Our favorite wildlife blog, Wolf Crossing [here], recently reported that western Great Lakes gray wolves are actually hybrids. The exisiting population, now numbering over 4,000 in Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin, are not pure wolves but wolf-coyote crosses, otherwise known as wolfotes.

The western Great Lakes gray wolf was on the Endangered Species List, but last March the US Fish and Wildlife Service delisted the “species” due to the burgeoning number of the predators. Predictably, an odd assortment of enviro groups including the Humane Society of the United States, Help Our Wolves Live, and the Animal Protection Institute filed suit in April [here].

The discovery that the wolves are not wolves threatened to throw a monkey wrench into the gears of the litigation. What is the point of “protecting” hybrids? But the USFWS countered that it knew the wolfotes were hybrids all along. From Wolf Crossing:

Rolf O. Peterson, a wolf ecologist at Michigan Technological University and the leader of the Fish and Wildlife Service’s Eastern Gray Wolf Recovery Team, said it had been known for some time that hybridization between gray wolves and coyotes was happening in the region.

What’s new in this paper,” he said, “is that they found no evidence of hybridization with coyotes in the historic samples — and no pure historic wolves in the current samples.”

Moreover, two “evolutionary biologists” (whatever those hybrids are) reporting in the journal Biology Letters recommended that “these animals should remain protected… while researchers determine the full extent of hybridization with coyotes.”

In other words, the fact (well-known to the USFWS but now publicly revealed) that the wolves are not wolves is a reason to relist them (as wolfotes, we suppose). This thinking is in line with the Mexican Gray Wolf program, also run by the USFWS, in which the animals are actually wolf-dog hybrids, or wolfogs. This fact is also well-known to insiders.

In stark contrast, the sparred owl has been utterly ignored. The sparred (or botted) owl is a cross between a spotted owl and a barred owl. The latest USFWS plan calls for blasting barred owls with shotguns to “protect” spotted owls [here]. But those birds are the same species, or close to it, and they are known to interbreed. The USFWS makes no mention of sparred (or botted) owls in their owl blasting plan, and there is every likelihood that sparred owls will be blasted by shotgun-toting “biologists” because nobody can tell the difference between any of the “species.”

This is wrong (in many respects). If wolfotes and wolfogs are to be “protected,” then sparred (or botted) owls should be, too.

And why stop there? What about beefalos? It seems highly unevolutionary, biologically speaking, as well as inhumane, to sell beefalo meat in grocery stores right next to the salmon, for instance. Shouldn’t beefalos be allowed to roam free and commune with Mother Nature, freaks of nature though they might be?

And what about ligers, zebronkeys, and jackalopes? This old world is big enough for all God’s creatures, isn’t it?

We want our favorite hybrid listed: that rare cross and the answer to nearly every question that can be asked, the elephino.

With some apprehension, because we know we will regret it, we invite your suggestions as to which hybrids you would like to see added to the Endangered Species List. Warning: creative suggestions will be posted, but not the juvenile ones.

An excellent update on federal payments to rural counties may be found at The Rogue Pundit [here].

The Public Land Communities Transition Act of 2007, HR 3058, would reauthorize the county payments for an additional four years. The payments would decline by ten percent each year until 2013, when they would stop. The legislation has been approved by the House Natural Resources Committee and has been forwarded to the House Agriculture Committee.

Federal payments to counties are in lieu of property taxes, which the feds don’t pay, and in lieu of timber reciepts, the old program meant to offset the unpaid property taxes. Another purpose of the timber payments was to ensure that the land would be used in a productive manner and not abandoned to holocaust and ruin.

As everybody knows, that program has failed miserably. There are few active management projects, only a dribble of timber receipts, and federal land abandonment has been accompanied by environmental devastation and economic depression.

The fix proposed by Congress is HR 3058. The legislation does nothing, zero, nada to restart forest stewardship on federal lands. It merely calls for temporary monetary payments in lieu of actual solutions. What’s more (this is the special part) the money will come from offshore continental shelf oil and gas leases! That’s right, sports fans. As the esteemed Col. Pundit put it:

The bill, estimated to cost $2.7 billion over four years, will be paid for with fees from Outer Continental Shelf oil and gas leases.

Yes, thanks to the continued inability of the feds and environmentalists to find compromise, we may soon be getting our timber funds from fossil fuels, not the harvesting of a renewable resource (which could also reduce the fire risk).  Sadly, that’s probably the best that we timber counties can hope for any time soon.

