Eric Forsman Oral History Interview, December 5, 2016

Sam Schmieding: Good afternoon, this is Dr. Samuel J. Schmieding, Oregon State University, College of Forestry, Forest Ecosystems and Society Department. I am here in the Forest Science Laboratory, U.S. Forest Service Forest Science Laboratory with Dr. Eric Forsman, Emeritus Research Wildlife Biologist, who was with the Forest Service for 35 years.

Eric Forsman: Not quite that long. I went to work full-time for the Forest Service in 1987 and I retired in 2016, no, I'm sorry, 2015. Yeah.

SS: What we are here doing an oral history interview that is centered on the Northwest Forest Plan and Eric's involvement in that, but not necessarily limited to that. We're going to also have some biographical background as we weave through his life story leading up to that main subject. This is part of the Northwest Forest Plan Oral History Project that is being funded by the Pacific Northwest Research Station of the U.S. Forest Service. Anyway, Eric, good afternoon.

EF: Good afternoon.

SS: Thank you for being willing to meet with me.

EF: I'm happy to be here.

SS: Anyway, I always start the interviews the same way, just basically, to ask where were you born and raised, and for you to give a biographical sketch of how it [career] all started out.

EF: Well, where I was born and raised is kind of a complex question, because my mother is from Oregon. Her parents came here on wagon trains, and so her family, you know, harkens back to the mid-1800's. My dad was a carpenter, but he was in the Navy in World War II. When he retired, they mustered him out here in Oregon. He met my mother on a blind date here in Oregon. They ended up going to Alabama, which is where my dad was from, and I was born there. They stayed there for like two or three years, and moved back here when I was four years old.

SS: So I take it, you don't remember a whole lot about the Deep South. Right?

EF: No, I don't remember much about the Deep South, but I'm so glad I wasn't raised there. I'm glad they came back to Oregon and I grew up down in Eugene.

SS: But think about it, you would have many national championships in football.

EF: I might have, but I suspect, if I had grown up in Alabama, I would have turned out to be a very different person than I am, so --

SS: That's possible. Anyway, but where in Oregon did you grow up?

EF: Okay, my mother was from Springfield. Her people were from that area.

SS: Okay.

EF: And so, when they moved back from Alabama, when I was like four, we settled in Springfield, lived there just for a couple of years. My dad then bought a farm out on the outskirts of Eugene, a seven-acre strawberry farm, out where the Beltline Highway is at now. None of those highways were there. It was a bunch of 00:01:00gravel pits and farm land and bean fields.

SS: But were you close to the river?

EF: We were fairly close to the Willamette River, yeah. We were just kind of a little bit east of the Willamette.

SS: What they call the Delta area now?

EF: Delta Ponds were right in our back yard. When we moved there, those ponds weren't there. The gravel company bought all that property, a lot of it at that time was agricultural, and proceeded to start mining gravel out of those ponds. So, all those ponds when I was a kid, were just being dug up.

SS: Do you remember when you were warned to not swim in the Willamette River because it was too polluted?

EF: I don't remember that so much.

SS: You don't remember that?

EF: My mother was scared to death we were going to drown out there because we were always out on the ponds in our boats, and we made boats and canoes and things, trapping out on the sloughs around there. But I had five brothers, there were six boys, and somehow, we all survived that era. But yeah, that was --

SS: Now, was your family involved in the timber industry in any way? You're from Springfield, so that's why that would be an obvious question.

EF: Not at that time. I mean, my mother's dad and quite a few of her relatives were farmers and loggers. My grandfather, for example, worked for a while in the logging industry. He was mainly a farmer, but they were sort of peripherally-involved. My dad's family, not at all. Dad was a carpenter. So, he used wood, but was not involved in the timber industry per se. And so, I guess I would say, not particularly involved in the industry. A lot of my brothers ended up being involved in the timber industry. My brother Tom, has been a timber buyer/seller all of his life, working in the industry. And my brother Richard, was the bridge and building foreman for Burlington Northern Railroad, so, he has 00:03:00been involved in transporting lumber or working with lumber all his life. My brother Joe, has owned a cedar mill over in Florence for pretty much his entire professional life, and he still owns that little mill and sells roofing products. My brother Pete, was a carpenter. Let's see, my brother Steve, worked in the mill down at, oh, gosh, I want to say, was it Sutherland? Anyway, it's a plywood mill. His job was a plugger. He put plugs in plywood all day long. So, yeah, you know, all of them.

SS: Do you remember Midgley's Millwork and Glass in Eugene?

EF: Oh, yeah, yes.

SS: That was my family's for 80 years.

EF: Oh, okay.

SS: We bought it from George Midgley back in World War I, my great-grandfather Sam, who I was named after.

EF: Wow, okay, yeah.

SS: So, some of our relatives probably crossed paths.

EF: Probably.

SS: Or bought stuff from each other.

EF: Yeah, yep.

SS: So, anyway, cool. So, now, you told me about you had some favorite places 00:04:00right by home there, the ponds where you probably fished and swam, and went in boats and things like that. But in terms of out beyond the valley, what places do you remember being especially impactful on how you saw nature, the Northwest, favorite places and experiences either in the mountains or the coast, or wherever?

EF: Oh gosh. Well, growing up, we didn't travel much. Mostly, dad was so busy making a living trying to raise six kids and keep his head above water, that he worked a lot. You know, he'd work during the week as a carpenter. He'd come home on the weekends and evenings and build houses. All the houses we lived in growing up, from the time I was probably, well, from the time I can remember, he built. He bought this old farm, and we lived in this rickety-old farm house, probably built in the, I don't know, '40s, with a wood stove and no insulation 00:05:00in the walls. And while we were living in that house, dad built a house next-door. This was about 1960 or so, he built a nice, single-story farm-style house. We tore down the old farm house, and moved into the new house. While we were living in that house, he shortly thereafter started building another house next to it. He subdivided the property, and built that house. We moved, sold the original house, and moved into the next one. We did that three times. He built, so we didn't have a lot of time to do much traveling.

The things I remember are like, for example, Dad took us a couple of times up to the Erma Bell Lakes, which is down on the south end of the Blue River District there between Blue River and Oak Ridge. And we'd hike back into the Erma Bells and fish.

SS: It's kind of on the south side of the Three Sisters Wilderness Area?

EF: It's on the south and west, yeah.

SS: Southwest side, yeah.

EF: Yes, close to French Pete, or south of French Pete. I can remember going with my grandfather up to Leaburg and fishing for trout in Leaburg Reservoir. You know, nothing very fancy.

SS: What we called "water-board park." [Eugene Water and Electric Board has hydroelectric power plant connected to dam/reservoir.]

EF: Yeah, yeah.

SS: Right.

EF: So those were some of the early experiences I had. But mostly, I and my brothers, but I think particularly me, spent a lot of time just running around the forests and urban areas where I grew up there in Eugene. At that time, it was all farm land, sloughs and gravel pits by the river. If you go there now, it's all a bunch of subdivisions. And I grew up trapping and fishing and hunting, thinking I wanted to be a trapper in Alaska. If you'd asked me when I was twelve-years-old what I was going to do, I probably would have said, "I'm going to Alaska to be a trapper." Because in those years, I thought mainly about 00:07:00harvesting things. I was always fishing. I was always out during the winter, and I would run a trap line. So, it was a pretty rural existence growing up. And I really just liked being out in the woods in nature doing stuff.

SS: Even right in the middle of the Willamette Valley?

EF: Well, yeah, but like I said, at that time --

SS: It was much wilder back then.

EF: Like all that area where I grew up, it was a bunch of bean fields. There were old hop yards, there was a lot of agriculture. In fact, my brothers and I all had summer jobs working picking beans, picking cherries, picking strawberries. That's how we made school money to pay for clothes going to school. But, it was a pretty wild area just in terms of a lot of sloughs and 00:08:00rivers and forests along those areas where a kid could run a trap line or shoot ducks or fish for bass. That's the kind of stuff we did. And for me, that gradually changed as I got older and got into high school. I became more interested in kind of watching things than trying to kill them.

SS: But how and why do you think that transformation took place?

