I can only tell you that the sporting community needs many more people like Ted Williams.

The irrational hatred of prairie dogs is particularly evident in the “varminters,” who speak reverently of “IVG” (instant visual gratification), experienced when their high-powered bullets make prairie dogs explode in “red mist.” “Red-Mist Society” T-shirts were popular in 1992 when, on another Audubon assignment, I observed a prairie dog shoot in South Dakota, where a bill was later introduced to rename the prairie dog the “prairie rat.” Rich Grable—better known as “Mr. Dog”—rested his .222 rifle on a foam pad taped to the base of his truck window and partly melted by barrel heat. Crack. He cut a target in half, sending hindquarters spinning. “Dead,” he declared, punching his dashboard-mounted kill counter. Babies, standing beside burrows with paws on their siblings’ shoulders, exploded in red mist. Once Grable killed five with a single shot. “Can ya hear it go plop?” he cackled. “Dissolved him! Ha. Ha.” Whenever a target dragged itself back into its burrow, minus major body parts, Mr. Dog would shout: “I done somethin’ to him.” According to his shooting journal, he’d killed 7,652 the previous year.

Thank you Ted Williams for exposing this garbage. You can read the entire article below.

Doggone!
Prairie dogs have been eliminated from more than 95 percent of their grassland habitat. And now they, and the vast and complicated ecosystems they sustain, face a new and deadly threat.
By Ted Williams/Photography by Matt Slaby

Americans haven’t figured out that pollution control is an expensive investment that prevents far greater expense. And with the fish, wildlife, recreational and health benefits that come with pollution control, it provides a huge return to society. We all want clean water but apparently not enough to pay for it.
Audubon Mar./Apr. 2009
In 1972 congress enacted the Clean Water Act, bold legislation that was going to make all waters of the United States fishable (safe for fish eating) and swimmable by 1983, then end all pollution by 1985.

The law was born of frustration. Pollution control by state wasn’t working. Municipalities were resisting modernizing their sewage-treatment plants, arguing that major investment was pointless until industrial sources were controlled. And industry argued that sewage pollution would render such expenditure a waste. In 1969 at least 41 million fish (and doubtless many more that were never seen) died in a record number of fish kills. The same year Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River caught fire, providing Randy Newman with the lyrics to his memorable song “Burn On.” About 65 percent of the waters in the contiguous states were neither fishable nor swimmable.

The Clean Water Act authorized the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to set limits on pollution by awarding discharge “permits.” Under the “polluter pays” concept, industry was required to pick up the tab for treating its waste, but municipalities got huge grants to upgrade sewage plants from primary treatment (removing solids) to secondary (substantially reducing biological content).

Few Americans—least of all Congress, which passed the Clean Water Act over President Richard Nixon’s veto—understood water pollution in 1972, hence the law’s naive goals and, even after amendments in 1977, 1981, and 1987, its thoroughly inadequate prescriptions for “non-point sources” such as runoff from streets, animal feedlots, and cropland. Still, federal regulation and appropriations got things moving. For something like two and a half decades, successes were dramatic. The Cuyahoga, for example, ceased being a fire hazard and instead became a recreational attraction, even providing spawning and nursery habitat for steelhead trout. But sometime around the mid- or maybe late 1990s, national progress ceased. Today about 45 percent of our waters flunk federal quality standards, and as our population increases and development continues, we’re backsliding.

There is no better case study of what the Clean Water Act has and hasn’t done than the fluctuating fortunes of the Blackstone River, which rises under the streets of Worcester, Massachusetts, and runs 46 miles to Rhode Island’s Narragansett Bay. Because its fast current gave birth to America’s industrial revolution it became the nation’s first and worst polluted river. In 1986 Congress designated most of the watershed a national heritage corridor to be administered with federal appropriations by a commission comprised of elected officials and representatives from the National Park Service, state agencies, and communities. Since then the John H. Chafee Blackstone River Valley National Heritage Corridor, as it is ponderously called, has been effectively protecting and restoring open space, historic buildings, and other cultural and environmental resources. In 1998, after frenetic lobbying by the Massachusetts and Rhode Island congressional delegations, President Bill Clinton named the Blackstone one of 14 American Heritage Rivers.

In my November-December 1995 “Incite” column—basically a response to the House Republicans’ effort to disappear the Clean Water Act—I noted that the cleanup of the Blackstone River “isn’t finished.” But with our title, “The Blackstone Now Runs Blue,” we may have gotten a bit carried away with the law’s early success. When the sun is out and you’re not standing in or floating on the river, it looks blue. But blue doesn’t mean healthy. The Blackstone was sick in 1995, and because of increased urban runoff and inadequate sewage treatment, it’s just as sick today.