Last year the plan was to fund the in-lieu debt by selling off isolated and superfluous parcels of USFS land, but that idea went over like a lead balloon. Every weepy-eyed numbskull in the country gnashed their teeth at the idea of selling one out of every 1,500 acres of the Federal Domain. The moaning caused Congress to crawl back into their spiderholes.

But the new plan is much better. The enviros ought to be all aquiver over the new plan. Or will they have another Groan-In?

Our guess is that HR 3058 is dead in the water, but stay tuned for more Federal Forest Follies, that long running realtime drama/comedy for the sedentary and the hanky-inclined.

Thanks to an SOS Forests senior researcher and policy analyst, whom we shall not name for reasons of secrecy, we have been made aware of an essay of interest by Mr. Tom DeWeese of the American Policy Center entitled Stupid Human Tricks: The Sad Case of the Spotted Owl (see here). We do not know Mr. DeWeese, nor are we familiar with his Center, but it’s a pretty good essay.

Killing America’s timber industry
Stupid Human Tricks: The Sad Case of the Spotted Owl
By Tom DeWeese, American Policy Center

Friday, June 29, 2007

Environmentalists are quick to lecture the rest of us about the ways of nature. Don’t clean the dead trees off the forest floor, it’s natural. Cattle and horses on the range aren’t native, so let the grizzles and wolves devour them, it’s natural. Man isn’t part of the ecology, lock him out of vast areas of land, it’s natural. It’s interesting to note how the “natural” argument only applies when it is used to impose the radical environmental agenda. Case in point, the Northern Spotted Owl.

Spotted owls, we were told a decade ago, were disappearing because big bad timber companies were cutting down “old growth” forests. So the environmental movement rushed to the forests, hugged the trees and issued news releases to decry the evils of the logging industry. Save the owl. Save the trees. Kill the timber industry.

Of course, that was exactly the point. Kill the timber industry. As a result of the hysteria to save the “endangered” owls, U.S. timber sales were reduced by 80-90%, forcing saw mills to close, loggers to go broke and whole towns which depended on the industry to literally disappear. The federal crackdown on the industry caused a shift in U.S. domestic lumber supplies to foreign soils. In short, American industry suffered in the name of protecting the spotted owl. Turns out it wasn’t true.

Continue reading this entry »

The Draft Recovery Plan for the Northern Spotted Owl calls for the shotgun blasting of barred owls. The reason given is that barred owls are killers of spotted owls.

Or are they? On what basis is this allegedly scientific statement made?

Guess what? None at all. It’s pure conjecture, and pretty iffy conjecture at that. No one has ever in history seen a barred owl kill a spotted owl.

The best the USFWS can come up is “circumstantial evidence indicated that a barred owl killed a spotted owl (Leskiw and Gutiérrez, 1998)” (DRP, p. 125). The citation for this obscure 1998 report is Leskiw, T. and R.J. Gutiérrez. 1998. Possible predation of a spotted owl by a barred owl. Western Birds 29:225–226.

At one time, in one place, ten years ago, somebody thought they saw something, but it wasn’t the actual thing, only some signs of something or other, which nobody else saw, then or ever.

That’s it. Upon that one shred of obscure “evidence” the Pacific Northwest is to be an experimental killing ground for barred owls.

Upon that shred of who really knows what, the barred owl has been condemned to extinction for allegedly causing the crash of spotted owl populations.

Upon that shred of nothing the Northwest Forest Plan, a colossal failure in every respect, is to be carved in stone and the resident human population subjected to 30 more years (at least) of pain and suffering.

This is what government scientists do. They trundle together horrific bullshit out of thin air and then expect millions of people to accept it and cease all economic and stewardship activities because of it.

Shakespeare was off-base when he had Dick the Butcher in Henry VI say, “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.” He really should have offered up quack government “scientists” as the best targets, as the scourge of civilization, truth, and justice.

What a shameful, pathetic, putrid abomination of real science. What crap. How excruciatingly awful.

If I had my way, yes, if I had my way, I would tear this old building down.

We paid those bozos with real money. We paid them to perp those horrendous frauds. I want my money back. We should all get our money back, and our owls, our forests, and our region back.

In the new Draft Recovery Plan for the Northern Spotted Owl the key element is blasting barred owls with shotguns. This is the strategy that will “save” the spotted owl and lead the species to new population levels so high that spotted owls will no longer be endangered.