EF: Oh, I don't know. I think I was always kind of interested in animals and trying to learn about what they did. But I had a couple of teachers along the way that influenced me.

SS: Did you go to North Eugene or South [Eugene]?

EF: I went to Sheldon. [High School]

SS: Sheldon, excuse me.

EF: Yeah. I was the first class that went all the way through Sheldon High School, and graduated in '66. He gave us a project where we had to go out and observe something and write a report on it. I went out in a gravel pit and watched ducks or something, I can't even remember now, but we had to do that. That kind of all of a sudden made me realize that maybe I might think about doing something other than trapping and trying to kill something. I might think about a career of trying to actually study something and learn about it. Then I had another teacher at Lane Community College, when I went to Lane for two years. In fact, he's still alive. I saw him the other day, Herb Wisner.

SS: This is shortly after LCC opened, about two or three years later?

EF: Well, I don't remember exactly. We were in a little shack over in Springfield.

SS: Oh, okay.

EF: They had these little campus places all over.

SS: So, they didn't even have the whole main campus?

EF: No, they had a bunch of little offices all over the place, some in Springfield, some in Eugene. I went to the one over in Springfield. It was kind of out there by where the mill sites were.

SS: What about this biology class you took?

EF: Yeah, it was just your basic biology, college entry-level biology class. And again, I was already kind of gravitating in that direction, I think. But he was just a good instructor, and again, gave us projects where we had to go out and do things and write reports. And on top of that, my mother was interested in birds. And so, I think when I was still in high school, she kind of infected me with the "bird nut" disease a little bit.

SS: Did you have some classic, maybe Audubon books in your house, or you read 00:11:00some classic piece of literature or saw some of the great art works like in the Audubon books, for instance, that made an impression on you?

EF: I don't remember that, you know, I just kind of got interested in watching birds, just because they were cool. They were interesting. In high school, I think probably about my senior year, I got really interested in owls. And I don't really know what it was that turned me on to them. I think it was because in our neighborhood we had lots of great-horned owls. In these sloughs and gravel pits, there are great-horneds all over the place. And every spring you'd hear them calling all over the place. And so, I started looking for nests and I actually found a couple. I remember, in my second year at Lane Community College, I found a nest right back behind our house, and I mentioned it to one of my instructors, and we ended up going back there. I drug him out in the field 00:12:00along with a couple other people. I can't remember who they were now, a couple bird nuts. And I climbed to the nest, and we banded the chicks in that nest. I remember getting whacked in the head by the female. In fact, it was one of the hardest hits I ever took from an owl. But anyway, I was kind of leaning in that direction.

SS: Obviously, yes.

EF: I got kind of fired up about birds, particularly owls. And I don't remember reading any particular literature.

SS: Because even cartoons, they depict owls as wise figures. You know where I'm going with this.

EF: No, I don't remember any of that. I just remember getting interested in these birds that hunted at night and were kind of these mysterious critters that most people didn't see or relate to particularly. At that time, I was reading 00:13:00bird books. I kept seeing and reading about spotted owls in bird books and was thinking, "Oh, they're here somewhere in Oregon," and really wanting to see one, but I didn't. I was a kid in high school without a lot of transportation. I just kind of read about them and was curious about them. And I knew that they were out there in the forests in Oregon, but at that time, nobody knew anything about them. They were just rarely ever seen. When I first got interested in spotted owls, there were like only twenty-eight previous sightings of spotted owls in Oregon, period. And most of those were just somebody happened to be out in the woods and saw one sitting there or something. There were no known nests.

SS: Well, they're pretty high up, most of them?

EF: No, they're down right in front of you.

SS: Oh, what's their average height?

EF: You mean, well, above the ground?

SS: Yeah.

EF: In the summer time, they're roosting right down ten feet off the ground.

SS: Okay, okay.

EF: If it's warm, they roost really low in the forest canopy, so they're hard to miss. But, up until that time, people, bird-type folks, didn't spend a lot of time out there in the old-growth forest. I'm sure the loggers saw them occasionally. But there were just very few published records. There had never been a nest located in Oregon. There was one case where someone saw juvenile spotted owls down near Trail, Oregon, but that was the only known case of observed reproduction in Oregon, when I first started getting interested in them. So, that just really intrigued me, being interested in owls and then 00:15:00knowing that there was this species out there we didn't know diddly-squat about.

SS: So, how would you describe the time before your professional career really started and let's take it up through your community college days, and that will be your point of reference there. But before that time, and obviously, you're coming at it now from a perspective of a career ornithologist essentially, or wildlife biologist. How would you see the evolution of ornithology and how birds were studied up until that point in the '60s when you started to become interested?

EF: Well, let me back up a little bit, too. In terms of my career, when I was a young kid, I thought I was going to be a trapper and end up spending my life hunting and trapping. By the time I got into high school, I also was interested in flying. And I ended up getting my private pilot's license when I was sixteen. It was in 1964. I was a junior in high school. For a while, I thought I was 00:16:00going to try to go on and be an aerobatic pilot, which is what I really liked doing.

SS: You wanted to do shows and stuff?

EF: Yeah, or I was going to end up getting a commercial license and be a commercial pilot. And so, the way I did that, I had a summer job working at Staff Jennings boat shop down in Eugene. And I think I was making a buck-and-a-quarter an hour when I left there. But I would take the money I had made working at the boat yard in evenings and weekends. And to fly the airplane that I was flying, cost like three dollars and fifty-some cents an hour to fly 00:17:00it. So, I'd work a few hours in the boat yard and make enough to go fly for an hour, and go out and fly. So, I started gradually accumulating hours in the airplane and got my pilot's license. And so, that was another thing I thought about doing for a while. Then, my dad being a carpenter, I also spent a lot of time working with him building houses. And for a while, I thought, "Oh, maybe I'll just be a carpenter," because I knew I could make a living doing that. So, I had all these sort of conflicting (laughs) careers that I wasn't sure what I was going to do.

SS: But there were some common threads here that led to you studying things that fly.

EF: But, well, I guess, yeah, I don't know. But, the flying thing was a lot of fun, but it was also very expensive.

SS: I can do the math. $1.25 an hour and $3.50, that's- EF: Well, if you'd been a rich kid growing up in a rich family, maybe you'd have had some support to help pay for going on and getting a commercial license, things like that. I 00:18:00didn't have that.

SS: That's pretty expensive to get one of those.

EF: It was expensive and my folks had more pressing concerns than paying for it.

SS: Well, with six kids.

EF: Yeah, so I ended up, gradually just in terms of my schooling, getting kind of sidetracked into the biology realm, and that's kind of where I went, once I got in there, but I still kept flying. In fact, I still do fly with my son. But, it's a hobby, it's not something that I do for a career. So, I kind of ended up going the biology route. But, you asked about just in terms of ornithology. What was your question?

SS: Oh, it's okay, don't worry, I mean, we can return to these themes. But my question was, in referencing how you said that the spotted owl, very little was known about it, and is couched in the broader historical vector of ornithology in general and what was being studied? Like, you can stay in the Northwest, or 00:19:00not? What was the interest of the discipline, let's say, up until the time you got involved?

EF: Well, I mean, an awful lot of what had been done up until that time was sort of natural history kinds of work. It's only more recently that we've gotten into genetics and more quantitative kinds of work. A lot of what had been done up until that time, particularly with owls, was natural history, and describing diets or describing home ranges or behavior.

SS: Descriptive narratives?

EF: Descriptive kinds of studies, right. For the most part, not particularly quantitative. There had been quite a bit of work [on some topics]. McArthur had published his paper on resource partitioning between song birds in the forest canopy and things like that. So, there had been some fairly quantitative work 00:20:00published like that. There had been a fair amount of work done on water fowl population biology, more quantitative kinds of stuff. But much of what had been done was more descriptive, more natural history kind of work, which is what I really liked. I liked trying to figure out these little mysteries about what owls ate, or how big their home ranges were, or what kinds of habitat they used.

SS: And this is from the very start, before you were really trained, correct?

