I was about eight years old when I learned, over lunch at the Burger King in Aberdeen, WA, that my dad had been laid off from his job with a local logging company. It was the only job I remembered him having, and it was scary, not least because I did not understand what was happening. Unbeknownst to me then, the layoff was the starting gun for the rest of my childhood and adolescence, which would be defined by family moves in search of work, friends left behind, new schools and constant financial strain. Had I understood what was in store, I would have been much more scared.
The collapse of the Pacific Northwest timber economy, on which countless families like mine relied, began in the early- to mid-1980s. Foremost among the proximate causes was a seized-up national economy featuring mortgage interest rates between 12 – 18% between 1980 and 1982. People weren’t building houses (in 1981, there were only 1.1 million housing starts nationally, the lowest in 35 years) so people didn’t need lumber and didn’t need people harvesting trees and turning them into lumber.
Between 1979 and 1982, forest sector employment in Oregon and Washington declined by about 39,000 jobs, or 27%, according to the U.S. Forest Service. A lot of that pain was felt in small towns like Aberdeen, where alternatives to timber jobs were few.
Depending on whom you ask, I ended up okay. But the early ‘80s collapse, driven largely by weak demand for forest products, would be the left jab setting up a nasty right haymaker to the jaw of the timber industry less than a decade later.
The decisive blow would come from the supply side, as first judges and then the President of the United States decided to hobble the rural economy of an entire region to save an owl we’ve now learned is “functionally extinct” despite the socioeconomic harm perpetrated in its name.
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Enter the Spotted Owl
Spurred by litigation from environmental groups including the Sierra Club, in June 1990, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service listed the northern spotted owl as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act, concluding that the continued loss of old-growth habitat threatened the bird’s survival. At the time, federal timber harvests in Oregon and Washington were near historically high levels.
The listing did not itself shut down federal logging. The more immediate blow came from the courts.
In May 1991, U.S. District Judge William Dwyer ruled in Seattle Audubon Society v. Evans that the Forest Service had failed to maintain viable owl populations. Dwyer, observing “the northern spotted owl is now threatened with extinction,” prohibited the Forest Service from auctioning or awarding additional timber sales in suitable spotted-owl habitat in Washington, Oregon and northern California until the agency adopted legally adequate standards and guidelines for protecting the owl.
Dwyer cited federal scientists in finding “the owl is imperiled over significant portions of its range because of continuing losses of habitat from logging and natural disturbances.”
The federal restrictions continued to expand. In January 1992, the Fish and Wildlife Service designated approximately 6.9 million acres of federal land in Washington, Oregon and northern California as critical habitat for the spotted owl.
The effect on the federal timber supply was dramatic. According to the Forest Service, Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management harvests in the Northwest Forest Plan area fell by approximately 2.5 billion board feet between 1990 and 1994, from about 3.3 billion board feet to roughly 800 million.
Land managed by the Bureau of Land Management in western Oregon provide an even more striking example. The Government Accountability Office in 2005 reported that timber sales on those lands plunged from a peak of 1.583 billion board feet in 1986 to just 14 million board feet in 1994.
President Bill Clinton stepped in. In April 1993, just months after taking office, Clinton convened a forest conference in Portland and directed his administration to develop a plan intended to resolve the perceived conflict between timber production and protection of the spotted owl and other old-growth-dependent species.
The result was the Northwest Forest Plan, adopted by the Clinton Administration in 1994. Covering nearly 25 million acres of federal land in western Oregon, Washington and northern California, the plan established a vast network of reserves and other restrictions intended to protect old-growth ecosystems and species associated with them, foremost the northern spotted owl. The Administration projected federal timber production of roughly 1 billion board feet annually under its selected approach—a fraction of the several billion board feet per year federal lands had produced.
Actual harvests never came close to meeting the dramatically reduced projections of the Northwest Forest Plan as environmental groups and compliant federal judges continued to block timber sales. The Forest Service’s first-decade monitoring found that from 1995–2003, federal agencies sold only 54% of the timber the Clinton-driven Plan had projected.
To save the owl, environmental groups, federal judges and the Clinton Administration forced drastic harvest reductions. With less timber to cut and process, job losses continued, mills closed and communities like Aberdeen spiraled.
Despite the restrictions and the jobs losses, a new study reveals, the northern spotted owl has continued its decline and is closer than ever to extinction.
Study: the northern spotted owl is “approaching functional extinction” in large swaths of Oregon and Washington
The study, published in Ecological Applications, the journal of the Ecological Society of America, describes an experiment conducted by researchers in Washington, Oregon and northern California in 2023 that used thousands of listening stations posted in forests and an artificial intelligence model identifying the calls of northern spotted owls.
The results showed spotted owls were “functionally extinct” in the northern portions of the studied area (Washington and much of Oregon). The researchers defined populations as approaching functional extinction when the probability that suitable areas were occupied by a breeding pair fell to 20% or less—a level associated with a high risk of demographic collapse. On the Oregon Coast, estimated pair occupancy was below 5%.
The authors of the study, led by Damon Lesmeister, a U.S. Forest Service wildlife biologist with courtesy faculty privileges at Oregon State University, described the Northwest Forest Plan’s logging restrictions and found they have not, in fact, saved the northern spotted owl:
Despite these conservation measures on federally managed forests, population recovery has not occurred for several avian species associated with structurally complex old forest, suggesting additional mechanisms are drivers of contemporary population trends. Northern spotted owl populations continue to decline faster than expected if habitat loss alone were driving population change, and by 2020 were found to warrant uplisting to endangered status.
(Internal citations omitted)
Lesmeister et al. say the culprit is the barred owl, a larger, more aggressive and adaptable genetic cousin of the northern spotted owl that originated in eastern North America and came to dominate much of the presumed former territory of the northern spotted owl by the late 20th Century. Barred owls out-compete the northern spotted owl when they share habitat, and the study found far more barred owl calls than northern spotted owl calls, particularly in the northern areas of the study where spotted owls are approaching extinction.
[Northern spotted owl] population declines are likely driven primarily through competition with invasive barred owls (S. varia), with continuing habitat loss (e.g., timber harvest, wildfire), legacy effects from historical logging, and altered disturbance regimes also contributing.
(Internal citation omitted)
The term “natural disturbance regimes” describes natural phenomena that shape forests, including wildfire, drought, insect outbreaks, disease, and severe storms.
A regional, multi-generational scandal
The clearcutting of timber jobs and the evisceration of the economy that sustained families and towns throughout the Pacific Northwest did not save the northern spotted owl. That timid, reclusive and apparently fragile bird has continued its march toward extinction despite the enormous pain and societal upheaval inflicted by the federal government in its name.
This is maddening. It is inexcusable. It is a scandal of regional and multi-generational effect. Those who claimed they knew what they did not know about how to save the spotted owl are mostly gone, now. Towns like Aberdeen, Coos Bay and Klamath Falls are mired in perpetual economic and social depression imposed on taxpayers by the government they help fund.
Government is a blunt instrument often wielded to achieve specific results. When its policies do things policymakers did not intend, we call those things unintended consequences. In the case of logging restrictions to save the northern spotted owl, the policies missed the mark entirely, leaving an owl more imperiled than ever and a smoking crater of collateral damage visible from the Aberdeen Burger King.
Written By Jeff Eager
Find the article and more directly from Oregon Roundup https://oregonroundup.substack.com/p/owl-for-naught
Republished by Right Now Oregon with Permission from Oregon Roundup. Oregon Roundup Foundation created this article. ORF is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation dedicated to covering Oregon political and government news.
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