10 Acronyms to Save the Murrelet

What you see here is a marbled murrelet's one chance to maintain its population every year. This endangered seabird is the size of a robin but lays an egg the size of a chicken's egg on a wide, mossy branch high in the mature and old-growth coastal forests of the Pacific Northwest. 

The forests the murrelet requires for successful nesting are found on federal, state, and private lands. Despite being protected as a threatened species under federal and state Endangered Species Acts since the early 1990s, the marbled murrelet's population is crashing and our federal and state agencies seem incapable of making meaningful changes to the way they manage the forests. The logging of our old-growth forests has left us with less than five percent of our orginal forests. Yet the logging continues--stand by stand, patch by patch, tree by tree. The murrelet and other species continue to decline.

Acre by acre, stand by stand, tree by tree we are shrinking, lowering, degrading our forests. (photo by MM Ruth)

 In Washington state, where I live,  the Department of Natural Resources manages 2 million acres of state forest land for marbled murrelets. Some of these forests actually have trees occupied by nesting murrelets, others have potential nesting trees, others have trees that were once used for nesting but are no longer suitable. There if very little "old-growth" left and there seems to be little effort being made to grow our younger forests into old-growth. 

Right now, the Department of Natural Resources (DNR) is working on its Long Term Conservation Strategy for the marbled murrelet--a strategy that includes public involvement. This fall, there will be an opportunity for you--yes, you--to support conservation of the marbled murrelet and the forests it needs to survive. Don't let busyness or shyness hold you back. To make it easy for you to get in the loop, to understand the lingo (acronymese), and to get engaged, I have written a short primer called Acronym for Advocates. There are just ten to learn (you probably know some of them already).

Click here to read it--and pass it on! If you don't start now, it might be too late for the murrelet.

If you are thinking, "Hey, I'm not a bird person. Heck! I can't even pronounce marbled murrelet," you should read the primer anyway. The marbled murrelet is just one of hundreds of animals that depend on the mature and old-growth forest for survival. Whatever steps you take for the murrelet, you take for these other species as well. 

If you want to learn more about the development of the Long Term Conservation Strategy, click here.

The Five-Minute Cloud

Everday I watch a cloud for five minutes. Every minute I take a photograph of the same patch of sky where I first started tracking the cloud. Every day I understand a little more and a little less about what's going on .

On Wednesday the small puffy cumulus cloud I chose vanished completely in 3 minutes, leaving me with photos of a patch of blue sky. Because I wanted to post some nice cloud photos with this blog, I turned to antoher part of the sky for another five-minute cloud. 

This time, aimed my camera at a slightly denser cloud. It moved across the sky, it changed its shape, but I could track it over five minutes before it vanished behind the trees. Which made me wonder, when is a cloud a mass that retains its "self" as it moves across the sky and when is a cloud the result of what is happening in a particular patch of the sky at any given time. That is, does the cloud move along--being the same cloud as it moves--or does it form on the leading edge and dissipate on the traling edge so that it seems to be the same cloud. 

This meteorological conundrum reminds me of the problem of the soul, of the self, of knowing how much of "me" remains "me" over time every  cell in my body is constantlly being renewed (at different rates and not precisely every 7 years as the myth holds).  

The water that makes up clouds, like the cells that make up our bodies, are in a state of constant flux. Clouds are more dynamic and life out their lives in moments not years. The kind of change and the speed of change within a cloud is mind-boggling and only a fraction of it is visible to us with the naked eye. In addition to the visible water molecules that make up a cloud, there are invisible molecules of water vapor influencing the form of the cloud.
 

The "cloud" we think we are watching is both a product of the atmospheric conditions in a particular patch of sky (which bring it into existence) and also an entity which moves as a unit for a while until the atmospheric conditions change and transform the cloud and we no longer recognize it. 

At what point does the cloud we started watching become a different cloud? Well, at what point does a loved one's face age? 

All the time and never. Take a look at this cloud. I watched it for five minutes, but I didn't notice the changes it was undergoing until I looked at my photographs, taken one minute apart.. 

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Marbled Murrelet Habitat Logged

This shouldn't be happening in 20013. This tree is one of five old-growth trees and known nesting habitat of the marbled murrelet illegally felled in April by the U.S. Forest Service.

The trees stood in the six-site Sunshine Bar campground within the Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forest near Port Orford, Oregon.

