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Pastimes : Where the GIT's are going -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Neeka who wrote (120760)	9/19/2006 7:26:44 PM
From: ManyMoose	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 225578

In my area of Oregon, we had a lot of pileated woodpeckers. They used dead snags for foraging and nesting. Larger snags were necessary for nesting because it's a big bird. All of our timber harvest proposals had to preserve as many of these snags as possible. This was a major paradigm shift from policies that developed before my career started, because these same snags were routinely felled to get rid of their fuel and lightning attraction component. Snags are dead trees, and usually are held up mainly by gravity, since their root system is dead and more than likely was stunted due to overcrowding to begin with. This makes them rather dangerous for the loggers, particularly during yarding the logs up to the landing, when there are lots of high speed cables swinging around. I was lucky enough to be absent when a logger was killed by one of them, and my colleagues had to pack the poor fellow out. It was very difficult to maintain the required minimum number of snags, because the rules of engagement allowed loggers to fell them if they believed they were dangerous. This meant that almost all of them went down. One time we got the loggers out on a field trip and sought their advice. They said leave the majority of the snags at the bottom and sides of the clearcutting unit, and in riparian strips that aren't cut. This way the yarding cables wouldn't impinge on them and it would be much safer. We started writing that into our specifications and started ending up with a lot more snags. Pileated woodpeckers lost their celebrity status when environmentalists found out that the northern spotted owl habitat requirements were more restrictive, thus driving up our costs and difficulty of preparing timber sales. Finally, the timber program was so expensive to implement that it is but a shadow of its former self. I'm in favor of preserving and maintaining wildlife habitat and wilderness values where ever possible. Working with the loggers helped us do that. Environmentalists were more interested in shutting us down, so I didn't enjoy working with them as much even though I shared their concern for the environment.