Word: owl
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...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...
...dispute over the owl has festered more than 15 years, a period in which the ancient forests receded ever farther and the timbering continued largely unabated. Efforts to find a solution were thwarted by the power of the timber industry, the bungling and inertia of the federal bureaucracy and the stridency of an environmental movement as quick to alienate as to persuade. But the conflict should never have reached the current crisis point. Forest ranger Schindler believes the coming economic turmoil might have been averted if the Government had weaned industry from its dependence on old growth by gradually reducing...
...Forest Service biologist Eric Forsman, who has studied the owl since 1968, believes it was the strategy of the federal agencies to stall for time by continually asking for more studies on the owl. "I've seen how the games are played," says Forsman. BLM in particular ignored repeated alarms. As < early as 1976, BLM biologist Mayo Call warned his superiors that unless swift action was taken to protect the owl, it might one day have to be put on the endangered-species list, curtailing timber harvests on federal lands...