When Mark Benedict and his spouse, Mary Shaw, moved in 2017 to Salmon Prairie, Montana, a distant enclave about two hours north of Missoula, they felt like they’d received the retirement lottery. Their property provided epic views of the Swan and Mission Mountain ranges and was bordered by public land. It was virtually all the things they’d dreamt of throughout their lengthy careers in Washington State.
There was only one wrinkle: The woods beside their dream residence hadn’t been logged because the Nineteen Fifties and had been due for it ultimately. The U.S. Forest Service (USFS) managed the tract, together with to reap timber for wooden merchandise and to forestall lethal wildfires. Having spent a decade as a technician with the USFS, Benedict knew a harvest may considerably alter the character of the panorama they liked a lot. “I went in with my eyes open,” he says.
However when he and Shaw realized that the USFS was planning a timber sale in 2021 on a portion of the Flathead Nationwide Forest adjoining their property, they’d an additional cause to fret. The couple loved monitoring their many path cameras for wildlife, together with the occasional Nice Grey Owl stalking voles within the soggy meadow past their entrance porch. Benedict had shared this footage with Beth Mendelsohn, an owl researcher with the nonprofit Owl Analysis Institute (ORI), who had been scouring the Swan Valley for greater than a 12 months in search of nesting Nice Grays with little to indicate for it. These elusive “ghosts of the forest,” as they’re generally referred to as, are patterned with grey and white mottling that camouflages them towards their conifer perches. Due to Benedict’s intel, Mendelsohn was capable of observe down an energetic nest within the Flathead cradled by a tall, dying larch tree. Now it was smack-dab in the course of a unit slated for logging.
That didn’t essentially imply the larch with the nest could be minimize down. The USFS administration method acknowledges the integral position that snags, a catch-all time period for standing useless and dying timber, play in wholesome forests. Snags enrich soil, sequester carbon, stop erosion, and supply habitat for as much as one-third of the wildlife within the ecosystem, together with a number of chook species. In some nationwide forests the company has made a concerted effort to protect snags, and even create them.
On the similar time, the company’s pointers permit contractors to take away ecologically necessary snags throughout timber harvests if they may injure employees. Forest advocates say this stipulation has created a loophole massive sufficient for a lot of timber to fall by means of. In apply, some snags that must be left standing for wildlife are as a substitute minimize below the banner of office security, says Andy Stahl, government director of Forest Service Staff for Environmental Ethics, a nonprofit devoted to defending nationwide forests.
The USFS administration plan underpinning the Flathead challenge said that every one useless and dying timber greater than 20 inches in diameter—or greater than 16 inches for standing useless Douglas fir, ponderosa pine, and western larches—could be spared. Moreover, crews could be required to depart a mean of six snags per acre that measured between 12 and 20 inches large.
Nonetheless, Benedict determined to audit the loggers. “I wished to see in the event that they abided by their very own standards,” says the retired environmental scientist.
In September 2023, after USFS contractors marked the forest for thinning, Benedict, who nonetheless carries his bear spray in a canteen pouch stamped USFS, started working surveying Unit 8, the one with the Nice Grey nest. Over 4 sweaty afternoons, he meticulously inspected the timber on its 33 acres, measuring diameters, inventorying species, and snapping photographs. Of the 47 snags Benedict recognized as massive sufficient to let stand, solely 7 had been marked with fluorescent orange paint as “depart” timber. Even the useless larch with the owl nest was set to be felled.
Benedict and Mendelsohn did the one factor they may do, writing to their regional USFS directors within the hopes of preserving a small slice of key habitat throughout the bigger logging challenge.
The state of affairs in Unit 8 is a component of a bigger ecological dilemma enjoying out in nationwide forests throughout the nation, says Jim Rivers, a wildlife biologist within the faculty of forestry at Oregon State College. A long time of clear-cutting and hearth suppression, he says, have created a “snag deficit” in American forests. To handle this hole within the woods, a rising contingent of researchers, conservationists, and group members are working to persuade land managers and policymakers of a fact that’s apparent to foresters and biologists: There’s an entire lot of life left in a useless tree.