EF: Yeah, those were the kind of things that really intrigued me. While I was still in high school, I was collecting great horned owl pellets, dragging them home and cleaning owl pellets on the table of the kitchen. So, I remember, I was doing that one time and we had somebody visit, I forget who it was. I think it 00:21:00was Harvey Waldron's dad, who was a professor at a community college in Bend, if I remember right. He stood there and watched me do that at the table, and he said, "You know, that's the kind of work that people do when they're working on scientific studies of species like that." And I thought, "Oh, that's interesting and kind of cool." So, those were the kind of things that really intrigued me, more so than doing hard science where you're doing a control and a treatment, and looking at cause-and-effect.

SS: So, you looked at it from the beginning anyway in a semi-inductive way. In other words, you went out and gathered this information experientially, visually, etc., and then you tried to create the model from that?

EF: Yeah, these were very much observational kinds of studies, as opposed to 00:22:00hard - [quantitative studies]

SS: It's kind of how historians, how we do stuff. We gather all this stuff and then we see what that tells us.

EF: Yeah, which is what a lot of biology has been. Much of what I've done has certainly been that way, as opposed to going out and setting up an experiment where you have a hypothesis, you do a treatment, measure, have a control, and you then look at the cause-and-effect. We've done some of that more recently. But much of what I did with spotted owls was purely observational kinds of studies, where you collect a bunch of data, run statistics, and try to determine what's important and what's not.

SS: Now, do you remember anything that you saw, witnessed, or experienced in nature, whether it's in the Willamette Valley, up in the Cascades, at the coast, what have you, where you witnessed something that was involved with how natural 00:23:00resources were being managed that made an impression on you, negatively or positively?

EF: Yeah. I didn't really notice this early on, but certainly by the time I was in college, I spent a lot of time out in the woods. Once I got wheels, got a car, and developed some friendships with other biologists, or other budding biologists, we spent a lot of time running around Oregon out in the woods or out in the desert, banding prairie falcons, that sort of thing, and it became very obvious to me very early on that we were cutting our forests very, very rapidly. And that had a huge-

SS: And this would have been in the late '60s and early '70s, right? EF: Yes, yeah.

SS: The peak of industrial forestry, or thereabouts. Close.

EF: Well, actually, I think the volumes kept increasing into the early '80s.

SS: Correct.

EF: But, yeah, those early years of running around all over western Oregon and in the deserts of eastern Oregon, really had a big effect on me, just seeing the landscapes changing so rapidly. Seeing extensive areas being harvested. I mean, the H.J. Andrews is a classic example. I was up there working in that area for the Blue River District from 1967 through '69. I came back and worked on a masters and Ph.D. up there part of the time, and they were harvesting on the Andrews pretty rapidly. And Watershed 1 is a classic example; there's a 200-acre clear-cut.

SS: Well, they harvested all the way up into the '80s. [Clearcutting on Andrews Forest was greatly curtailed by the 1970s.]

EF: Yeah, and they were planning on harvesting a lot more of it. The plan was to cut a lot of that. And so, in fact, to me, it's remarkable to go up there now 00:25:00and drive those roads and not be able to see anything. Back in the '60s and '70s, you could see all over the place because you were driving through these big clear-cuts, and you could see the ridges and see the landscape. Now, you drive up there, and you're driving through a sea of second growth, young forest, and you can't see out. It's very different.

SS: What specific things bothered when you were thinking that this is not sustainable? What were the particulars? I mean, obviously, you were a bird guy and you were an animal guy. Was it like the little furry creatures of the forest are all getting killed, or what was your impression?

EF: That was kind of the latter. Back in those days, I really wasn't thinking in terms of sustainability, so much as I was thinking, "God, these are places where spotted owls live, and they are cutting the heck out of it very rapidly. And we have no idea what the effect is in terms of how these species are responding." 00:26:00That was kind of my gut reaction, as I'm driving all over the Blue River District, and there's just clear-cuts everywhere. You can't go anywhere without hearing a yarder whistle, literally. And we have no idea about all these species that are living out there. At the time, I was thinking particularly of spotted owls, because that's the one that got me fired up. But, I kept thinking, "Wow, if we keep this up, we're probably going to lose these things and we won't even know."

SS: As you were being trained, starting from community college through your eventual undergrad, master's and Ph.D., do you remember reading about American environmental history, and, shall we say, cases of extinctions and other events in the past as you were becoming trained?

EF: Well, I think where it really hit home was when I first read Aldo Leopold's Sand County Almanac. And that probably was my first year at OSU, in '68, I guess.

SS: Which essay do you remember made the biggest impact? I mean, there's a bunch of them in there.

EF: Oh, man, yeah, I don't know, if it's "Thinking Like a Mountain" or whatever, but yeah, all of them. I don't know if you've read it, but his "Ode to the Passenger Pigeon," published in a separate little book, is gut-wrenching. I think that more than anything else, got to me for some reason. I read a lot of other stuff in those years, but that really kind of brought me around.

SS: So, take me through your education. Now, you touched on LCC briefly. You said that you took a biology class. Do you want to say a little bit about that 00:28:00mentor, but especially your undergrad and even graduate studies, and tell me about how your studies progressed, how you became focused on certain things, and who were your most important mentors?

EF: Again, I think by my senior year in high school, I definitely was thinking about a career in biology. And beginning to realize I was a horrible student in high school, I just never quite knew what I was going to do.

SS: Did you play sports, too?

EF: Not really.

SS: No?

EF: I was a runner in junior college, but in high school, no. I was kind of a loner. I kind of did my own thing. In fact, I hung out mostly with adults in high school. I hung out with bird folks from the local Audubon chapter like Larry McQueen, who was a pretty famous artist. He still lives in Eugene. I hung out with Larry and Herb Wisner and some of the bird guys from Portland. We went on Christmas bird counts with these guys. In high school, I think it was senior 00:29:00year I took this biology course, from, I think it was Mr. Favier. That was his name.

SS: At Sheldon?

EF: At Sheldon, yeah, and I really enjoyed that class. I liked going out and doing this little study we had to do. You know, it's just something, I thought, "Hey, this is fun." This keeps me out in the woods and, you know, it was cool. I got to Lane Community College, and again, at that point I decided to major in biology. This was in 1966 through '68. I was there at Lane Community two years. And took mainly biology courses. In those two years, I was also working summers up on the Blue River District to make money to pay for my college. I was on trail crews and recreation crews, then transferred to OSU in 1968, and was there 00:30:00until 1970. I was there two years, for my junior and senior years, in the wildlife program. Once I got up here, I had a number of mentors in Fish and Wildlife, old Professor Kuhn and Jay Long, were kind of the old-timers over there, and other cool, old dudes. There were many big-game type biologists, not particularly interested in non-game forest wildlife. In fact, I remember Jay Long in front of one of the classes I took. About old-growth forests, he said, "They're a biological desert." (Laughs)

SS: Which was kind of the stereotype at the time, right?

EF: Yeah, because there's no deer and elk in those forests.

SS: Quite a narrow, humanistic perspective.

EF: But the other professor that I interacted with then was Howard White, who was head of the Oregon Cooperative Wildlife Research Unit over in Fish and 00:31:00Wildlife. I started talking to Howard about spotted owls because I was interested in them, and I mentioned to Howard there was this species out here that we really don't know anything about, you know, this owl. And he kind of perked up, because Howard at that time was one of the first biologists here to get interested in non-game forests, or non-game wildlife, particularly as they related to old growth. He was interested in cavity-nesting woodpeckers, for example. He was interested in things like that, and that there was concern that cavity-nesters might be negatively impacted by harvest and conversions to young forest.

Then I started to talking to him about this owl that nested in big cavities, and he really got interested. And I don't remember talking to him so much about a 00:32:00graduate project, it was just talking about this interesting owl and the fact that we didn't know anything about it. At the same time, I met Richard Reynolds and Chris Maser. Chris was a grad student then, and a little older than I was. Richard had just come back from Vietnam and was interested in goshawks and accipiters, forest birds. I started running around with those guys, and they were a little older than I was, but very much mentors. They had more experience than I had, they had a little more. In terms of Reynolds, he'd been off and fought in a war, and come back. So, I looked up to those guys. But they were also very interested in what I was interested in. Chris Maser was a tree vole maniac.