Still, the long-term recovery of this aquatic ecosystem has been astonishing. When my wife and I settled beside the river in 1970, one species of fish, the white sucker, survived in the main stem. That year our insurance agent’s dog frolicked in the Blackstone and died as a result; since 1995 our dogs have frolicked in it and only smelled worse (or occasionally, depending on previous activities, better). Where we had encountered only sludge worms in the 1970s and ’80s, we’ve been seeing crayfish and turtles since the mid-1990s. Today the main stem sustains 19 species of nonmigratory fish, and because sea-run species such as blueback herring, alewives, and American shad can finally spawn again, fish ladders are going in at the lower four dams.

But like so many other urban and suburban rivers across America, the Blackstone isn’t anywhere near swimmable, and while it offers superb angling, especially in its lower sections after it has been aerated by myriad waterfalls, you wouldn’t want to eat a resident Blackstone River fish.

I was reminded of this fact on a warm, damp morning this past November as I inhaled the ammonia fumes wafting from the outfall of the Upper Blackstone sewage treatment plant, which serves greater Worcester. Standing beside me on the Blackstone River Bikeway (a Heritage Corridor project that will connect Worcester with Providence, Rhode Island) was the leading authority on the river and its most tireless advocate: Donna Williams, the Massachusetts Audubon Society’s conservation advocacy coordinator, president of the 11-group Blackstone River Coalition, and vice chair of the Corridor Commission. Williams, a lifelong valley resident, has been probably my most reliable and certainly most accessible source on water pollution for most of the 39 years we’ve been married.

“Look at all the macrophytes,” she declared, pointing to the treatment-plant effluent entering the river to our left.

“Remind me what those are,” I said. She explained that they’re rooted aquatic weeds, that they shouldn’t be here, and that they’re a symptom of gross manmade fertilization. The main fertilizers (nutrients) issuing from this plant and similar facilities across the nation are phosphorous and nitrogen, and they kill aquatic ecosystems in the way that a massive injection of adrenaline would kill a human. The nutrient cycle slams into fast-forward, vegetation proliferates, and bacteria break it down, exhausting oxygen. In freshwater, phosphorous does most of the damage; in saltwater, it’s nitrogen. The bilious, undulating mat extended from the outfall as far downriver as we could see, but above the outfall the river bottom was bare gravel.

Sewage treatment plants have done a decent job controlling solids, fecal coliform bacteria, viruses, and heavy metals. But removing phosphorous and nitrogen requires expensive new equipment. When the EPA was doling out lavish construction grants, municipalities couldn’t wait to renovate their plants. But that enthusiasm dried up in the late 1980s along with Congressional appropriations. “Worcester is no worse than lots of cities,” Williams told me. With that, she drove me to her office at Massachusetts Audubon’s Broad Meadow Brook Wildlife Sanctuary in Worcester and turned me loose on her voluminous files, from which I unearthed a chronology of the Clean Water Act’s fizzle on the Blackstone microcosm.

In 1991 the EPA had issued Worcester’s treatment plant a pollution permit that didn’t cover nutrients. The slightly stricter permit, due in 1997, wasn’t issued until 1999, at which point the city appealed it. After three years of negotiating and compromising, the EPA issued a modified version. Although this gave the plant a continued free pass on nitrogen, it did require a modest cap on phosphorous of .75 milligrams per liter, but not until 2009.

In 2008—even as the environmental community scolded the Bush administration for transmogrifying bizarre Supreme Court decisions into an end run around the Clean Water Act—Bob Varney, administrator of the EPA’s New England office, stood tall for fish and wildlife, issuing the Worcester plant yet another permit that required a cut in phosphorous to .1 milligrams per liter and, for the first time, imposed a nitrogen limit (5 milligrams per liter). “There’s no deadline, because the city is appealing this permit, too,” Williams said. “I wouldn’t expect this second set of upgrades to be online before 2020.”

For outraged city fathers, the preferred date is never. “It’s totally illogical to impose more stringent limits when we are only halfway through the [first] upgrade,” the public works commissioner, Bob Moylan, told the Worcester Telegram and Gazette, neglecting to point out that the reason they were only halfway through the first upgrade was because they’d fought it. And city manager Michael O’Brien chimed in with: “Enough is enough. This cannot be passed on to the Worcester taxpayer.” Why not? one might ask. The average Massachusetts household pays $440 a year for sewer services, while the average Worcester household pays $381.

As Moylan correctly observes in prefacing long “but” clauses, “everyone wants clean water.” It’s just that in Worcester, as in many cities and towns across America, they don’t want it enough to pay for it. And what’s truly unfair is that who pays the costs of this misfeasance are downstream communities like greater Providence—which has embraced Clean Water Act caps on nitrogen at its two sewage treatment plants and has just completed a $400 million system to catch and treat stormwater runoff.