Tlisted here are some ways for a tree to die: drought or illness, a bolt of lightning or the gradual onslaught of previous age. How lengthy the decaying tree stays standing is determined by elements like its species, its measurement, and the native local weather. Aspen and birch would possibly keep upright for a decade, a big conifer for greater than a century. At each stage of decomposition, the snag offers a bounty of advantages to the ecosystem round it.
In some forests, as much as 45 % of chook species depend on snags for nesting, roosting, foraging, or perching. The USFS’s own research has discovered increased chook abundance, species richness, and species range in plots with useless or dying timber. Another study, carried out in Florida’s Ocala Nationwide Forest, discovered there was a 70 % probability of American Kestrels occupying a plot with 5 snags per hectare versus 30 % in plots with 1 snag per hectare. Like many different birds, kestrels like habitat with loads of locations to perch and forage. In different phrases, these birds don’t simply need to stay in a single snag, they need to stay in a neighborhood stuffed with them.
For many years the USFS has included the retention of snags in its administration plans for the roughly 50 million acres of its land which might be accessible for timber harvests. Every nationwide forest units its personal snag retention pointers that dictate which timber must be retained throughout a given logging challenge, says Shaun O’Connor, a deputy district ranger in Lolo Nationwide Forest. Managers take note of such elements as the categories and measurement of timber and the presence of snag-dependent wildlife. The company has additionally researched snags and promoted their creation by means of strategies like injecting focused timber with a deadly fungus or lopping their tops off with a chainsaw (and, maybe most memorably, with dynamite, as a trio of foresters tried on the Pacific Northwest Analysis Station in 1981).
And but, whereas snags are ecological gold mines to scientists, the useless and dying timber, weakened by rot and climate, can fall in unpredictable methods, posing a menace to logging or hearth crews beneath. With regards to logging, it’s as much as the timber firm harvesting the timber, not the USFS itself, to find out if a snag poses a security threat, O’Connor says. As soon as a snag has been deemed a hazard, Occupational Security and Well being Administration crews present steerage on the right way to safely deliver it down.
When contractors do depart or create snags, they usually cluster them on the far edges of the logging unit to simplify entry for heavy equipment, paying little thoughts to the age, high quality, or species of snags they’re abandoning, Stahl says. Typically, nobody comes again to judge how or if wildlife use them. That method, Stahl says, disregards a part of the company’s mission. The A number of-Use Sustained-Yield Act of 1960 declared that the nation’s forests “shall be administered for out of doors recreation, vary, timber, watershed, and wildlife and fish functions.” Congress wrote the record in alphabetical order, he says, “to suggest no significance of precedence.” A forester and former timber lobbyist, Stahl argues that whereas human security ought to after all be paramount, the well being of wildlife “must be on the desk, too,” noting that the mascots of the USFS aren’t foresters however forest denizens: Smokey Bear and, fittingly, Woodsy Owl. (USFS headquarters didn’t reply to a number of requests for remark.)
“I can’t find each owl nest within the nation and put a tag on it that claims: Save me.”
Arbitrarily leaving timber shouldn’t be an efficient technique, Mendelsohn says. Moreover, snags will not be created equal. A spindly lodgepole pine remnant received’t present appropriate actual property for a cumbersome chook like a Nice Grey Owl, and a tree that does can take centuries to succeed in an sufficient measurement. But counting on scientists like her to seek out and defend essentially the most priceless snags for wildlife could be “silly and fruitless,” she says. “I can’t find each owl nest within the nation and put a tag on it that claims: Save me.”
Making certain the proper of habitat exists, she believes, received’t occur as a result of she or a involved citizen like Benedict petitions for a single snag. It’ll require a paradigm shift, one by which extra forest managers deal with snags as an integral element of a wholesome ecosystem. In her effort to result in that change, Mendelsohn has discovered keen companions in close by tribes, who haven’t solely helped facilitate the scientist’s analysis but additionally put it to good use managing their very own forests for wildlife.