That’s what “recovery” means. The DRP for the NSO is so slick, so scientific, and so Harry Potter magical that the simple solution proposed will work wonders, and NSO’s will be so abundant that we can erase them from the list in 30 short years of barred owl blasting.

What could be better?

Other factors, like mega-fires that destroy forests and convert them to tickbrush, don’t even need to be considered. Fires are good for spotted owls, especially catastrophic fires that turn living old-growth forests into rare and/or uncommon early successional ’stands’ (see here).

Need proof? The DRP authors (see here, 6478 KB) are explicit in their desire to fry forests. On page 42 the authors muse:

2007 DRAFT SPOTTED OWL RECOVERY PLAN: OPTION 1 CRITERIA AND ACTIONS

• Recovery Action 31: Outside of the MOCAs in the fire-prone provinces (see Recovery Action 25), based on plant association group and fire regime types, strategically (geographically and topographically) modify fuels and stand structure to assist in the suppression of wildfires to decrease the risk of wildfire spread into the MOCAs. Wildfire does not include wildland fires for resource benefit (WFRB).

There you go. Whoofurbs (WFRB’s) are much like whoofoos (wildland use fires or WFU’s). In fact they are so similar that it’s a distinction without a difference. Let-It Burn forest fires are all the rage in eco-Fascist circles these days. But they never tell you what the alleged benefits might be.

Forest fires in old-growth forests, fuel-laden as they are, tend to erase those forests from the face of the Earth while killing all the owls therein. Forest fires tend to fill the sky with carbon smoke, choke streams with ash, kill all living creatures within reach, and create fire-prone brushfields where forest creatures do not dwell.

To our knowledge the only benefit from forest fires cited in the “literature” is exactly that: the conversion of forest to brush. To our way of thinking, conversion of heritage forests to incendiary tickbrush is a detriment, not a benefit. It is a hardship, a tragedy, a disaster, and a bummer imposed by nutjob government “scientists” and bureaucrats on innocent forests, owls, and other residents, including humans, many of whom are taxpaying citizens that butter the bread of said “scientists” and bureaucrats.

Here’s some more drivel from the DRP:

• Recovery Action 26:

… Fire management plans for some National Parks and designated wilderness areas permit naturally ignited fires to burn under specific prescriptions and are acknowledged as viable management practices under this action. Fire is an important ecosystem process that plays a key role in creating and maintaining some of the forest structure required by spotted owls and it is not the intent of this action to require that all fires in spotted owl habitat be suppressed.

In centuries past, frequent and regular anthropogenic fire gave rise to open, park-like forest/savannas. The remnant trees from those open, park-like forests constitute the old-growth in modern old-growth, i.e. spotted owl nesting stands. Most trees in modern old-growth forests are not old, but are new, younger trees that seeded in following the removal of the Native American residents who set the anthropogenic fires.

In that manner, fire (and the fire-setting human residents) did play a “key role in creating and maintaining some of the forest structure required by spotted owls.” However, allowing fires to burn today in forests deprived of anthropogenic fire for 100+ years and burgeoning with accumulated fuels is a recipe for disaster, tragedy, and the destruction of said forests, and the permanent loss of resident spotted owls and their habitat.

This is why the Northwest Forest Plan has been such a disaster. Garbage in, garbage out. Junk science kills.

The DRP for the NSO is more of the same deadly, toxic, arsonistic, failed, junk science.

The DRP for the NSO is a cry for help. The gummit has failed (whaddaya know?). It’s time to scrap not just the DRP but the entire Northwest Forest Plan.

Write your Congressperson. Do it today. Tell them to get on the stick.

SOS Forests correspondent Steve asks, “Why would the Federal Government breed and release wolf-dogs?”

A better question might be: why breed and release wolves, purebred or not, when there is a certainty that said wolves will kill livestock and threaten families? We could add, why shoot owls, incinerate forests, and cripple rural economies?

These are not easy questions to answer. Proponents of these government actions give many reasons, and not all of them are believable. Ostensibly however, and in the general case, proponents would probably claim they wish to “save the planet” or at least forestall what they envision as the pending environmental apocalypse.

Proponents of predator reintroductions, let-it-burn forest fires, and the general human exclusion from Nature have claimed altruistic objectives. They see these disasters as means to “good” ends, where “good” is variously defined as saving species from extinction, protecting ancient forests, promoting clean air and water, and other arguably morally positive outcomes.