Also paying for Worcester’s dereliction is Narragansett Bay. It takes the tide almost two weeks to flush the 25-mile-long, 10-mile-wide bay, so nitrogen wreaks havoc in the upper section that otherwise would be the most productive. Salt marshes are suffering. Eelgrass, important to fish and wildlife, has declined from perhaps 16,000 acres before 1930 to roughly 300 acres. Smelt, shad, herring, flounder, alewives, and eels have been decimated, and die-offs of shellfish, crabs, and fish have become a summer tradition. This past August, for example, the upper bay rippled with juvenile flounder vainly trying to leap out of the deoxygenated dead zone created by nitrogen. Soon their rotting carcasses lined the scum-crusted shore.

What’s more, climate change is magnifying the pollution woes of rivers like the Blackstone and estuaries like Narragansett Bay. Precipitation is more frequent and severe, and runoff has increased with the steady spread of asphalt and cement. In the Upper Blackstone watershed, 25-year floods now send as much polluted water downriver as 100-year floods used to. Global warming is also speeding the rate at which bacteria deplete dissolved oxygen, and rising sea level is creating more saltwater intrusion—a catastrophe for wetlands, estuaries, and the rich life they sustain. During the past 50 years the average temperature of Narragansett Bay has increased four degrees. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but it’s huge if you’re a gill breather.

Like virtually all rivers, the Blackstone is fed by wetlands and small streams, some of which appear “isolated” and/or dry up in summer. No one even vaguely familiar with flooding and groundwater flow would contend that any are truly isolated from the river. And the fact that some dry up makes them more—not less—important to wildlife. Consider the vernal pool in Sutton, Massachusetts, where one spring afternoon Donna Williams showed me wood frogs, spotted salamanders, and a blizzard of fairy shrimp. The frogs, salamanders, and shrimp survive because fish, which otherwise would eat them, can’t. Consider also my secret fishing spot in central Massachusetts, a tiny rill I call Hyla Brook. You won’t find much of it in high summer because, as Robert Frost wrote of his Hyla Brook, “Its bed is left a faded paper sheet/ Of dead leaves stuck together by the heat/ A brook to none but who remember long . . .” But with fall rains, gaudy native trout ease up into Hyla Brook to spawn, and it provides them refuge when winter spates and snowmelt send silt and road salt into the perennial Blackstone tributary that collects it.

These types of habitats—half of all stream miles in the contiguous states and about 20 million acres of wetlands—were placed in jeopardy not by the 2001 Supreme Court decision known as SWANCC (for the Solid Waste Agency of Northern Cook County, which sought to discharge into Illinois wetlands) but by the Bush administration’s intentional misreading of that decision. The court had merely ruled that a nonnavigable water completely in one state could not be protected by the Clean Water Act simply because migratory birds used it.

But there were other reasons the feds could have protected waters that appear to be isolated. “Those reasons,” reports Bob Perciasepe, National Audubon’s chief operating officer, “include holding of floodwater that can cause interstate damage; holding of pollutants that can cause interstate damage; harboring of endangered species, which have federal jurisdiction; even the hydrologic cycle [interstate transfer of water via evaporation, precipitation, and ground flow].” During President Clinton’s first term, when Perciasepe served as the EPA’s assistant administrator for water, he and his staff worked from the policy memo for the migratory-bird litmus test. “We only chose that one,” he says, “because it was simple and easy to establish.”

Obviously, sewage pumped from honey trucks into the dry bed of Hyla Brook would find its way to the Blackstone with the first big rain. No sane, sober person who wasn’t fronting for special interests would contend that the framers of the Clean Water Act intended to exempt polluters who foul streams or wetlands that, for part or all of the year, feed navigable waters. But with its 2003 “guidance” document, the Bush administration essentially instructed EPA and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers enforcement personnel to do exactly this.

The 2006 Supreme Court decision known as Rapanos—involving two Michigan developers who sought to build shopping malls on wetlands—opened the door for more mischief. Four justices contended that the Clean Water Act didn’t apply unless a wetland abutted a nonnavigable water body that fed a navigable one; four disagreed; and one divined that there needed to be a “significant nexus” (whatever that meant) between wetland and water body. So by court precedent, the significant-nexus rule became primary, and the Corps was left to apply it on a case-by-case basis. Today, with no intelligible guidance, the rule festers in fog, and developers have seized it as an excuse to plunder. In an internal memo, leaked to Greenpeace, Granta Nakayama, the EPA’s assistant administrator for enforcement and compliance assurance, reported that between July 2006 and December 2007 his agency refused to enforce the Clean Water Act against apparent violators 304 times “because of jurisdictional uncertainty” allegedly created by Rapanos.

