What Are We Talking About?

After a long walk in a neighborhood woods today, I understand less and less what we mean when we describe a tree or a forest as "old-growth." There are many definitions--some uninformed, some vernacular, some scientific, many political. And this is a problem when the definition is used to push timber sales through as in "we are not logging old-growth." Does this mean we (the Department of Natural Resources, Weyerhauser, whoever) is not cutting down certain really really big trees or that they are not logging in old-growth forests?

One sparrow does not a summer make. One really big tree does not an old-growth forest make. As we should expect, trying to define a state of a certain forest--one that has been growing, changing, living, dying, responding to natural forces for a thousand years (or more or less)--is not a simple matter. Old forests are complex and they don't translate easily into numbers or words.

 Alaska used to have a slogan that attempted to define its undefinability: "Alaska is a state of mind."  And old-growth forest is like this, too--a state of the forest. And that state takes in many qualities--large standing trees, large standing snags (dead trees with broken tops), fallen trees, nurse logs, nurse stumps, a broken canopy, trees of different age classes, certain understory plants. A forest featuring these qualities is one that has seen little human disturbance.

This hundred-year-old tree doesn't make the >80 cm dbh cut (which translates as 100 Inches in circumference), yet it is an important part of an old-growth forest. This is along the Lewis River in Gifford Pinchot National Forest, WA.  Photo by MM Ruth.

During my walk this morning, I talked with man who knew the woods and the flora well. I asked him if the trees in the woods were old-growth. He said no. They were big, but old-growth means original old-growth. I took this to mean the "virgin' old-growth--the massive trees that pre-date human disturbance. Which means that the trees I have been measuring and calling "old growth" are just really big second growth. In the woods where I was walking, this means the oldest trees started growing after the forest was clearcut sometime in at the turn of the 20th century. Which makes them 100+ years old. According to my fellow walker, these trees will only ever be "big second growth." 

I am not sure I buy this, but I am intrigued by the idea.

And by the controversy surrounding what the Washington Department of Natural Resources (DNR) is doing in the forests of the Olympic Peninsula. A few weeks back, two timber sales were approved in an area of high-quality marbled murrelet habitat (aka old-growth forests, mature forest, late-successional forest) called the Olympic Experimental State Forest. The timber proposed for clear-cutting is not old--30-40 years old, most of it. However, those younger trees are in an area of old-growth forest--but outside the 100-meter buffer required around murrelet nesting sites. Removal of these younger, buffering trees is a problem for murrelets as the clear-cut allows for the incursion of nest predators, specifically Stellar's jays, which prey on murrelet eggs and chicks.

A young marbled murrelet chick is a vulnerable creature during its month-long development on the nest. This seabird depends on the coniferous coastal forests of the Pacific Northwest--forests we call old-growth, mature, old, older, late successional, and ancient. These terms may be synonymous. Or not.A precise definition is elusive, but critical to this threatened species. Photo by Tom Hamer, Hamer Environmental. Used with permission.

Removal of these trees by clearcutting is also a problem for the University of Washington. The University, like other state schools and institutions, receives financial benefit from certain state-forest timber sales. The recent timer sales in the Olympic Experimental State Forest are earmarked for UW...but UW scientist have contributed data to a major report that recommends emphasizing conservation efforts in this forest to achieve and maintain high-quality nesting habitat for the marbled murrelet. This includes the kind of clear-cutting DNR is proposing in a forest that should be managed using experimental silviculture methods that reflect the best-available science.

This latest timber sales show that DNR is still in the dark ages--using the equivalent of a club instead of a fine-edged blade to manage our state forests.

And thus, on March 31, Seattle Audubon, the Olympic Forest Coalition, and other conservation groups decided to sue the DNR over the proposed clearcuts in the Olympic Experimental State Forest. Today's Crosscut features an excellent article by Martha Baskin explaining the sale and the controversy and the plight of my favorite "chunky" seabird, the marbled murrelet.

Vanishing Seabirds...and Other Species

This spunky marbled murrelet chick makes appears on the upcoming reissue of Rare Bird by The Mountaineers Books. (Illustration by Paul Harris Jones). 

