April 26, 1983. Mail Tribune file photo
A spotted owl peers through the branches at Nueman Gap in June 2008. Photo by Lee Webb
Our Valley
4/13/2016 5:13:28 PM