As Perciasepe puts it, “A perfect storm of government ambivalence, aggressive polluter activism, and a split Supreme Court have subverted the original intent of the Clean Water Act.” Clearly Congress needs to insulate from banal and/or malicious misinterpretation its obvious aim of controlling all pollution whether or not waters delivering that pollution can float a boat. The Clean Water Restoration Act, sponsored by Representative James Oberstar (D-MN) and Senator Russ Feingold (D-WI), would have done this by specifically including isolated wetlands, headwaters, vernal pools, intermittent and ephemeral streams, and—even though the original text never states or implies that cleanup should be limited to navigable waters—by deleting the word navigable.

This reform, filed and spiked every session since 2003, did no better when the Democrats took control of Congress. “The bill couldn’t even get a hearing when the Republicans had the majority,” explains Jan Goldman-Carter, a National Wildlife Federation attorney for wetlands and water. “This last session [2007 and 2008] we were finally able to engage in the debate, but because we were having success in getting hearings and the attention of Congress, the Farm Bureau and the homebuilders came out of the woodwork. We feel pretty good about our ability to move the bill in the next [111th] Congress.” She went on to note that during the campaign, Barack Obama, through his spokespeople, pledged support for such legislation and that the bill will save money by reducing all the confusion and resulting workload generated by the Bush guidance.

On the Blackstone River Bikeway, about a mile upstream from the treatment plant, I noticed trash festooning branches at least six feet above the flow. Massachusetts Audubon’s Williams explained that it had been hung there by the October 2005 flood that overwhelmed the facility to the point that 120 million gallons of raw effluent spilled into the river. Aging plants like Worcester’s can’t handle big slugs of stormwater when it overflows into ancient, porous sewage pipes. But the 1987 amendments to the Clean Water Act provide only marginal regulations for urban runoff.

And there are no effective regulations for agricultural runoff. Ethanol production—a publicly financed net energy loss perpetrated by agribusiness (see “Drunk on Ethanol,” July-August 2004)—is converting wildlife habitat to corn, which requires more fertilizers and pesticides and creates more soil erosion than any other crop. Just as Worcester’s inadequately treated sewage helps create a dead zone in Narragansett Bay, runoff from the Corn Belt helps create one in the Gulf of Mexico. This past July the Gulf’s dead zone was the second biggest ever recorded, covering 5.1 million acres.

“The politics of agriculture are baffling,” comments Nancy Stoner, a water program director for the Natural Resources Defense Council. “There are lots of farmers who are good stewards and many good organizations representing them, but the Farm Bureau Federation reduces them to their lowest common denominator. Most pollution controls can easily be incorporated into farm practices without a loss of revenue. It’s very simple stuff—spring fertilization [so more nutrients will be taken up by crops instead of needlessly washing into water bodies during fall and winter], stream buffers, fencing cows out of streams. None of this is required, because the Farm Bureau has blocked it for decades. It has even prevented regulation of factory farms, which produce about three times as much [waste] pollution as humans. It’s as if we’re in a third-world country.”

Under the 1987 Clean Water Act amendments, the EPA is requiring communities to implement modest bylaws to reduce stormwater. But there’s stiff resistance. My town of Grafton, Massachusetts, is typical. It missed its May 2008 deadline to consider a bylaw, and development interests stayed at the October town meeting until 11:45 p.m. to vote it down. Ironically, good stormwater bylaws would save developers money. Curbing, for example, should be eliminated so water can flow into low, vegetated swales instead of storm drains. Cul-de-sac islands should be low and vegetated, the roads one-lane and one-way to reduce runoff. Driveways should be short and narrow. Houses should be clustered, open space maximized. And there is no reason, financial or otherwise, not to require pervious with crushed stone, concrete blocks, or any of the brands of porous cement and asphalt.

But the public shouldn’t expect regulations to take care of everything. Home-owners can do a great deal on their own. For example, one inch of rain sends 832 gallons off the roof of the average American house. Instead of shunting that water down the storm-drain system to foul the nearest stream, you can redirect it to your lawn, woodlot, or garden. Cars should be washed on lawns, not driveways. Septic systems should be maintained, phosphate-free soap used in dishwashers, lawn fertilizers and pesticides reduced or eliminated, dogs encouraged to do their business on vegetated surfaces.