  Thanks to the Washington State Audubon list-serve,"The Case of the Vanishing Seabirds" "The Case of the Vanishing Seabird" arrived in my inbox this week. It's fascinating article from Crosscut.com about the marbled murrelet by award-winning science writer, Eric Scigliano. 

   I am grateful to Scigliano for his article, despite the fact that I was criticized for "neglecting" to address the collapsing Pacific coast fisheries in my book, Rare Bird: Pursuing the Mystery of the Marbled Murrelet. 

For the record, Rare Bird was published in the spring of 2005--my research being completed in 2004, shortly after the publication of the UC-Berkeley study, which suggested declining reproduction rates among marbled murrelets could be exacerbated by reduced prey availability, based on observations that murrelets were spending more time diving in pursuit of prey.

  I was aware of the UC-Berkeley study prior to its publication, but 1) it was just one study (among hundreds I read on the murrelet),2) the study was based on research conducted in central California (a fraction of the murrelet's range), and 3) I did not feel this newly documented potential threat deserved the kind of focus I devoted to the well-studied, range-wide threats to the murrelet: harvesting of the old-growth forests, catastrophic oil spills and chronic oil pollution, gill-net fishing, and increased nest predation.

Moreover, it was not until 2007 that the UC-Berkeley study on prey species was published--the study containing much of the information I Scigliano says I neglected in my 2005 book. This study--the real subject of Scigliano's article--presents evidence that murrelets have been "feeding down the food chain"--that the historically abundant and fatty prey such as sardines, anchovies, and squid have been overfished and that the murrelets are spending more and more time pursuing smaller and smaller (and less nutritious) fish, including even tiny krill. 

 Thanks to the Mountaineers Books, Rare Bird is being reissued in paperback this September and in my new epilogue I have addressed the increasingly complex suite of threats facing the marbled murrelet at sea. In addition to a reduction in quantity and quality of their prey species, murrelets continue to face the pernicious threat oil pollution and catastrophic oil spills, which are likely to increase in both the U.S. and Canada with the recent push in domestic oil production. Increases in offshore oil drilling, gas-platform development, shipping traffic (including oil tankers) in the coastal waters where murrelets are most abundant put the species at high risk. Gillnet fishing, though banned in California and in Oregon, is still practiced in Washington, Alaska, and British Columbia. (In B.C. alone, about 550 murrelets drown by entanglement each year as bycatch).

   Newly documented threats to murrelets at sea includes entrapment in derelict fishing gear (abandoned gillnets, purse seines, crab pots, and other fishing lines); warming ocean temperatures, changes in upwelling patterns, ocean acidification, sea-level rise, and other climate-change-associated phenomena affect the murrelet's prey species. The frequency of algal blooms and accumulated biotoxins (such as PCBs and PDBE) causes the deaths of seabirds through contaminated their prey species; some algal blooms produce compounds that reduce feather waterproofing and cause hypothermia. Increased levels of domoic acid cause neurological damage among seabirds. Increased aquaculture displaces murrelets from foraging habitat and degrades the spawning ground of their prey fish. Elevated underwater sound disturbance, such as pile driving and detonations has been shown to cause injuries and mortality among seabirds and also disrupt their foraging behavior. Even so-called green energy has a cost: murrelets risk collision with massive underwater wave and tidal turbines in their foraging grounds; onshore and offshore wind turbines add the risk of collision to airborne murrelets if they are placed in the murrelet’s sea-to-forest flight path.

  These threats affect not only marbled murrelets--a federally threatened species--but also many other seabirds. The marbled murrelets are considered an indicator species--they are sensitive to changes in the ocean where they spend 95% of their time and in the old-growth coastal forests where the breed.

  What they are and have been indicating for several decades is that these ecosystems are badly broken and that the future looks bleak for many species, including our own, as we spend more and more time extracting, harvesting, mining increasingly precious resources.

 Thanks to Eric Scigliano for his well-written fascinating article and the opportunity to discuss the important research on the marbled murrelet.