The Forest Service did not have the required permit from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to fell or even trim one, let alone five trees, which were known nesting habitat for the endangered seabird, the marbled murrelet. What seems to have happened is that the removal of one "hazard" tree turned into a training exercise for fallers who needed practice cutting down big trees. Five trees were cut, one of them 238 feet tall. 

The Forest Service had little to say to explain itself--little that was credible anyway--when the U.S. Fish and Widlife Service found out about the logging in July. It's all hush-hush at these two agencies as they scramble to figure out why such a thing could happen. The marbled murrelet has been on the list of federally threatened and endangered species since 1992. You think the agencies could have figured this out by now. Perhaps they have, but just feel the need to play by the rules.

The illegal cutting was done last April, but the news just broke thanks to the  volunteer environmental group Friends of the Elk River, which reported the habitat removal to the  USFWS in July. The story was first reported  on August 11th. Read the story here.

The Friends of Elk River's founder, Jim Rogers, used the Freedom of Information Act to obtain a February 7 correspondence between Forest Service staff about the need for a refresher class for fallers who cut big trees. Sunshine Bar campground was mentioned as was the potential for a reaction from the Friends of Elk River. Clearly, the Forest Service (the Powers Ranger District specifically) knew it was in the wrong. Yet it proceeded, presumably hoping to not get caught. Which they did.

Who will be fined or fired? Whose wrist will be slapped? Who has egg on their face? 

I fear the answer is nobody. 

Reflecting on our path bent toward small- and large-scale destruction of the planet, author Derrick Jensen, writes this: 

It is not possible to survive in the long run by taking from your surroundings more than you give back, in other words, one cannot survive in the long run through the domination of one's surroundings. It is quite clearly in the interest of a bear to make sure tha the salmon return and that the berries ripen. They can eat them, but they cannot hyperexploit them and still expect to survive.

Misperceptions About Marbled Murrelets

  I was going to write about the clouds this morning, but was Google alerted this morning to a blog posting on the marbled murrelet.  Because the blog comes from a timber-industry group, the Washington Forest Protection Association, and because my book, Rare Bird: Pursuing the Mystery of the Marbled Murrelet,  is mentioned in the article, and because my book was used by the timber-industry blogger to support  the state's logging of  murrelet nesting habitat, I need to defend myself.  Again.

  Again, but differently. 

Marbled Murrelets         Photo by Glenn Bartley 2009

  Back in May, I was politely accused in a Crosscut article of having ignored the scientific research documenting a potential cause of the crashing marbled murrelet populations: depletion of the fish the murrelet's feed on. I politely and fully defended myself in this blog posting. The research I had not included in Rare Bird in 2005 when my book was first published was published after I had completed my writing. When I explained this to the author of the Crosscut article, Eric Scigliano, he politely ate a tiny bit of crow and added a note at the end of his online article mentioning that I was addressing these and other newly documented threats in the paperback edition of Rare Bird (just released by Mountaineers Books).

  Unfortunately, Scigliano's article remained online. Unfortunately, Ashley Bach, the Washington Forest Protection Association shill (sorry, but it's true) used the article to support the timber industry's popular new mantra: the murrelets problems are caused in the ocean, not by logging.  

  This is a convenient misperception. Convenient, facile, irresponsible, but sadly typical in the blame game being played at the expense of the marbled murrelet. Everyone is to blame for the murrelet's declining population--30% between 2001 and 2010 in Washington, Oregon, and California.

 While no one will dispute the oceans have become increasingly inhospitable to marbled murrelets (and all other marine life forms), no one who has read the science carefully (or at all) would dare dispute the well-documented fact that the primary cause of the murrelet’s decline is—and has always been—the removal of the murrelet’s nesting habitat (aka logging).

Here is how the Scientists put it : "Marbled Murrelet (Brachyramphus marmoratus) populations have declined over much of their range due primarily to current and historic loss and fragmentation of older-aged forest breeding habitat (USFWS 1992, Nelson and Hamer 1995, Burger 2002, McShane et al. 2004, Peery et al. 2004, Becker and Beissinger 2006, Piatt et al. 2006, Hébert and Golightly 2007, Lynch et al. 2009, Miller et al. 2012). "

To read how misperceptions beget misperceptions, take a look at the offending blog.