In addition to providing clean water, these kinds of commonsense reforms invigorate the economy. Audubon and 16 other environmental organizations have sent the Obama team a list of 80 projects and proposals for investing in water and other resources that could create 3.6 million jobs. Floods, for example, cause about $5 billion of damage each year. But they can be controlled and water simultaneously cleansed by protecting and restoring floodplains and wetlands that filter and store water. New York City has saved $6 billion by preserving land around its reservoirs. By shunting stormwater into wetlands and woods, Indianapolis is saving about $300 million. And by returning the Napa River to its natural, wetland-bound channel, the city of Napa, California, annually prevents $26 million in flood damage. The Alliance for Water Efficiency estimates that investing $10 billion in such water conservation methods as replacing leaking pipes, using runoff for irrigation, and installing efficient toilets, showers, and washing machines would boost U.S. gross domestic product by as much as $15 billion.

After I’d raided Donna Williams’s files, she showed me Massachusetts Audubon’s new rain garden, which collects roof runoff. Proliferating in the lowest parts were such water-tolerant species as highbush blueberry, sweet pepperbush, winterberry holly, turtlehead, swamp milkweed, and joe-pye weed. Higher, drier sections grew purple coneflower, bee balm, lowbush blueberry, fall-blooming aster, black-eyed Susan, deutzia, yarrow, sea oats, and redstem dogwood.

Here was a treatment plant anyone can build in a day, one that prevents pollution even as it produces beautiful, native flowers and berries relished by birds. Suddenly I felt the return of the appetite I’d lost as I stood in the ammonia-scented breeze, staring down at the bilious, undulating mat of macrophytes. And I took my wife to lunch.

WHAT YOU CAN DO
Urge your lawmakers to support the Clean Water Restoration Act. For information on how to join the fight for clean water, visit Audubon’s clean water campaign. To learn how you can reduce stormwater flowing into drains, download A Homeowner’s Guide to Protecting Water Quality in the Blackstone River Watershed.

Owl Wars II by Ted Williams

Last August Audubon Washington director Nina Carter and I hired Robert Pearson of Packwood, Washington—a.k.a. “Hooter Bob”—to guide us on a spotted owl search high in the Gifford Pinchot National Forest’s Cowlitz Valley Ranger District. With us were Shawn Cantrell, director of the Seattle Audubon Society; Denis DeSilvis, a Seattle Audubon volunteer; and Paul Bannick, noted wildlife photographer and director of development for Conservation Northwest.

Hooter Bob speaks spotted owl without a trace of accent, having studied the language from cassettes played endlessly on his truck’s tape deck. He had been on a fire crew when, in 1991, the U.S. Forest Service asked him to help map spotted owl habitat. Since then he has honed survey protocols, finding new nest sites.

Because the biggest trees in the Pacific Northwest grow in the low-lying forests, most have been clearcut and planted to Douglas fir monoculture, thereby destroying the habitat of spotted owls and other wildlife. Only about 20 percent of the old growth remains, predominantly on Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management (BLM) lands in Washington, Oregon, and California, so we had to drive to a high ridge. Above us silver fir marched up the slope. To our southeast, across the wide, emerald-green valley, Mount Adams arched into the cloudless sky, its snowfields and glacier gleaming. The woods here aren’t classic old growth, but there are plenty of older trees, mostly Douglas fir, hemlock, western red cedar, slide alder, and red alder. Northern spotted owls are highly dependent on cavities for nest sites, and because they’re sensitive to temperature fluctuations, they need a high canopy so they can move to lower branches when it’s hot and to high ones when it’s cold (because warm air rises).

When spotted owls were found inhabiting much younger second growth, mostly in California, the timber industry made a lot of noise about how the old-growth forests that remain supposedly aren’t necessary to keep the species on the planet. But the preeminent spotted owl scientist, Eric Forsman of the Forest Service’s Pacific Northwest Research Station in Corvallis, Oregon, explains that the picture isn’t that simple: “As you go south you find spotted owls in some fairly young forests—40, 50, 60 years old. But those forests have lots of redwoods sprouting from stumps. In these lower elevations those redwoods grow very quickly; they might be four feet in diameter; and they develop layered, diverse structure, whereas in the north that multi-layered structure takes much longer to come back. Spotted owls need these layers, and they need big trees with nesting cavities. In Oregon and Washington trees usually don’t get these cavities before they’re 150 years old. And in the south there are other kinds of nest structures—platforms of dead sticks and debris, for instance.”

A feature common to older forests, and vital to the owl’s rodent prey base, is a healthy, diverse understory. Our party hiked through one of wild huckleberry, rattlesnake plantain, Oregon grape, coralroot, ocean spray, Indian paintbrush, thistle, fireweed, tiger lily, twin flower, strawberry, wood rose, and bear grass. For almost an hour we listened, and marveled, at Hooter Bob’s mellow whoop wu-hu hoo rendition of the male spotted owl’s vocalization. When I heard him on the slope above us I also marveled at his agility, because only a minute earlier he’d been well downslope. Then I turned and saw him climbing toward us. He’d been answered.