On a crystalline Might morning, I meet Mendelsohn at ORI headquarters, an previous yellow farmhouse set among the many Ninepipe wetlands advanced on the base of the Mission vary. On this huge prairie-pothole panorama, the fixed takeoffs and landings of gulls, grebes, and cormorants rival a world airport. She and ORI discipline interns Gabriela Mendes and Hayley Madden are loading Mendelsohn’s truck with all the things they’ll have to find, seize, and tag a Nice Grey Owl fledgling.
Thirty minutes later, the 4 of us are bushwhacking by means of the Mission Mountains Tribal Wilderness. Managed by the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes (CSKT), the practically 93,000-acre tract was the primary tribally designated wilderness space within the nation and lies sandwiched between the Flathead and Lolo Nationwide Forests. It’s tangled and verdant—and a really huge place to trace down a small, shy fledgling.
Nice Grays are elusive, however they’re not endangered, and Mendelsohn want to hold it that approach by guaranteeing the habitat they want stays on the panorama. But regardless of their measurement and charisma, a lot stays unknown in regards to the species, particularly their nesting habits. Mendelsohn is aware of the birds could nest solely each two to 5 years, generally in broken-top snags, generally within the stick nests of different raptors. She is aware of they typically transfer websites from 12 months to 12 months, generally greater than a mile away. Past that, there are many unanswered questions: Why are some nests deserted? Which varieties of nest do the owls favor? The place do the younger go once they disperse?
All this uncertainty has made it troublesome for Mendelsohn to maneuver past the save-one-snag-at-a-time method, so her analysis goals to supply extra broadly relevant steerage to land managers and logging crews. To date she’s tagged roughly 50 Nice Grays throughout western Montana to higher perceive their habitat wants.
We meander by means of the woods, the whine of mosquitoes in our ears. Mendes performs owl calls—they sound just like the squeaks of a mangled canine toy—from a handheld speaker in an try and solicit a response. Lastly, after practically two hours, she spots the goal: a foot-tall, downy-gray fledgling staring down at us from a ponderosa.
The researchers gently nudge the still-flightless chook from its perch with a protracted, padded pole after which shortly get to work, inserting an ORI baseball cap over its head to maintain it calm. They pluck pin feathers for a genetic pattern from the younger owlet, which Mendelsohn estimates is 5 weeks previous, then clip a silver metallic loop with a yellow tag round its leg; researchers and tribal foresters will now know this chook as T6.
Kaylie Durglo, the CSKT hearth division’s reserved treaty rights lands coordinator, says partnering with ORI has been integral to managing tribal forests for habitat, whereas additionally utilizing them for timber, recreation, and cultural ceremonies. Tribal crews depend on Mendelsohn’s crew to identify essentially the most priceless snags, like these with energetic or former nests. When designing insurance policies for particular person logging tasks, the CSKT has additionally included insights that ORI employees have gathered in regards to the birds’ life cycle, such because the perilous weeks flightless owlets spend out of the nest, in close by branches.
When ORI’s crew identifies timber with nests in an space to be logged, for instance, the forestry division units them apart, together with different equally sized timber close by. “Birds don’t at all times come again to that very same snag, and we need to make sure that they’ve extra alternative to nest inside their territory,” Durglo says. And through every timber harvest, tribal foresters are required to retain two current snags, create two new snags, and depart two downed logs per acre.
Mendelsohn want to foster this sort of collaboration on nationwide forest lands. District employees within the Flathead and Lolo have expressed curiosity in becoming a member of ORI within the discipline to seek for owl nests and study extra in regards to the birds’ habitat wants, she says, however have but to decide to such an outing. So she continues to hone her dataset, hopeful that extra time and extra information in regards to the mysterious birds will result in higher forestry administration.