SS: So, that was your entry to tree voles? Because you became interested in 00:33:00those later, too.

EF: Yep, Chris really was interested in tree voles. He was out there collecting trees voles and writing his master's thesis, but he didn't particularly like to climb trees. I liked climbing trees, so I would go out with Chris and help him collect tree voles. Reynolds, he was just a complete maniac in terms of accipiters. He was very interested in goshawks, and he and I ran all over western Oregon in those early years. This would have been 1969-70, looking for goshawk nests. I was trying to find spotted owls. I mean, we camped in the snow up at Box Canyon looking for spotted owls in the middle of winter. We were just all over the place. We went over and rappelled off of Fort Rock trying to band prairie falcons, with Reynolds and Wes Pike and other guys that I knew. So, I ran into a bunch of these guys in college that had similar interests.

SS: Kindred spirits.

EF: Kindred spirits. That just kind of got me even more fired up about trying to do something with spotted owls in terms of a more detailed project.

SS: And did that really start during your master's program?

EF: No, it started as an undergraduate.

SS: Okay, okay.

EF: Yeah, it started with Howard White and Richard Reynolds, in particular. This would have been '68, well, '69-'70, talking to those guys, getting Howard fired up about spotted owls. And Reynolds and I started actually searching for spotted owls together, and finding a few. This was, let me back up a little bit. Before I really got too involved with, well, actually, it was about the same time. In 1969, it was my third year working on a summer job for the Forest Service. I was 00:35:00up at Box Canyon guard station, stationed there in late summer at the peak of the fire season, and going out and driving up and down the roads during the day and talking to campers in the campgrounds, hiking into the Erma Bell Lakes to check on campers there. But I was sitting there in the guard station one evening and I heard something "barking" up on the hill, it sounded sort of (makes noise). I thought, "That's a weird-sounding dog." Then, it began to dawn me that, hey, that sounds like what I've read about spotted owls do, you know.

SS: So, this was your first experience? EF: That was my first experience.

SS: It was the call of a spotted owl.

EF: Yeah, I'd been looking for them for years, not really knowing what I was doing. But I'm sitting there on the front porch of the guard station in the evening, and all of a sudden they start calling on the hill right above me. And I said, "Oh shit, that sounds like a spotted owl." So, I hiked down the road, it was down by the meadow there at the guard station, and they were right up on the hill to the west of the meadow there calling. I started trying to hoot back at them, and I was pretty much an amateur, but they, the spotted owls, respond to 00:36:00almost anything that's close to their calls. And they eventually followed me all the way back to the guard station. I had them right there in the trees over the Box Canyon guard station. After that, I kept hearing them all summer, off and on. They'd call up on the hills around the guard station, and I'd gradually practiced calling and gotten better at it. And again, this was in 1969.

So, when I went back to school my senior year, in 1970, '69-'70, Reynolds and I started running around looking for spotted owls, going out and doing calls. We'd go up to Tombstone Summit, and found them all up there around Tombstone, over just to the east of there on Indian Creek. We found out there in McDonald Forest and a couple different sites. So, again, this was while I was still an undergraduate.

SS: What was the literature you had to go on at that time about the spotted owl?

EF: Very little. You know, Gabrielson and Jewett's Birds of Oregon had a short 00:37:00section in there. There were a few published papers. Dickey had published a paper in California. Joe Marshall had published papers on finding spotted owls in California, and he published one on spotted owls in Arizona. They were all just little, short papers. They found a few pellets, and they looked at the diet.

SS: Anecdotal?

EF: Oh, yeah, just observational kinds of stuff. But, nothing very detailed. So, yeah, once we found them and started looking for them, I just got really fired up, and started talking more and more to Howard White about possibly doing a Master's study. So, I was all primed and ready, but I was also number nine on the draft list. And in August of 1970, I got drafted. And so, that changed my 00:38:00plans. I spent two years in the Army as a medic. They shipped me over to Germany. I spent about thirteen months in Germany working out of a dispensary, doing sick call in the morning [screening people asking for medical attention] and working on the emergency ward at night occasionally. So, I spent two years in the Army.

SS: But you never went to 'Nam?

EF: No. They drafted me, and I didn't volunteer for anything. I just went where they sent me, and they sent me to Germany. They wasted a whole bunch of money training us. Sent me to Germany, and eighteen months into my two-year hitch, they said, "We're giving all you guys an early out. We don't have enough to keep you guys busy." They sent us back to the States. So, I actually spent eighteen months in the Army. The last few months, I spent most of my time doing exit physicals for guys that got drafted along with me, and getting them processed 00:39:00back out of the Army. It was right at the end of Vietnam, and the Army drafted way more than they could use.

SS: During the time in Germany, how did you keep your interest and love for birds and biology alive? Did you do a little observational stuff over there?

EF: For someone like me, they couldn't have hardly sent me to a better place. They sent me to a little town, Wildflecken, Germany. It's a small community out in the middle of nowhere in the eastern part of West Germany, close to the Czechoslovakian border. It's all forested, with rolling, conifer-covered hills. It looks much like western Oregon. During the week you'd get up every morning and go pull sick call. Sick call is when whoever comes in and claims they're 00:40:00sick, you've got to process them, and determine that they really are sick. You send them to a doctor. If they're not, you give them some aspirin and send them on their way.

But, I'd do sick call in the morning and then do whatever ward work they had in the afternoon, and then your evenings, but particularly your weekends, were usually free. On those weekends, a lot of the guys would go drinking, and I would hike the hills around the base. I'd take off in the morning and hike ten miles over hill and dale to one of the little hostels on the hilltop, where you could have a beer and come back. And, so, it was really nice country. It had all been logged many, many times. The forests were very manicured, but there were still things like the big black woodpecker, the Schwarzspecht, and there were owls and all kinds of cool birds. I can remember going out at night and calling 00:41:00up the long-eared owls out behind the barracks. I kind of just got through it by spending as much time as I could off-base hiking the hills around the base.

SS: Channeling your inner John Muir.

EF: I also liked to climb. And so, I made one trip with a fellow GI, who was also a climber, down to the Alps, and we spent a week hiking and climbing in the Alps.

SS: The Alps in Switzerland?

EF: We were in Switzerland right on the border with Italy.

SS: Oh, so you were in the real high stuff then?

EF: Oh, yeah, we were up in the high Alps.

SS: Close to Monte Rosa and the Matterhorn and all that?

EF: Yeah, we were looking right at the Matterhorn. We were climbing just down the road a-ways from there. So, I spent a lot of time running around the mountains and the hills of Germany whenever I could get away from the base. But 00:42:00the whole time I was there, I was corresponding with Richard Reynolds, a grad student back at OSU, and with Howard White, and in a couple different letters between me and Howard, talking about possibly doing a master's study when I got out. Howard was enthusiastic about doing that. I had pretty good grades when I was at OSU, so he basically said, "Yeah, once you get out, I'll take you on as a grad student."

SS: So, you come back here and you start your masters in '72?

EF: I got out in March of '72, in April of 1972, I was in the field doing spotted owl surveys.

SS: So, you didn't wait at all?

EF: I didn't have time to wait. It was the breeding season. You had to get out there then. I got back out of the Army, and normally, when you do a master's study or a Ph.D., you do a big, long research review, you write up a proposal and you do all the steps. Okay? I got out of the Army and it was the end of 00:43:00March, spotted owls were starting to breed in March and early April. I got back to Howard, "We've got to hit the field," and he said, "Go for it." And so, without a proposal, without anything, I just hit the field, and my assignment was find spotted owls. We need to find out what's going on with this species. We've got to find out how common they are, we need to find out where they are, we need to find out where they're nesting; basically anything we can find out about the species. We've got to do it and we've got to do it quick, because breeding season basically runs from late March through the end of August, so we didn't even have time to do the usual things that you should have done if you're doing a master's study [proposal/plan in advance of field work].

SS: Well, create some kind of a framework model/methodology, etc.

EF: Oh, yeah. I don't remember doing it, maybe I did a little of that, but I hit the field running in the summer of 1972. I spent the whole summer out there just 00:44:00doing surveys all over western Oregon. And by all over, I mean, all over.