We clawed our way up the ridge, Carter carrying the most important tool used by owl researchers: pet-store mice. When Hooter Bob judged we were more or less under the owl, Carter reached into the cage, picked up a mouse by the tail, and deposited it on a log, where it trustingly preened. To effectively converse with northern spotted owls you need major training, but anyone, even an Audubon columnist, can talk mouse. I call in eastern owls, not by hooting but by sucking air through my front teeth and lower lip. “Squeak,” ordered Hooter Bob. Before I could start my second squeak the owl dropped soundlessly from his invisible perch, nearly making contact with my right shoulder, snatched up the mouse, and sailed off through the dark canopy. This close encounter with the most revered, most reviled, and most intensely studied raptor on earth astonished me more than it did Audubon’s editor-in-chief when I excitedly reported it to him. He informed me that spotted owls are naturally curious, responding to sounds like slamming car doors; that they may not fear humans because they rarely see them; and that, after a biologist put a mouse on it, he’d had one land on his head.

Over the next two hours we fed our owl four more mice, and he posed cooperatively for Bannick’s camera. He closely resembled the barred owls that haunt my Yankee woods—the same earless, rounded facial disk and obsidian eyes, but slightly smaller and darker, with white spots and streaks. The fact that he hadn’t swallowed or cached any of the mice was a good sign, explained Hooter Bob. It probably meant his mate was still with him; the fact that there was no vocal response from the juvenile, which Hooter Bob had been monitoring, or from the female (which usually answers the male with a co-weeep) probably meant both were well fed.

As pumped as I was, I couldn’t shake the feeling that we’d had a visitation from the ghost of old-growth past.

Who won the Spotted-owl War?” asked environmental writer William Dietrich in the Winter 2003 Forest Magazine.“Democracy.”

It sure seemed that way back then. In 1990, after a prolonged and vicious battle between the timber industry and wildlife advocates, the Seattle Audubon Society had prevailed in a federal court case that forced the Fish and Wildlife Service to list the spotted owl as threatened. Then, in 1994—after even nastier conflict—the Clinton administration released its Northwest Forest Plan, a de facto recovery plan for the spotted owl. This protected from unsustainable logging 24.5 million acres in Oregon, Washington, and California, not just for spotted owls but for salmon, steelhead trout, marbled murrelets, and at least 600 other species that depend on old-growth forests. The environmental community declared victory in the spotted owl war and turned to other crusades.

Meanwhile, spotted owls continued on their toboggan run to oblivion. In 2003 an interagency analysis of all data showed an annual, decade-long decline of 3.7 percent throughout the Pacific Northwest. In Washington, where the annual decline was 7.1 percent, the population had been halved. BLM wildlife biologist Joe Lint tells me that the next analysis, for which he is the funding coordinator, won’t be published until 2009 because it takes five years to accumulate enough data to make such analyses meaningful. Still, he reports a steady reduction in pair counts. At this writing an optimistic population estimate might be 100 pairs for British Columbia, 1,200 for Oregon, 560 for northern California, and 500 for Washington. On top of this a federal genetic analysis released last July reveals that inbreeding threatens to spiral surviving northern spotted owls into an “extinction vortex.”

So did the Northwest Forest Plan bomb? No, the Bush administration disabled it before it had a chance to succeed. The plan’s architects understood that the owl would continue to decline for years, stabilize, then rebound over at least a century of forest recovery. The plan, requiring enormous political courage, was a major victory for good science and arguably the crowning environmental achievement of the Clinton administration. “It’s the nation’s only multi-state ecosystem-management plan,” comments Kristen Boyles, Seattle-based attorney for Earthjustice, a public-interest environmental law firm. “It was the best that could have been done at the time. And I still think it’s the best idea we’ve got out there.”

Forest ecologist Dominick DellaSala, a former member of the spotted owl recovery team and director of the National Center for Conservation Science and Policy in Ashland, Oregon, offers this: “The scientific consensus is that the plan has met most of its obligations with respect to ecosystem management. The critics like to claim that despite the plan the owl is declining and, therefore, we don’t need to protect old growth. First, the plan was a strategy with an end game that would take decades to achieve—a restored, interconnected network of old forest reserves. When it went into place in 1994 about 40 percent of the [future] ‘late successional reserves’ [second growth] were actually clearcuts in various stages of recovery. The plan assumed it would take 50 to 100 years for these forests to acquire some old-growth characteristics, and we’re only 15 years into that process. What’s more, in 13 locations where birds are monitored, the rate of decline has been about half that on non-federal lands.”

