Our research shows that spotted owls can thrive with mixed-severity fire, but logging in owl habitat for fire concerns may accelerate their extinction.

A do-loop occurs when you repeat a set of tasks an indefinite number of times until something is ostensibly resolved. In other words, it’s doing the same thing repeatedly while expecting a different outcome.

We see this do-loop mindset in action in owl habitat management, where the Northwest Forest Plan & Amendment proposes logging canopy giants up to 150 years old, supposedly to “save” the northern spotted owl (Strix occidentalis caurina) from wildfires, a policy advocated for by some forest researchers. But scientific evidence clearly shows that these imperiled nocturnal birds of prey can survive and thrive with wildfires.

Logging for northern spotted owls was institutionalized in forest management practices in the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service recovery plan. The 2011 plan, published by the Obama administration, carried forward logging provisions from a politically influenced earlier plan under the George W. Bush administration that was summarily rejected in peer-review by scientists in 2007 and redone by the Obama administration in 2011. Unfortunately many of the logging provisions remained in the revised plan and are now inculcated in forest management.

Owl habitat managers also reinforce the logging do-loop with incorrect assumptions that severely burned forest patches are unsuitable for owls. Under this misperception, large trees can be removed via post-fire logging without jeopardizing the status of the owl population. For instance, the Fish and Wildlife Service routinely grants logging permits to federal land managers after fire even though logging causes owls to abandon territories that may not otherwise be lost to fire itself.

As the spotted owl is one of the most intensively studied birds of prey on the planet, we know that all forms of logging in burned and unburned forests that remove large trees and reduce the overstory canopy degrade habitat. While the species occupies old-growth forests throughout its range, mixed-severity wildfires have created the conditions for owl habitat in dry forests to flourish. Such fires are not complete “tree kill” events; instead, they leave a mosaic of large and small patches of dead and live trees for owls as well as myriad species that occupy the gradient of forest successional stages from pioneering stage after fire to older age stages that act as fire refugia.

Colloquially speaking, unburned patches act as nesting areas or owl “bedrooms,” and severely burned ones become the “kitchens” for small mammal prey to flourish.

Mixed-severity fire effects on the Rogue-Siskiyou National Forest, Oregon, illustrating the “bed-and-breakfast” effect. (Photo: D. DellaSala) The owl presumably expanded its range along the eastern crest of the Cascades of Oregon and Washington not just because of fire suppression, as often claimed, but ostensibly because of mixed-severity fires that provided this habitat effect. And while there are conflicting perspectives on spotted owl management in wildfire areas, the main culprit in spotted owl nest abandonment post-fire is more complicated than wildfires, which are most often blamed.

For instance, researchers (including two of the authors of this op-ed) documented that nearly every known northern spotted owl territory throughout the entire range of the subspecies experienced repeat logging before and after fires, as well as the incursion of the competitive barred owl (Strix varia). The interacting effect of logging and barred owl encroachment conflates whether severe fire is the main problem in spotted owl nest abandonment. Regardless, federal agencies have used the excuse of wildfires to weaken habitat protections by allowing logging of large trees up to 150 years old in spotted owl habitat, thereby, reinforcing the do-loop.

Logging in northern spotted owl critical habitat that opens the forest canopy below the 60% threshold is a form of habitat degradation. Despite recognizing this in the recovery plan, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service approves such projects as fuel reduction (pictured here is “fuel reduction” in critical owl habitat on the Rogue-Siskiyou National Forest, Oregon) (D. DellaSala). In a habitat simulation study, researchers (including three of the authors of this op-ed) concluded that logging large trees in spotted owl habitat in the name of wildfire management, as proposed in the owl recovery plan, would result in a large net degradation of owl habitat. Yet this concern, and the previously mentioned study documenting extensive logging in owl territories, has been repeatedly ignored by land managers — including researchers inappropriately calling for more logging in owl territories for fire concerns.

The do-loop of logging in owl territories is playing out in the Northwest Forest Plan Amendment that proposes to reverse habitat protections in the original plan established in 1993. The landmark plan has served as the benchmark ecosystem and biodiversity framework across some 25 million acres of federal lands in the Pacific Northwest for more than three decades. It is anchored in spotted owl habitat protections (e.g., late-successional reserves) that placed restrictions on logging trees that are more than 80 years old in the reserves. The current amendment would allow logging of large trees up to 150 years of age for fire concerns following misguided direction from some researchers and the owl recovery plan.

The original Northwest plan also was a 100-year plan whose effects, because of the habitat protections, have begun to shift the region’s forests from a source of carbon emissions from logging to a carbon sink, while gradually repairing damaged watersheds from expansive roads and logging.

Simultaneously, in some areas, like the dry forests of the eastern Cascades of Oregon and Washington, logging restrictions have allowed large trees to begin to recover from early 20th century exploitation, and the recovering trees store over 40% of the aboveground carbon.

Logging large trees up to 150 years old would emit most of the stored carbon while exacerbating the global climate and regional wildfire crises. This is because large trees within intact forest canopies act as a wind buffer that slows advancing flames. The older trees also tend to burn in lower fire intensities. Removing them can over-ventilate a forest, increase wind speeds, dry out soils and understories that, in turn, contribute to fast fires that race through logged stands in extreme fire weather. These conditions are increasing because of the unprecedented buildup of greenhouse gases which, in an ironic twist, is worsened by the emissions from logging.

The Trump administration is on a collision course with forests nationwide. It’s rescinding protections for about 44.7 million acres of roadless areas and proposing to log large trees and older forests on nearly 60% of the entire national forest system. It will do this by “streamlined” permitting (i.e., minimal environmental review) and bypassing endangered species protections.

The Northwest Forest Plan Amendment and the owl recovery plan of 2011 have inculcated the do-loop of logging to save owls from wildfires, even though our peer-reviewed research questions that assumption. Instead, we believe it is time to break the cycle of repeating the same failing tactics. That would mean maintaining and even increasing habitat protections for the spotted owl, especially large trees now targeted for logging, along with science-based measures in the recovery plan like barred owl containment. Protecting the forest for these owls and myriad species that use large, old trees is the right call — not doing the same thing over repeatedly and expecting a different outcome.

That outcome is the likely extinction of northern spotted owls at the hands of some of the same logging “solutions” that historically contributed to the owl’s decline in the first place. We offer our research in the links provided to activists fighting to save the owl from misguided fire concerns, and while our response is directed at researchers and land managers responsible for enabling the do-loop, we believe the issues addressed herein are playing out in other dry forests outside the range of the owl where logging proposals aimed at large trees are degrading forests and increasing fire risks while doing nothing to solve the climate and global extinction crises.

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Previously in The Revelator:

‘Active Management’ Harms Forests — And It’s About to Get a Whole Lot Worse

Dominick A. DellaSala, Ph.D.

Dominick A. DellaSala, Ph.D., senior conservation scientist, associates program, Conservation Biology Institute, is an award-winning scientist with over 300 peer-reviewed articles and 9 co-authored books. He served on the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service recovery team (2006-2008) and became a whistle blower for political interference in the plan.