SS: Coast Range and Cascades?

EF: Coast Range and Cascades. I had a trap line, basically. I went all the way down to Medford, over to the coast, over at Bend and Coquille, and I had study sites down at Gold Beach. I'd just do surveys here and there, trying to find a sample of spotted owls that we could collect data from.

SS: And was this on a combination of proprietorships? In other words, Forest Service, BLM, private, state. Or how did that go?

EF: At that time, it was predominantly on federal lands, just because that's what I had access to. I did some surveys on non-federal lands, but the vast majority of it was Forest Service and BLM, because that's where the old growth was, for one thing, and then it was just easy access. You didn't have to ask permission. And, I met a bunch of people very quickly in the agencies that were 00:45:00also very interested and helpful, like Bill Nietro at Medford BLM, and Charlie Thomas at Eugene BLM. These are biologists that were working for the agencies and that were just enthusiastic about somebody caring about what was going on in their lands, and wanting to get out there and figure things out.

SS: Because at that time, there was very little energy.

EF: No.

SS: Going into-

EF: Non-game wildlife, at all.

SS: But basically, any of the things that the "-ologists" became involved in later, especially within the post-Earth Day paradigm shift in terms of from humanism to more biocentrism? That was just really starting to take place within the agencies, right?

EF: Oh, yeah.

SS: It's just the beginning of it, correct?

EF: Yeah, oh, yeah. I can remember in '67 or '68, there was a biologist on the 00:46:00on the Blue River District and he was the first biologist on the Willamette National Forest. [Could not recall name] He ended up going on to be one of the big-name biologists. Anyway, it was very unusual for a district or even a forest to have a biologist on staff. It simply wasn't done earlier.

SS: But usually out of the PNW Station here in the Northwest, at that time, or out of Washington or somewhere else?

EF: Or the region, yeah. [Regional Office of national forest system]

SS: The region, yeah, right. [Region 6 in Pacific Northwest]

EF: Yeah, but on the districts, very few. Like I said, Blue River was the first one in the Willamette, if I remember right, to have a biologist. And when they did have a biologist, it was usually a big-game biologist; it was not a non-game type.

SS: Deer and elk and big fish, etc.? Right?

EF: Helping them regenerate clear-cuts to provide forage for elk or deer. It was definitely not a non-game biologist. That was pretty darn rare. So, when I first started running around looking for spotted owls, me and these biologists on the districts, a lot of them were pretty excited because it was something they really hadn't thought about much or been involved in. So, I started just running all over. Once they found out that I was interested, they started paying attention, listening to their foresters, who came in and said, "Oh, yeah, I saw one of those stupid owls out there today." So, they started reporting to me that we found another one of your birds. I'd make a trip down to Medford or wherever to go out and see another site. In that first couple years, we just started to accrue a sample size that was big enough to begin to learn something in terms of diet and distribution.

SS: What did those first couple years tell you in your burgeoning database about this animal?

EF: Well, basically, what it told us, and Howard picked up on this pretty darn 00:48:00quick, was that these birds were more common than we thought. We still thought they were pretty rare, but they were certainly more common than the data prior to when we started looking would have suggested. And that they were definitely most abundant in old forests, and that most of the sites we found them at were getting cut very rapidly. It was just obvious. You'd go out there and you'd find another nest site, you'd start to look around, there was blue paint everywhere. I mean, there were just units laid out all over in these old forests where these owls occurred.

SS: Now, the owls that would be in a cut area, the adults would be able to escape, theoretically, but a lot of times there would be young that would be lost, I would take it, right?

EF: Well, I don't know how often that happened. I mean, it certainly happened occasionally. But, the birds are mobile. Even young birds, after they're a few weeks old, can fly.

SS: Can fly, okay.

EF: And I think there was one occasion I can remember back where they actually found a juvenile bird that was killed by a tree that was felled in a logging unit. But I think that kind of stuff was pretty rare. But, certainly even, the adults can move, but they're also territorial, and if they're forced to move because you harvest their habitat, at some point, there's no place for them to move to without competing with the neighbors. That's what we were concerned about in those early years. We just started finding these birds and every time we'd find another pair, we'd find out that we've got three sales planned in that area. That kind of thing.

So, we got concerned. In fact, the first summer, we got concerned. But even before that, Howard, after talking to me and talking to others, he was pretty concerned about spotted owls in general. Even though we didn't know much about 00:50:00them, what we did know was that harvest rates were incredibly high, that the focus was on harvesting old forest, converting it to young forest, and we were concerned that that was going to create problems for things like spotted owls. Howard actually started writing letters in 1973 to the [Oregon] State Director of BLM and others, "We are concerned about this species, that I've got this grad student, he just spent his first summer out there and, based on what he's seeing, we're worried that this could potentially be a problem, if we don't pay attention." Just after that first field season. At that same time, things were happening - the Endangered Species Act was passed in 1973.

SS: '73. So, it was being legislated when you were in the field?

EF: Oh, yeah.

SS: Literally, and that would be in committee and all that kind of thing.

EF: Oregon had put together a potential endangered species list, you know, and the spotted owl was on that list. So, just a whole bunch of things were happening. The National Forest Management Act was passed in 1976, so there was a bunch of legislation going on that was beginning to get people's attention in terms of worrying about species like spotted owls and marbled murrelets, things like that. So, in 1973, right at the end of that first field season, or kind of right in the middle of it, the State Director of the Department of Wildlife, I think it was the Oregon Game Commission at the time, pulled together a committee, called the Oregon Endangered Species Task Force. Actually, it was somewhat more involved than that. But, anyway, that was the name that I remember. But their job was to try to deal with long-term plans for species that 00:52:00might be listed as threatened.

SS: They also used that term threatened, as well. Endangered or threatened, they were kind of interchangeable before the ESA became codified in culture and politics. Right?

EF: Right, and there were actually two different committees. One was to focus on terrestrial species, one was supposed to focus on aquatics. The Oregon Endangered Species Task Force, as early as 1973, was beginning to make recommendations for protecting spotted owls, after only one field season.

SS: Now, do you think that was an outgrowth of the state-level progressivism that came out of the Tom McCall years? [Oregon Governor, 1967-75]

EF: Well, certainly possible.

SS: This was just at the end or after that.

EF: Maybe. In those years, the early '70s, there was this groundswell of optimism in terms of our ability to manage for threatened and endangered species, and be a little more holistic in terms of how we manage forests. 00:53:00Certainly, the agencies weren't ready for that. They were still back in the mode of let's hire all these engineers and foresters and road crews to try to get the "cut out." [Maximum board-feet - harvested timber]

SS: And economists.

EF: And economists to try to meet the annual cut. That was the focus. Initially, they were not particularly open to having a bunch of "-ologists" telling them that you need to be worried about more than just board-feet. But there certainly was a window there when the Congress was passing legislation that focused on environment and endangered species and things like that. They were more open to dealing with things like that, or at least with talking about how we might do a better job. That window is now closed, I would say. There was just a lot going 00:54:00on in the early '70s, and a lot going on in terms of legislation, and just an openness to try to deal with things.

SS: Going back to your family. Now, you told me about your brothers and your father, and being of a different generation in terms of culture. Do you remember some interesting conversations as you developed in your early career about you doing all this loner stuff out in the woods and studying birds, and they were doing their thing?

EF: Oh, no. I think my whole family was always pretty supportive of what I did. Even my brothers. I was the only one that got a four-year college degree of all my brothers. Most of them ended up going to work fairly early-on, and trying to make a living. They were always very supportive of me. The only times they weren't was when I did something stupid, like when I made some dumbass comment 00:55:00in the press. I got quoted in a newspaper one time after one of the big fires. The reporter was asking me about salvage logging after a fire that was caused by arson. And I made this comment, and this was just really stupid, "Well, you know, if we allow them to salvage in arson-caused fires, that might encourage some crazy logger to go out there and set fires." And I got quoted in the newspaper. And my brother, Tom, who is normally pretty reasonable, he's the timber guy. He called me up, "You fuckin' asshole," (laughs) "What are you doing?" Yeah, that was just dumb. I got reprimanded. Actually, I was working for the Forest Service when I did that.