But in 2001 Mark Rey—the former timber-industry lobbyist chosen to run the Forest Service—got together with his former employers who wanted to triple the cut in Northwest forests. There followed a series of “sue-and-settle” lawsuits in which industry sued the government and the Justice Department declined to defend. As part of the “settlements” the administration agreed to redesignate the owl’s critical habitat. Its final determination, published on August 12, 2008, slashes critical habitat by 23 percent, sacrificing 1.6 million acres. The scientific community was appalled. “I don’t understand why you would do that if you know a species is threatened,” remarks the Forest Service’s Eric Forsman.

In the same sweetheart deal with the timber industry, the Bush administration agreed to prepare a new review of the spotted owl’s status. Instead of giving the job to federal biologists paid by the public to do this kind of work and who might have come up with facts the administration didn’t want the public to know, it hired a private firm (the Sustainable Ecosystems Institute) with close financial ties to the timber industry. But the new “independent review” turned out to be, well, independent. The panel of scientists assembled by the Sustainable Ecosystems Institute confirmed what everyone even moderately informed about northern spotted owls already knew—that the owl was in desperate trouble and that if the Northwest Forest Plan wasn’t reinstated, the species could be on the way out.

Then, in April 2006, threatened by legal action from both industry and environmental groups, the administration agreed to hatch a recovery plan. Accordingly, the Fish and Wildlife Service selected a multi-stakeholder recovery team. “This was a balanced group,” declares Seattle Audubon’s Shawn Cantrell. “In addition to two environmentalists [the National Center for Conservation Science and Policy’s DellaSala and Tim Cullinan, then a biologist with Audubon Washington], it included representatives from the timber industry, and federal, state, and private forest managers. It wasn’t just a bunch of owl huggers.”

After collecting and collating the best science available the team came up with some sensible recommendations, and in September 2006 it delivered a draft recovery plan to the Fish and Wildlife Service. But the service declined to send it out for peer review, instead announcing that the draft would be vetted by a “Washington [D.C.] oversight committee” consisting of high brass from the departments of Interior and Agriculture, including one Julie MacDonald, the civil engineer who had been appointed Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Interior for Fish, Wildlife and Parks and who was under investigation for gross abuse of power. The following April, MacDonald resigned after the Inspector General confirmed she had “been heavily involved with editing, commenting on, and reshaping the Endangered Species Program’s scientific reports” and that she had “disclosed nonpublic information to private sector sources” inconvenienced by the Endangered Species Act.

The oversight committee proceeded to transmogrify the draft into a pass for the kind of predatory logging that had led to the owl’s listing. “The recovery team worked really hard for more than a year to get the plan right,” says Nina Carter. “And the oversight committee just ripped it up. It came back an absolute mess.”

Eventually the Fish and Wildlife Service relented and sent the rewrite out for peer review, which it flunked spectacularly—this despite the fact that the agency had funded five of the six reviewers. In addition to getting slammed in peer review, the new version elicited 75,800 mostly negative comments. A letter to Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne from 113 of the nation’s top scientists complained that the oversight committee had “ignored” science. All this was disregarded by the administration, which in May 2008 issued a final recovery plan with only marginal improvements.

“This [final] plan threatens spotted owls, marbled murrelets, endangered salmon runs, and clean water supplies across the region,” announced Steve Holmer of the American Bird Conservancy in a press release. Earthjustice, a nonprofit environmental law firm, called the plan “a parting gift from the Bush administration to its timber friends.”

The administration’s routine sabotage of science and reflexive sacrifice of fish and wildlife to the appetites of extractive industry is hardly breaking news. But getting rid of the Bushies doesn’t mean we get rid of their spotted owl plan and critical habitat designation. Barack Obama can’t just disappear them. Earthjustice’s Boyles explains why: “They’ve been promulgated as final rules with notice and public comment. They’d have to go through that process again. Undoing it would still take a while. That’s the problem with having things go forward to a final rule—an administration can’t cut corners even when it wants to do the right thing.”

Even grimmer is the situation on state and private forestland, originally far better owl habitat than the federal forests, most of which the industry didn’t want because they’re at high elevations and therefore not great for growing anything, owls included. Non-federal forests have been heavily logged, and heavy cutting continues. Remarkably, however, a few birds hang on in uncut patches.

“State regs are all but nonexistent in Oregon,” reports DellaSala. And he’s distrustful of habitat conservation plans (HCPs)—a tool by which landowners can be exempted from prosecution for “take” of a listed species if they implement habitat improvements, maintenance, and/or protections prescribed by the Fish and Wildlife Service. “Some spotted owl scientists call HCPs ‘places where owls go to die,’ ” he says. “The recovery plan recommends streamlining the HCP application process, so we could see even more HCPs.”

