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On June 30 2011, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service issued its Revised Final Recovery Plan for northern spotted owls. The Plan came as a result of Seattle Audubon litigation that successfully challenged the prior plan created in 2008 and that was scientifically and politically discredited.
The new Plan is an improvement over the fundamentally flawed 2008 version. It recognizes the vital importance of protecting and restoring high quality habitat, including federal lands identified in 1994 as the essential foundation of the recovery framework. It affirms the scientific principles of the Northwest Forest Plan, including managing for ecological processes across the range of the spotted owl.
Another key provision in the new plan is the identification of the important role State and private lands can provide in recovering the spotted owl. The Plan recommends the protection of “occupied sites and unoccupied, high value spotted owl habitat on State and private lands wherever possible,” including in key areas such as Southwest Washington.
The Revised Recovery Plan also calls for additional regulatory and voluntary measures to protect and restore owl habitat on private land. It identifies multiple incentive-based mechanisms that can be used by land owners to work toward spotted owl recovery, including conservation banking and carbon sequestration credits. It also calls on the State to evaluate existing timber harvest rules affecting spotted owls and make regulatory changes in order to meet the Plan’s recovery goals.
One aspect of the Plan that has generated significant media attention is the call to address the impacts on spotted owls from growing competition with non-native barred owls. The Plan calls for scientific research and evaluation, including experimental removal of barred owls, to better answer questions regarding the interactions of these species and to develop ongoing management recommendations. The Plan notes that the presence of the barred owl increases the need for conserving and restoring older, multi-layered forests across the range of the spotted owl.
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USFWS
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While the Plan is a positive step in the right direction, Seattle Audubon remains concerned that the Plan places too much emphasis on logging as a way to improve forest health, opening the door to cutting trees in late-succession reserves created by the Northwest Forest Plan. It offers less protection for nesting, roosting and foraging habitat, as well as weaker ecosystem protections around forest thinning and post-fire logging.
The northern spotted owl is a keystone species that tell us about the overall health of our ecosystem. Protecting mature and old-growth forests is about owls and more – healthy forests are essential to protecting rivers and streams, drinking water, sustainable timber jobs, and outdoor recreation, a major economic contributor to local communities across the region. Hundreds of scientists have warned that spotted owl populations have been declining by four percent a year for at least the past 15 years. Much of the decline in owl populations is due to the logging of mature forests needed by owls to survive.
The Fish and Wildlife Service listed northern spotted owls as a threatened species in 1990 and originally protected its critical habitat in 1992. Only 15 to 20 percent of the original old-growth forests remain throughout the Pacific Northwest. In addition to providing critical habitat for spotted owls, salmon, steelhead and other species, mature and old growth forests are important sources of clean water and help reduce global warming.
In 2008 the Bush administration sought to abandon the seminal Northwest Forest Plan by issuing a deeply flawed recovery plan and eliminating millions of acres from the owl's designated critical habitat. One of the Bush administration officials involved in weakening the owl recovery plan, Julie MacDonald, was forced to resign from government service because of her politicized meddling.
The 2008 Plan failed numerous scientific peer reviews, but that didn’t stop the Bush administration from using it to justify slashing the amount of forest designated as critical habitat for the owls by about 1.6 million acres, or 23 percent. Development or logging projects in critical habitat can only proceed with the approval of federal wildlife experts.
The next step in the federal process for protecting spotted owls is for the Fish and Wildlife Service to revise the designated critical habitat for the owl. The court has ordered a proposal from the agency by November 15, 2011. At the state level, the Forest Practices Board needs to move forward with implementing additional voluntary and regulatory measures to protect and restore owl habitat on private land.