SS: You mean, in the '70s or the '80s?

EF: It would have been in the '80s, yeah.

SS: Oh, okay, this was later, okay.

EF: And I got quoted in a newspaper. The reporter felt bad because, well, we 00:56:00both should have known better. But, yeah. And so, I got reprimanded, and I very quickly realized what I had done. And I wrote a letter to the editor saying I've got a lot of respect for loggers, I didn't mean, blah, blah, blah. It was just stupid, yeah.

SS: Did your brother forgive you?

EF: Oh, yeah. They have. I think especially after I did a public mea culpa. And kind of like I say, I submitted a long letter to the newspaper saying, "Hey."

SS: Mr. Garza?

EF: I think it was with him.

SS: So, anyway, continue on, where you were?

EF: Oh, man, I don't remember where I was.

SS: You were backtracking on the newspaper.

EF: Yeah, I'm trying to think of what that was, though, I've kind of lost my train of thought. I was talking about the early '70s and just sort of the 00:57:00dynamics that were going on then.

SS: But also, what you were doing study-wise, and also how it related to land management and what you were witnessing?

EF: All I was doing those first years, from '72 to '74, basically [observing and collecting data]. About a year into my study after that first field season, I actually got a proposal together so that I could sit down with my committee, and got the proposal approved. We formalized what I was doing, but, it was still pretty much an observational kind of study where my goals were to find as many spotted owls as I could, and to survey as broadly as I could in western Oregon to document distribution and abundance. And to find as many nests as I could find, to document what sorts of trees they were using for nesting, to collect 00:58:00pellets so that we could look at their diet, to collect basic behavioral information on when the young came out of the nest, how long they were cared for by the adults, when they dispersed, what kinds of habitat they occurred in, and whether they occurred in old forests or young forests. Those were the kinds of things I focused on. It took me basically three years, '72, '73 and '74, those three field seasons, to collect the data and get a thesis written.

SS: What was the name of your thesis, do you recall?

EF: "Biology and Distribution of the Spotted Owl in Oregon," I think it was. Something like that.

SS: But that must be simple methodologically compared to what you did later, but still an important document because there wasn't a lot there before.

EF: Oh, yeah.

SS: It was the foundational document just because you did it.

EF: Yeah, well, it was the first large-scale study of the spotted owl anywhere. 00:59:00Okay, it was the first really detailed look at kind of how what made 'em tick. And there were other people that got involved shortly after I did. Gordon Gould in California started doing surveys in 1973. A few guys up in Washington, Howard Postovit, Harriet Allen, and Larry Brewer. They started doing surveys in Washington in about 1976, something like that. So, there were others getting involved, but none of them did a formal master's project where they actually published the results in a thesis. But while we were doing that those first three years, the Oregon Endangered Species Task Force was busy working away trying to come up with recommendations for how to manage this species. And as early as late 1973, they suggested that in Oregon, all known sites should be 01:00:00protected with a core area of at least, I think it was 300 acres. Okay. And the BLM immediately said, "No, we won't do that, we want you to set some target for Oregon. We don't want to just say protect all known pairs."

SS: You mean, a target of how many?

EF: So, how many pairs.

SS: In other words, what is a viable population level?

EF: Well, they weren't talking about viable populations back then, but they were saying, "Okay, if we've got to do something, tell us how many." And so, the Oregon Endangered Species Task Force came right back and said, "Okay, we recommend 100 pairs in Oregon, each one of which you need to manage for 300 acres of old forest as a core area." Okay, so that was kind of the first real plan, and that was in 1973. Then it just sort of ramped up from there.

SS: Now, that only applied to which lands, though?

EF: To federal lands.

SS: To federal lands. Okay.

EF: Yeah, yeah. At that point, nobody was talking about non-federal lands requirements for owls. It was, yeah, I'm trying to think, by 1976, they were proposing 400 pairs on public lands in Oregon.

SS: The same agency?

EF: Yeah, well, the Oregon Endangered Species Task Force.

SS: The task force.

EF: Yeah, this task force. So, things ramped up pretty quick. And by 1976, we also had data on their home range size, so we were beginning to learn something about how much.

SS: That had to do with your work, as well as other people that were starting to do work, too?

EF: It had to do with Ph.D. work we did on the Andrews.

SS: So, after your masters was finished, you immediately continued in the Ph.D. track, and basically, you did a more intense, in-depth study. Correct?

EF: Right, correct. Howard White, who was my major prof for my master's study, he and I kind of talked about doing a Ph.D. and agreed that that would be a good thing to do. I mean, there was a lot of interest in spotted owls by 1975-76. Howard talked to the Forest Service and the BLM and was able to get funding. And so, I went right from finishing a master's thesis in 1975 to doing a Ph.D. In fact, the ink was barely dry before I was in the field up on the Andrews in, it would have been April of 1975, putting radio collars on spotted owls. Because we decided that, okay, by that time, we had a lot of data on basic biology on what they ate, where they nested, what kinds of habitat they occurred in, kind of a 01:03:00rough idea of what their distribution was, but we didn't know. [In-depth data] What the agencies were all saying was, "If we've got to manage these damn things, how much habitat do we have got to give 'em?" And we kept saying, "Well, we don't know. We don't have any data." There had never been a radio telemetry study done on spotted owls.

And, in fact, radio telemetry back in those days, was kind of in its fledgling years. I mean, Tom Dunstan back at Minnesota, had put radio collars on some barred owls. They're a big, clunky radio collar. They had done a little work on barred owls. I had read about those studies, and gotten pretty excited about trying to do something like that with spotted owls. And I started talking to Howard about it. We were faced with this demand from the agencies that, if you're going to make us manage these things, how many acres do we have to give them? So, we said, fine, we'll do a radio telemetry study. It'll be a lot of fun.

We got money to go up to the H.J. Andrews and do a one-year telemetry study. We went into it thinking, "Okay, what we know about barred owls is they have home ranges that are about, you know, 900 acres-1,000 acres, something like that, so probably spotted owls are similar." They had done some studies in Europe where they'd look at tawny owls, which are a similar species. And they had little tiny home ranges of 60-100 acres, something like that. So, we thought, "Okay, we're going to put these transmitters on spotted owls and find that they have home ranges that are probably like a barred owl." And so, we did that. We went out in April of 1975, up on the Andrews. We were hoping to get about ten birds radio-collared. We ended up getting eight in May and June of 1975, or, I'm sorry, April to June of 1975. We tracked them, I tracked them for that whole winter. I was up there by myself and I tracked those eight birds over the course 01:05:00of the winter until June of 1976.

SS: Did they even have a trailer there yet? EF: No.

SS: People were still staying down at Blue River here in the Ranger District area, right?

EF: Well, there was nobody up there.

SS: I'm talking about down in Blue River town.

EF: Yeah, they were still --

SS: Where the actual ranger district was and that was where that lodging for the Forest Service people was, but you were up in the sticks.

EF: Yeah, there was really in those years, I mean, by 1975, the big "old-growth biome" or whatever-they-called-it project [Coniferous Forest Biome] had happened up there on the Andrews. People had done some survey work, like I remember Ron Nussbaum was up there looking at herps [amphibians and reptiles] and things. But there really wasn't a whole lot going on research-wise. It was a pretty quiet place. And yeah, I spent the whole year up there. I moved out there with my trailer. Chuck Meslow had gotten a little old sixteen-foot travel trailer from 01:06:00some place.

SS: So, you did have lodging. You weren't in a tent?

EF: I did. Yeah, I parked it out there. I initially parked it up on that little spur road, if you go past McRae Creek, on up to Lookout Creek, there's a little spur that goes up on a hill right there and dead-ends in an old landing. And I parked it up there for the first few months and then the snows hit in late September of October, and I was getting snowed in up there. So, I pulled it back down, and I parked it in the big gravel storage area which is now where the main admin site is.

SS: Right.

