Word: owl
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Though the timber industry has zealously replanted over the past two decades, the hallmark of old growth, biodiversity, has been lost. Gone are the broken-topped dead trees or "snags" favored by owl, osprey and pileated woodpecker. Gone the multilayered canopies and rich understory, the scattering of hemlock, incense cedar and sugar pine. Gone the centuries-old firs in their noble dotage. Increasingly, the forests have been transmogrified into tree farms of numbing uniformity, countless ankle-high seedlings and spindly saplings germinated from seeds selected for their productive capacity. The logging operations have tattered the seamless fabric of old growth...
...controversy is on everyone's mind there, and the owl gets much of the blame. A banner headline in the local paper declared: SAVING SPOTTED OWL SEEN AS THREAT TO SCHOOLS. Douglas County may lose more than $13 million a year in timber revenue that the Federal Government returns to the county to help pay for public administration, roads and schools. At the local Ford dealership, the only owls that are welcomed are those made out of ceramic, which stand on the roofline warding off swallows intent on building nests under the eaves. Cars and trucks are not selling...
...Roseburg, a spotted owl hangs in effigy over the bar. Shops offer T shirts saying I LOVE SPOTTED OWLS . . . FRIED. And in the cabin of logger Bill Haire's truck, beneath the mirror, swings a tiny owl with an arrow through its head. "I can still maintain some sense of humor," says Haire. His father Tom, 65, works with him in the forest, and his son Brian, 12, hopes one day to join them there. "If it comes down to my family or that bird," says Haire, "that bird's going to suffer. Where would we be right...
...loggers or environmentalists have ever seen the elusive spotted owl. They know it as either a costly subject of litigation or a rare distillation of the forest spirit. But on the summit of a steep ravine in Douglas County, a pair of spotted owls assert themselves, as if to prove they are more than a mere abstraction. Nesting in the cavity of a broken-topped fir, they scan for prey and ponder the rare two-legged observer far below. Their gentle mewing ! gives way to a distinctive four-note hoot: "who-who, who-who." The male drops down...
Oliver is enchanted by the owls' trusting ways, their grace and their attention to their young. He worries about their future, seemingly dependent as they are for both prey and nesting sites on old-growth forests. But Oliver and others have observed that it is not the age of the forest that appears to be critical to the habitat of the owl, but rather the structure and character of the forest. He and other biologists hope that one day they will be able to identify those key components and, by preserving them in reforested tracts, both widen the owls' habitat...