In the case of spotted owls, 25 million acres were “set aside” for four stated reasons: to save spotted owls from extinction, to protect their special old-growth forest habitat, to provide a continuity of that habitat across the entire range of spotted owls, and lastly to protect the rural economies in the affected regions.

These objectives were deemed worthy and, in fact, necessary and required by law under the Endangered Species Act, as interpreted by a Federal judge. Proponents claimed the moral high ground, their arguments held sway, and the Northwest Forest Plan was implemented in 1994.

The elephant-sized tragedy is that the Plan failed. The Northwest Forest Plan failed catastrophically in every respect. None of the objectives were realized, but instead the problems were worsened. The spotted owl population crashed, vast chunks of habitat have been destroyed by infernos, and the economy across the region has been crippled, apparently permanently.

One cause for failure is that the Plan was based on incompetent and fraudulent pseudo-science. Hucksters posing as scientists sold a bill of goods to the public. The public lapped up the main thrust of the pseudo-scientific message: people are bad for owls; owls do better where there are no people.

Otherwise intelligent adults bought this myth because it conformed to the more general environmental belief that people are bad for Nature; Nature is better off when people are absent. Misanthropy, the hatred or distrust of humanity, is an important undercurrent in modern environmental philosophy.

Which leads to the first moral irony: can misanthropy ever be characterized as morally positive? We think not. Misanthropy and goodness are mutually exclusive. This is one of those questions where the devil is in the details. Tough love can be beneficial, but general hatred and distrust of humanity cannot be called tough love or anything else but anti-ethical.

Regardless, the second moral irony is more horrific: the Plan is a failure. If there was some “good” that was supposed to come out of the Northwest Forest Plan, when all was said and done, it didn’t. The Plan has failed in every respect.

Proponents who claimed moral high ground thirteen years ago have some self-criticism coming. The “worthy” objectives, for which so many suffered so much, never materialized. Where is the hue and cry from the self-proclaimed saviors of the species today, in the aftermath of thirteen years of their grand Plan, during which spotted owls have been going extinct at an ever more rapid rate?

The silence today from former proponents of the Northwest Forest Plan is deafening.

One is tempted to conclude that the moral imperatives expressed then by the proponents were as fraudulent as the supporting “science.” The hidden agenda, as it were, was not some complex moral positivism, but the same old paranoid misanthropy that has burdened environmental philosophy since environmental philosophy was invented. Thoreau, Muir, Foreman, Abbey, Gore, et al: misanthropes every one.

To be honest, as a rural resident and hence a victim of misanthropic environmentalism, I have lost most of my interest in the philosophic underpinnings of those who would dump wolves, burn forests, shoot owls, etc.

It no longer matters to me whether environmentalists claim moral high ground or not. I see it all as misanthropy, targeted misanthropy, or as we call it in our lighter moments, the war of pan-ethnic landscape dehumanization currently being waged against rural residents of the West by our own government.

A lot of suffering and hurt has come out of the Northwest Forest Plan. Nothing good has resulted. Whatever morality led to its creation has crumbled into dust. Why it happened is no longer important. The time has come to throw it out. That is the only morally defensible and responsible thing to do.

It’s time for a little lesson in wildlife population biology. In this post we answer the pressing question: why do animal populations often go up and down, or more precisely, expand and/or contract over time?

An Important Question

This is an important, relevant, and timely question. Our social structure, economy, liberties, and lives are being jerked around and terrorized in the name of wildlife population dynamics. The government insists on destroying outdoor America by mega-fire, blood-thirsty predators, and other catastrophes because Species are Endangered by population change, especially Extinction, which is a population change to zero organisms in a species.

No end of nutty theories have been proposed to shed light on the Extinction question, and solutions offered to save Endangered Species include curbside recycling, hybrid cars, incinerating heritage forests, blasting barred owls with shotguns, and feeding somebody else’s livestock and children to wolves.

Some clarity of thought is desperately required.

Continue reading this entry »

Spotted owls and barred owls; they are almost just the same, nearly identical in nearly every respect, both cute little balls of feathers. But one is worshipped by fanatical eco-Fascists, and the other is hated and has to be exterminated.