The inbreeding accelerating the spotted owl’s decline results from the big clearcuts that, especially, scar state and private land and which spotted owls won’t cross or will die trying. “When the state and federal plans came out,” says Carter, “miraculously, there were said to be no owls on Weyerhaeuser land, a huge chunk in southwest Washington that would be a natural migratory corridor connecting birds in the Cascades to birds in the Olympic Peninsula.”

But a quick and by no means complete survey of this supposedly owl-free habitat by the Seattle and Kittitas Audubon chapters turned up four owls in separate locations where they had previously been known to nest. The chapters sued the state and Weyerhaeuser for a “take” violation of the Endangered Species Act and in August 2007 obtained a preliminary injunction on logging. Eleven months later the litigants reached a settlement by which representatives from the timber industry, the environmental community, and the state will attempt to come up with new regulations for the management of owl habitat on private and public land. Carter will be a member of this working group.

Audubon Washington has found many loopholes in state regulations and is working to get them closed. For example, private landowners have to leave 70 acres around active nest trees. But if they can demonstrate that the owls have not been seen or heard for three years, they get to hack out everything, including the nest tree. At this writing Audubon has temporarily plugged the loophole but only with a moratorium that will have expired by the time you read this.

It’s always been easy not to see owls, and it may be getting easier not to hear them, because spotted owls appear to be increasingly reluctant to answer human hoots. Presumably, they don’t want to give away their positions to the barred owls that have recently invaded their range from the East and that kill them and usurp their prey and nesting sites. The destruction of the old-growth forests has given a tremendous advantage to barred owls, which do fine in clearcuts.

For the timber industry the barred owl has been the bluebird of happiness, allowing it to argue that spotted owls are doomed with or without old-growth protections. Barred owls do appear to be having a major impact. The main body of the invasion was from British Columbia, which may explain why spotted owls are declining in Washington almost twice as fast as in Oregon and California. But habitat destruction, of which the barred owl irruption is a function, has been even more hurtful. “It’s pretty typical for a lot of endangered species to be facing multiple threats,” says DellaSala. “And some of those threats act synergistically; you’re kicking the victim when it’s down.”

Barred owl control, touted by the timber industry as a substitute for habitat protection and now under consideration by the Fish and Wildlife Service, is a fool’s errand. First, barred owls are strikingly similar in appearance to spotted owls (and so closely related that they sometimes hybridize with them). So a federal barred owl control effort might encourage people to knock off any and all black-eyed, earless owls. Second, a control program would almost certainly fail. Eric Forsman says this: “Killing a few barred owls is one thing. Systematic, ongoing control over spotted owl range is another. Places like the Olympic Peninsula are very rugged and mountainous, with no roads. I think it would be just about impossible to control barred owls.”

Right now many private and state land managers in the Northwest fear spotted owls because, even with the option of HCPs, hosting the bird can mean red tape and at least some regulation. But if the recovery plan and critical habitat designation for federal lands stand, the burden on private land will become truly onerous. “In that case,” declares Kristen Boyles, “I think everybody with an HCP should be worried, because they won’t have the federal government doing what it’s been doing for more than 10 years. Private and state lands will have to take up a lot of the slack.”

For now, the future of the spotted owl and the vast ecosystem that sustains it rests with the Obama administration. First, there are the difficult and lengthy tasks of restoring science to the recovery plan and redesignating critical habitat. Then the Justice Department will have to aggressively defend against timber-industry lawsuits such as the one filed in September 2008 by the American Forest Resources Council seeking an even bigger cut in critical habitat than the Bush administration gave it. There are alternatives. One is uplisting the spotted owl from threatened to endangered—a disaster for the industry and certain to foment new and prolonged conflict.

Another is a federal law that once and for all ends the spotted owl wars by permanently protecting large pieces of habitat. Representative Peter DeFazio (D-OR) and Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) are working on legislation that could do this.

Now that we’re down to our last 20 percent of old-growth owl woods, the only hope for all people and animals that depend on these healthy forests, even the timber industry, is to slow the cut and regrow the trees. We can’t lose the spotted owl without losing a whole lot more. It is just one of many indicator species, and it has done a superb job of showing us what we’ve done wrong. But we also need to save the spotted owl for itself—not because it is an indicator species, not even because it is beautiful and unique, not because it is anything, only because it is.

WHAT YOU CAN DO
Tell your lawmakers to support federal legislation to protect old-growth forests of the Pacific Northwest. There are a number of groups that offer information on the spotted owl situation. Consult the Audubon WatchList, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the National Center for Conservation Science & Policy.