EF: All it was then was a big pile of gravel and a turnaround. I parked it there and spent the winter there in my trailer. Basically, once we'd get the radios on, my daily schedule consisted of working, as soon as it got dark in the evening, I would start to track the birds. I would go until whenever I got tired 01:07:00or till daybreak, go sleep a few hours, get up in the afternoon, hike in on one or two birds to collect pellets. I'd go in and I'd find the bird in the roost, flag the roost -- this is during the winter -- and go back a day or two later to the roost and see if I could get a pellet, because that's the only way you can get pellets in the wintertime. But, anyway, I spent that first year out there doing that, going 24/7 just about. SS: Now, when you did your earlier study, which was kind of a broad demographic study across the whole, big parts of Oregon, you probably never got a chance to know particular birds. I mean, you put radio collars on some of them, but in terms of this is the first time that you were involved with specific sets of birds?

EF: You'd get really attached to your birds, yeah.

SS: Well, tell me a little bit about that?

EF: Basically, you throw a transmitter on them, and the transmitters we used were pretty big and heavy, so, you worry constantly about having the bird being affected by that transmitter, not being able to forage, or getting somehow damaged by the transmitter rubbing on it. These are pretty obtrusive things you're doing to a bird. And so, you worry about that constantly. You worry about having your bird die, because, obviously, if they die, you can't get data. You worry about affecting their movements so that you're underestimating their home range areas.

SS: Because of the thing that's on them, right?

EF: Because they're lugging a big-old twenty-gram transmitter around. Plus, you go in you see them every day just about, walking in, finding them in their roostery in the middle of winter up there. You watch them breed and bring up young, and you watch the young come out of the nest. You get very involved with your animals. You can't help it, but you're there with them 24-hours-a -day just 01:09:00about. But, just as a scientist, you're worried about getting enough data to estimate home ranges. My schedule was, I'd find a bird, I would sit on it, taking a location every fifteen minutes, and collect data on it. So, that was the kind of nighttime schedule that I kept.

SS: Do you think they got to know you?

EF: Oh, yeah, they get used to you being around.

SS: So, they don't just fly away. After a while, it's like, "Oh, it's that guy."

EF: Yeah, exactly. Owls are not very afraid of humans to begin with. But when you sit with them all the time every day, they see you hiking under their roost and picking up pellets. Yeah, you just get to be kind of one of those slow terrestrial things that they don't much care about. But, yeah, that's what we 01:10:00did for that year. I came back, and at the end of that field season, started to analyze that data. We knew before then, but at the end of the year, we realized these guys have really huge home ranges. They don't have these little dinky home ranges like a barred owl, they have home ranges that are 2,500 to 4,500 acres. They are three or four times or five times the size of a barred owl's home range.

SS: Is that because of their diet and their needs for foraging?

EF: They're very much a specialized forest predator. They feed on things that occur at fairly-low densities. Flying squirrels, for example, and red tree voles. When you're that much of a specialist, you have to forage over a big area to get enough food. If you're a barred owl, barred owls eat everything. They eat insects, they eat lots of snails and salamanders and crayfish and birds, and so they're able to exist in a much smaller home range area. Spotted owls, being the 01:11:00specialists they are, they've got to have a lot of real estate. But, at the end of that year, we were going back to the Oregon Endangered Species Task Force and the agencies saying, "Well, we were wrong guys, these guys don't just need 300 acres of old forest, they've got to have a lot more than that." By now, Howard had died. Howard got cancer.

SS: Howard White?

EF: Howard White. In 1975, just after I started the study, he got cancer and died. Fairly quickly. And Chuck Meslow took over as my major prof.

SS: That must have been fairly traumatic for you?

EF: Yeah. He was a neat-old guy, he was a damned-good mentor. I was pretty close to him. Chuck took over, and Chuck was a young biologist not much older than I was. Well, he might be ten years older than me. So, he and I went back to the Oregon Endangered Species Task Force guys and whoever would listen, because we gave talks to the Audubon Society saying, "Hey, we now know that this species, 01:12:00if we just protect 300 acres, it's probably not going to be enough." You know, the minimum we found in any of those home ranges we looked at, the minimum amount of old forest was about 1,000 acres of old forest in that home range area.

SS: What was their response?

EF: Well, I think the biologists in the agencies were completely receptive to that, but timber folks, much less so. They pushed back really hard and said, "We definitely can't manage for two or three or 4,000 acres per pair, and even a thousand acres is crazy, if you're talking about very many pairs. We simply can't afford that, it's too expensive." It was kind of the pushback that we got. But, by 1987, the Oregon Endangered Species Task Force, only a year later, they 01:13:00were recommending a minimum of 1,000 acres of older forest per pair.

SS: Which is 10 years after you made your original observations.

EF: Ten years, yeah. And not only that, but by '87, they were recommending a target of 400 pairs in. I don't mean '87, I mean '77. They were recommending a target of 400 pairs of spotted owls in Oregon, with 300 acres each, but, I think, actually, that was '77. They were recommending 290 pairs on the Forest Service, 90 pairs on BLM, and 20 on other public lands. But by '81, they were recommending 1,000 acres within 1.5 miles of these, what they called, SOMAs, or Spotted Owl Management Areas.

SS: I want you to tell me about the finishing your Ph.D. and the transition into 01:14:00what it was later, but tell me a little bit more about the Andrews.

EF: Okay.

SS: I mean, it was transitioning itself from its International Biological Program years into the EER [Experimental Ecological Reserve], which was the transition to the LTER, the Long-Term Ecological Research network. It was essentially a change in name as they were transitioning. But what do you remember about their program? I mean, you were there in the winter time and not much was going on.

EF: But I was there in the summer, too, but yeah.

SS: But that was becoming the synergy of that whole thing, which really parallels these broader societal dynamics that we have. What do you remember about the Andrews and the people that were going up there? Jerry Franklin was involved, Fred Swanson, a lot of these people, like Stan Gregory, I don't know if he'd [Gregory] started yet?

EF: Stan was at OSU. Yeah.

SS: I mean, these people were really starting to get going, but what do you remember about the synergy of all that as you're doing your owl work?

EF: Well, it's kind of funny. I was kind of on the outside. I didn't really interact with those guys much at all, back in those years. I knew Stan because 01:15:00we were fellow grad students at OSU, but Jerry was off in his little world doing forest ecology stuff. And in those early years, Jerry was very interested, at least my impression was, very interested in forest ecology and sort of the stand dynamics in terms of the transition from early to late seral, all kinds of stuff. But he really wasn't that interested in old growth, per se, in those early years. At least, that was my impression.

SS: He was developing the research that would become that though.

EF: Yeah, yeah.

SS: Because the foundational document for his career and old growth, really, which is "The Ecological Characteristics of Old-Growth Forests," in 1981.

EF: Right, he and, who did that? Tom Spies, I think, worked on that with him, if 01:16:00I remember right, didn't he?

SS: Not, well, maybe. [Document published before Tom Spies was in NW.]

EF: I think it was Tom. I think Tom co-authored it.

SS: It was et al. There were like eight other co-authors. [Franklin, Cromack, Denison, McKee, Maser, Sedell, Swanson, Juday.]

EF: I think he and Tom co-authored that paper, if I remember right. But at least in the early '70s, I don't remember Jerry being particularly interested in old forests at all.

SS: He was just repurposing his career himself, actually, from a traditional forestry guy to kind of incorporating what became known as ecosystem science methodologies and perspectives.

EF: Yeah, right. So, I really didn't interact much with those guys, as I kind of was off in my own little world doing spotted owl stuff. I did interact with them when they were doing the biome thing on the Andrews. I interacted a bit with Ron Nussbaum, who was there doing contract work, where he was looking at herps [amphibians mainly] composition in those old forests up there. And the main reason I interacted with Ron was because I knew his wife had worked a bit here on campus, and, when he was up there on Watershed 2 one day and he came down 01:17:00that little patch of old growth and a spotted owl took a bath right in front of him. He called me up and said, "Hey, I saw one of your birds."

And so, I went up there. This was in '72, if I remember right, the first year I was doing my master's work. We walked into that site and I called, and here is a pair of spotted owls nesting right there above where he had seen this bird take a bath. Then, we went on up Lookout Creek, and we found two more pairs of spotted owls. That got me really fired up about working on the Andrews, just because I knew there were some birds there. After that, I kept going back there every year to check those birds, to try to find more nesting pairs. But all that was kind of independent of the other folks that were working up there. I didn't really interact with them much.

