The spotted owl leaves the stage

The symbol of the fight to save old growth is giving way

Northern spotted owl. Photo by Oregon Wild.

The news that the northern spotted owl still is fading, one docile bird after another, from the great forests of the Northwest nearly two decades after the chain saws were mostly silenced is profoundly humbling.

They weren't supposed to go this way. All those authorities on the subject -- the researchers, environmentalists, lawyers, elected officials, editorialists -- insisted that if we stopped logging the Northwest's old-growth trees, we could save the spotted owl and countless other creatures that depend on undisturbed and ancient forests.

No one warned that the barred owl, a stronger, hardier owl species, would glide silently into the region and destroy some of those hopes. What do you know? It turns out that no one, not even those experts who spoke with all that assurance, fully understood the natural processes in Northwest forests.

Now, even though the region has shielded millions of acres of forests from logging, the number of spotted owls continues to plummet about 3 percent a year. The spotted owl is becoming a zoo animal in British Columbia. It's all but gone from Washington's Olympic National Park. And it's steadily dwindling across Oregon's forests.

When The Oregonian's Michael Milstein recently interviewed many of the Northwest's leading spotted owl biologists, he found them uniformly pessimistic about the owl's future. "At best, we're going to end up with some considerably reduced population," said Eric Forsman, a U.S. Forest Service biologist. "At worst, who knows? All species eventually go extinct. . . . That certainly could be the worst-case scenario, yes."

So what now? The first instinct of all the major interest groups is to retreat to their familiar corners in the owl debate. Conservation groups want more habitat protected. The wood products industry wants back in the public forests. The Bush administration wants to allow more logging, including old-growth, while cleansing some spotted owl habitat of competing barred owls by shooting them.

All these arguments have problems: The conservation groups demanding more protected areas for spotted owls are, in effect, doubling down on the original bet of the Northwest Forest Plan. The bet has paid off for many old-growth-dependent species but not, apparently, for the spotted owl. Furthermore, if this is all about habitat, why then are spotted owls disappearing from the Olympic National Park, which is as undisturbed as any place in the Northwest?

Meanwhile, many in the wood products industry and the Bush administration still won't accept that public opinion about the highest and best use of federal and state forests has fundamentally changed. With or without spotted owls, Northwesterners do not want to see a resurgence in logging old-growth on public forests. They want public forests managed first and foremost for clean water, fish habitat, wildlife, forest health, open space, views, recreation and solitude.

However, like the fortunes of the spotted owl, Northwest forests are rapidly changing. Global warming, drought, overstocked forests, disease and catastrophic wildfires require new and more creative responses than the same tired, reflexive debate over spotted owl protections. If there is any reason for optimism, it's this: the broad agreement that commercial logging has a place across much of the Northwest's thick second-growth forests.

Time has proved that the region's forest issues are far too complicated to understand by looking at them through the lens of a single bird species. Twenty years ago, road-building and unsustainable logging were the biggest threats to public forests. But now unhealthy, overstocked forests and catastrophic fire are much greater threats.

It would be premature, as well as illegal under the Endangered Species Act, to give up now on the northern spotted owl. But it is time for all sides to let go of the spotted owl as the symbol, the legal tool, the end-all, be-all of Northwest forest policy. That, too, just doesn't fly any longer.