After about 5 minutes of captivity, throughout which T6 snaps its beak in indignation, the chook is again in its pine. Because the researchers collect their gear and start the trudge again to their four-wheelers, Mendelsohn glances over her shoulder for one final take a look at the owl. “Good luck, buddy,” she says.
On my final day in Montana, Benedict invitations Mendelsohn and me to see what’s turn into of Unit 8.
Via their outreach to the USFS, Benedict and Mendelsohn had been capable of defend the larch with the Nice Grey nest from harvest within the waning days of 2023. Nonetheless, as we see after a 30-minute hike, their marketing campaign wasn’t precisely successful. In the present day the tree stands tall, however the stick nest is empty, and the few different remaining larches stand far aside, like candles on a child’s birthday cake. The closely logged tract now lacks a buffer zone of timber that the grownup owls use to roost and their chicks have to fledge. “It’s doubtless ineffective for the birds,” Mendelsohn says.
As he takes within the website, trekking poles dangling from his wrists, Benedict is clearly dejected.
Regardless of the disappointing final result within the Flathead, elsewhere nationwide forest managers have extra actively included snags into administration plans. In Missouri’s Mark Twain Nationwide Forest, as an example, USFS efforts to revive useless wooden paid off in 2020 when a conservation crew successfully reintroduced the Brown-headed Nuthatch, a cavity nester that had been absent from the world because the early 1900s. Within the Southeast, the company has restored swaths of native longleaf pine forest in an effort to recover the Red-cockaded Woodpecker. Whereas the once-endangered species nests in stay timber, leaving useless wooden on the panorama means much less competitors from different cavity-dwellers.
Such successes present that it’s attainable to steadiness the wants of wildlife with different priorities for nationwide forests.
Such successes present that it’s attainable to steadiness the wants of wildlife with different priorities for nationwide forests. On the similar time, snags have turn into extra susceptible to elimination. Since January, federal coverage has lowered the boundaries to reducing them down by selling home timber manufacturing and authorizing emergency measures for “the salvage of useless or dying timber,” which have additionally eased sure environmental assessment necessities for logging tasks.
However there are a whole lot of woods in the USA not managed by the USFS, which oversees solely about 20 % of the nation’s forests. Nationwide parks, state parks and forests, ecological preserves, tribal land, and personal land can all assist erase our snag deficit “collectively throughout the panorama,” Rivers says. Up to now, he says he’s seen owners in his Corvallis, Oregon, neighborhood leaving or creating snags of their backyards. Greater than half of the nation’s forests are privately owned, so ORI, Audubon, and different conservation teams are working with keen landowners to create plans for managing bigger tracts. The general public, Rivers says, could also be beginning to see useless timber in a brand new gentle.
Our afternoon within the Flathead additionally holds an encouraging sight. In an adjoining, unlogged space, Mendelsohn leads us off path and deep into the woods to a stately larch snag that held a Nice Grey nest two years in the past. We cease about 200 toes away as she lifts her binoculars to her face, then lets out a quiet, relieved snort. “That is thrilling,” she whispers. “That is actually superior.”
Two fuzzy heads bob above the cratered crown of the useless larch. They’re every week or possibly 10 days previous, Mendelsohn estimates.
To keep away from disturbing the birds, we keep solely briefly. However for the sake of Mendelsohn’s rising dataset, somebody might want to monitor the nest till she returns in a few weeks to tag the fledglings. Would Benedict contemplate doing that, she asks?
Benedict is quiet on the stroll again, and I’m wondering if he is considering the plundered panorama in Unit 8 or the mounting duties at residence now that summer season has virtually arrived within the Swan Valley. Simply earlier than we are saying goodbye, Benedict has a solution for Mendelsohn. A mixture of fear and obligation on his face, he says he’ll regulate the nest.
He is aware of how onerous it’s to guard valuable issues, and the way a lot tougher it’s to lose them. His eyes, as he says, are open.
This story initially ran within the Winter 2025 problem as “Life After Demise.” To obtain our print journal, turn into a member by making a donation today.