One is the epitome of life on Earth, a surrogate and symbol for healthy ancient forests, pristine and untrammeled by Clumsy Man, while the other is a blight, a plague, a foul fowl that must be killed off.

The killing will be humane, as humane as can be given the humans in charge. The evil-type birds will be beckoned with bait and then blasted to bits with buckshot.

This has to be done. Wildlife rules the roost in government today. Our government is of, by, and for the birds (and the wolves, coyotes, cougars, rattlesnakes, yellowjackets, and most especially, blood-sucking ticks). Human beings don’t enter the equation of government, except as pests that must also be exterminated, just like barred owls.

And what have barred owls done to deserve approbation and extermination? Absolutely nothing. The eco-Fascist propaganda says that barred owls are aggressive killers of spotted owls, yet that claim is pure lie. Great horned owls, peregrine falcons, and golden eagles kill and eat spotted owls, but barred owls do not.

There is no plan to exterminate great horned owls, peregrine falcons, and golden eagles. No, the plan is to kill barred owls, who are innocent of all charges.

The false charges against innocent barred owls are part of the lie-spackled eco-Fascist take-over campaign and regional war. The idea is to screw over humanity in a big way. The spotted owl is a surrogate for pan-ethnic cleansing. It is their goal of de-humanization of the landscape through oppression, bankruptcy, and tragedy that drives the sick twitch eco-Fascists.

Make no mistake about it. The barred owl blight is pure political propaganda posing as wildlife biology. Your home, job, family, heritage, and even your life have been targeted by the evil hearts and evil minds of eco-Fascists.

Eco-Fascist wackos think nothing of burning down forests, farms, ranches, sawmills, schools, subdivisions, and entire communities. Sometimes they set the fires themselves, with milk jugs filled with gasoline. They revel in the destruction and “hold rendezvous” in the ashes to celebrate the tragedies. Eco-Fascists think nothing of wild predators stalking and attacking human children, in fact, they encourage the sport. The more human children with their throats ripped out by wolves, the better.

And now the barred owl must be sacrificed on the eco-satanic altar of lies and evil. The particular lies about barred owls justify a 20-year stream of lies about spotted owls, lies that have crippled the economy and destroyed the forests of the Pacific Northwest.

Now the government of, by, and for the birds will be arming wye byes with shotguns and sending them into rural communities, neighborhoods, and adjacent forests to blast away at owls.

These aggressive killers must be stopped, and we are not referring to the cute little balls of feathers.

The latest “solution” proposed by the US Fish and Wildlife Service to the Spotted Owl Crisis is to arm Federal “biologists” with shotguns, send them onto public and private property, and have them blast away at owls.

That’s right, sports fans. The defective brain trust at USFWS plans to give loaded weapons to wackos, form owl death squads, and send them out here to shoot to kill owls.

In the name of the Environment!!!!

Get this: after 15 years of intense expert study (ha ha, that’s a laugh), after 15 years of an economic straightjacket strapped on millions of citizens, after 15 years of a half-trillion dollar forest set-aside program, the architects of “owl biology” are punting.

They don’t have a clue about spotted owls, or the hope of a clue, and so have devolved their “owl biology” into a nightmare of pointless violence and owl murder.

Continue reading this entry »

Before we analyze the new Draft Recovery Plan, we should review some history.

This past April 13th marked the thirteenth anniversary of the Inception of the Northwest Forest Plan. The NWFP has been and continues to be a catastrophic failure, a scientific abomination, and one of the most destructive things ever to happen to Pacific Northwest forests. Twenty-five million acres, most of the Federal forest land and nearly half the total land base west of the Columbia Plateau, are directly impacted. The economies of two states, Washington and Oregon, are also heavily impacted. The impacts to forests and people have been uniformly and overwhelmingly bad.

The NWFP, nee the Clinton Plan, nee the Interagency Spotted Owl Agreement, grew out of the Timber Summit held in Portland in 1993. The Timber Summit was hosted by Bill Clinton and Al Gore, and was the one and only domestic Summit Meeting in the history of the U.S.

Following the Timber Summit, the NWFP was drawn up in secret meetings by hand-picked Party faithful, not unlike the closed-door meetings of Hillary’s Health Care Task Force, Dick Cheney’s Energy Task Force, or the current Wildland Fire Leadership Council. The public was and is excluded, and any scientific voices that deviate from the pseudo-scientific Lamarckian eco-babble were and are excluded, too.

Continue reading this entry »