Three Keers for Science!

Thank you all Marbled Murreleteers who have been supporting a Science-based conservation strategy for this imperiled species in Washington state. It's been a long haul (at least two years of monthly meetings with the Board of Natural Resources), but today the board approved an expanded range of alternatives including one based on the 2008 Science Team report (officially known as Recommendations and Suporting Analysis of Conservation Opportunities for the Marbled Murrelet Long-Term Conservation Strategy, (Raphael, M.G., S.K. Nelson, P. Swedeen et al). 

Additionally, the board approved adding and amending other alternatives to create a total of six alternatives, one including expanded buffers (from 100 meters to 150 meters) around occupied nest sites. It is unlikely this expanded buffer will be approved, but it is important that buffers with meaningful and documented conservation value be analyzed for comparison to less buffer-generous alternatives.

This is a big victory! Thanks to all the individuals, staff of the Washington Forest Law Center, the Murrelet Survival Project and partners, and many Audubon chapters who have been providing public comment in person or in writing lo these many months. Every voice matters--truly. And we seem to have a board that listens.

Kyle Blum of Department of Natural Resources has done a remarkable job getting all the stakeholders to this point. It's amazing how complex, time-consuming, and fraught the conservation of such a little bird can become. The members of the BNR (with one notable and unnamed exception) should be praised for their engagement in the material presented and for their insightful questions all along the way. This is how we get to a win-win. Maybe even a win-win-win if we are lucky.

Up Next: More analysis by the DNR and USFWS. This is just the end of one phase and the beginning of the intense scrutinizing the environmental impacts of each alternative strategy. We are probably looking at summer/fall for a Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS) and opportunities for Murreleteers and others to provide comment. Adding and modifying alternatives will extend the time line to reach an approved Long-Term Conservation Strategy--but what's a few months given the interim strategy has been in place since 1997!

Calling All Murreleteers!

Public comments needed! On Tuesday, November 4, 2014, the Washington Department of Natural Resources (DNR) and U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service will be giving a presentation on the Long-term Conservation Strategy for the Marbled Murrelet.

The meeting is open to the public and is being held at the Natural Resource Building in Olympia at 9 a.m.

Please consider attending the meeting to urge the Board of Natural Resources to protect the buffers around marbled murrelet nesting habitat--these buffers are the next targets for logging. Sign up to speak, be a warm body, write to the BNR to express your concern. E-mail bnr@dnr.wa.gov

For more information on the meeting location, agenda, and to see the presentation Power Point, please go to the BNR website here. Scroll down past the 2011 calendar to the Board of Natural Resources Meeting Materials. Click on the link "Marbled Murrelet Long-Term Conservation Strategy Presentation" to download a pdf of the PowerPoint to be presented by the DNR.

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.

Marbled Murrelets and DNR Clear-cutting

“The opponents make an emotional issue that these are the last acres available when in fact they’re not."

These are the words of Peter Goldmark, Commissioner of Public Lands in Washington, as part of his response on KUOW to the conservation community's opposition to 200+ acres of clear-cutting he approved yesterday. Though the trees being logged are younger trees, they are  closely adjacent to known nesting trees and within a block of forest identified as some of the highest-quality marbled murrelet nesting habitat in in Washington State.

Goldmark is clearly out of touch with what "the opponents" are doing, with what is happening to the forests he manages, and is on his way to leaving a legacy of destruction and degradation or our state forest lands.

Firstly, opponents are not making this an emotional issue. We are not tree-hugging cry babies. We are asking the Department of Natural Resources, which manages 1.3 million acres of forest state trust land within the range of the marbled murrelet,  to heed the recommendations in the 2008 Science Team Report the DNR funded. Our lower lips do not even quiver when we ask DNR to do this.

I attended the Tuesday meeting of the Board of Natural Resource, which reviews all timber sales before (mostly) approving them. I spoke at this meeting as did several members of the conservation community, including the Olympic Forest Coalition, the Sierra Club, and the dedicated lawyers at the Washington Forest Law Center. These--and many other conservation organizations (aka "the opposition") are passionate about murrelets, and owls, and forests in the Evergreen State,

A juvenile marbled murrelet on its nest in the forest.     Photo courtesy Hamer Environmental.

But passionate is not the same as emotional. We ground our comments in the best-available science. Though we might express that we are fond of marbled murrelets, we do not sob or plead.

Nor do we tear up when we suggest that the DNR use a precautionary principle and complete its long-overdue Long-Term Conservation Strategy for the Marbled Murrelet before considering clear-cuts within large blocks of nesting habitat. This strategy is now in the works, but seems the DNR is not inclined to ensure it is a solidly science-based document, one that serves the trust beneficiaries and the wildlife.

Peter Goldmark's comment--that we believe the 200 acres of forest he and his board approved unanimously on Tuesday are the "last acres available" is not true. No one has said this.

Since logging began in earnest in Washington in the 1840s, we have lost 90% of our mature and old-growth forests. Are the "last acres" in the remnant 10% of these forests?

According to a 2012 report on the status of the Lower 48 marbled murrelets published by a team of highly respected murrelet biologists, Washington State has suffered the largest losses of nesting habitat between 1996 and 2006--more than Oregon, more than California. The 2012 Annual Report of the Washington Department of Fish & Wildlife states, "From 1996 to 2006, model-defined potential nesting habitat in Washington declined by an estimated 252, 600 ac out of 2.3 million ac (~11%). Most of this loss (>90%) was attributed to timber harvest."

The remaining 2.05 milion acres exist not in one contiguous block, but in fragments and patches on federal, state, and private land across western Washington. Marbled murrelet nesting habitat on these acres is being lost primarily through logging on non-federal lands. These fragmented forests are being further lost through windstorms, such as the one in December of 2007 that took out an estimated 2000 acres of occupied  habitat. It is being lost through disease and fire. We have lost 90% of our forests incrementally--through industrial-scale logging and through a thousand small cuts.

How many acres are the last acres? Do Peter Goldmark and the BNR know "in fact" where these last acres are? And will they stop rubber-stamping timber sales when we identify them? And do they mean "in fact" acres--as in more than one acre--so 2 acres? Or will they use the more technical definition of, say,  1.5 acres?

By this point, yes, we will all be sobbing and pleading.

Meanwhile, read or listen to the KUOW report here.