SS: How much did the Andrews forestry treatment program affect your decision to work there, which originally was a traditional experimental forest designed to study the effects of different treatment methods in the context of industrial 01:18:00forestry; its effect on hydrology, fire, regeneration, within the traditional economic model? But, because they did a lot of comparative stuff in different ages and different times, didn't that create, not just when you were doing your masters and doctorate, but later on, an interesting laboratory for comparative studies of old growth, plantations, clear-cuts, etc.?

EF: Yeah, it certainly did. Because when I got up there to do the telemetry study in 1975-76, and most of, or a lot of the cutting that happened up there, had already happened. They had done big clear-cuts all over the place. And at least in terms of comparing, one of the things we wanted to do with these radio-collared owls, was to find out what kinds of habitat they preferred or selected. If all we'd had was old growth, we wouldn't have been able to do that. 01:19:00But because we had these contrasting clear-cuts and early seral and old forest, and even a little bit of mid-seral stuff, we were able to do those comparisons.

SS: So, in a sense, it was a laboratory.

EF: It was. It would have been better if we had a little more of the early, 30-40-year-old stuff, but what we had was a lot of old growth, sort of the mature category, the 80 to 160-year-old stuff on some of the ridge areas and early seral and clear-cuts.

SS: Now, the 80 to 160-year-old stuff would have been-

(Break in Audio)

SS: Okay, continue with the concept that we had been talking about before the interruption that it [H.J. Andrews] made a good laboratory, if you will, because of the differential ages in cuttings and treatments that had happened? [Also had records of wildfire history going back centuries]

EF: Yeah, it wouldn't have been a very interesting study if all we had was old growth up there because, in addition to figuring out how much area these owls 01:20:00used in terms of their home range size, we wanted to find out what kinds of habitat they preferred or selected. So, to do that, you have to have a mix of habitats, obviously, or they can't do the selection process. So, yeah, the fact that they had clear-cut a bunch of areas on the Andrews, made it so that we could do that. It still probably wasn't the best study area we could have picked in terms of having a broad range of age classes, but we kind of solved for that problem by going elsewhere. We did the study on the Andrews where we had this certain mix of forest dominated by old growth for sure, but then we did a follow-up to that over on Eugene BLM lands about nineteen, oh, what was it, about a year, 1981, I think it was. I went over and worked on the Eugene BLM District.

SS: Which side of the Eugene area?

EF: On the west side, out in the Coast Range.

SS: On the Coast Range, okay.

EF: We put radios on six more spotted owls. I only tracked them for the summer for about three or four months, but there the birds had, in addition to a fair amount of old growth, they had a lot of more even-aged young forest, much of which was on private land, I mean, those alternating sections of BLM and private. So, there we had--

SS: The checkerboard effect?

EF: The checkerboard. We had a mix of forest types that included a lot of young forest. And in the monograph we eventually wrote on spotted owls, the home range monograph, we had included that data from the BLM land. So, we had a mix of data from the Andrews and from some BLM property that helped us to kind of get a broader perspective on how these owls behaved in terms of the kinds of habitat that they seemed to prefer.

SS: What would be a general statement about the differences you found in terms 01:22:00of behavior, demographics, what-have-you, between, the Cascades and Coast Range? I mean, you have different elevational dynamics, you have different climatic dynamics because you're closer to the coast?

EF: What we found was that home ranges of spotted owls appear to be smaller in areas where the landscape is dominated by lots of old forest. So, when you get into a landscape that has been heavily impacted by harvest, for example, the BLM checkerboard ownership in the Coast Range, home ranges tended to be a lot larger there. Andy Carey found the same thing when he did his radio telemetry studies in 1987, '88, '89, I think it was over on Roseburg BLM lands. He found that home 01:23:00ranges tended to be larger in areas where you had relatively little old forest, than in areas where you had lots of old forest. So, again, it just looked like these birds are having to use larger areas when they have less suitable habitat. So, that's kind of the pattern that we saw.

SS: So, you finished your doctorate in '81 or '82?

EF: I finished the doctorate in 1980.

SS: And what was the title of your Ph.D. dissertation?

EF: "Home Range and Habitat Use by Northern Spotted Owls in Oregon," or something like that.

SS: Up to that time when you were going through school, were you continuing to work periodically for the Forest Service, as well, didn't you do summer work, is that what you were saying?

EF: No, I didn't. Once I started school, I pretty much just went to school.

SS: But you did do a little summer Forest Service stuff in the '60s. Right?

EF: Oh, yeah.

SS: Okay. I just wanted to make sure there wasn't a continuum of seasonal types of positions.

EF: No, no.

SS: Okay.

EF: The seasonal jobs that I had were when I was an undergraduate in college. I worked three summers on the Blue River District. The first summer, it would have been 1967, and I worked up there as a recreational technician. I spent the summer dumping empty garbage cans in the camp grounds or washing toilets and doing whatever. And in late summer when the fires got started, I helped too, like that was the year of the Hoodoo Burn, 1967.

SS: Right.

EF: My boss and I went up to the burn area and built wooden floors to set the tents up on. They had a bunch of wall tents in the main camp for the fire operations. I remember, we went up there and nailed together these plywood floors. Also fought a little fire on one of the fires up by McKenzie Bridge there.

SS: So, basically, your employment was related to your schooling, either as a research assistant or teaching assistant or what have you, right?

EF: Well, okay, after that first year '67, the next year I was on the trail crew. Actually, it was the fire crew. We spent much of the summer piling slash and burning slash and fighting fires. That third summer I was at Box Canyon on the fire crew, the trail crew. I actually ran the trail crew that year. We spent a lot of time early in the summer hiking back in and working the trail. But those three seasonal summers I spent with the Forest Service was the last time I worked for them in any kind of capacity until I went to work for them full-time in '87 as a research biologist.

So, when I finished my Ph.D. in 1980, I spent the next several years writing all 01:26:00the data up, getting it published. I was basically unemployed, though. I got married in 1980, and my wife was a school teacher. So, we were living off her income while I did temporary work. I did all kinds of carpentry jobs. I started climbing and doing tree removals in people's yards. I worked for Charlie Thomas doing that telemetry study on the BLM project for one summer. I spent two summers going up to British Columbia doing spotted owl surveys in BC.

SS: For the Canadian government?

EF: For the Canadian government. I did contract work for ODF&W [Oregon Dept. of Fish & Wildlife]. I designed the first computerized database to keep track of spotted owls in Oregon, and did this also for grey owl surveys. We published a 01:27:00paper on that. So, all these little, basically, odd jobs. Because, when I finished my Ph.D., I was so frustrated with the Forest Service and the BLM, that I swore I would never work for them. I spent years butting heads with them trying to get some kind of a spotted owl management plan implemented that would --

SS: And this is from your graduate school days on through the '80s, right?

EF: Yeah. Chuck Meslow, Howard White, and myself had spent years in one fight after the other, trying to get the agencies to adopt a plan that would do a good job of protecting spotted owls. It was just always a battle.

SS: At that time, all the individual forests were trying to complete their 01:28:00forest management plans as mandated by the 1976 National Forest Management Act. So, part of that discussion you were entering into was a wild card.

EF: Yeah.

SS: This new element that would complicate things?

EF: Yeah, and I was kind of oblivious to all that. I was so focused on spotted owls. To be fair to the agencies, we waltzed in there expecting them to do a lot, and they begrudgingly did adopt some management plans for spotted owls. It probably wasn't enough, but it was certainly more than they wanted in terms of the impact on timber sale programs, things like that.

SS: Right.

EF: But anyway, when I got through with all that, I'd been butting heads for years with the agencies, and I finished my Ph.D., and I just thought, "You know, 01:29:00I don't want to work for these guys. I just don't." So, I spent a bunch of years just trying to figure out what I was going to do next, but doing all this contract work and trying to make ends meet.

SS: Did you ever think about being an academic?

EF: Not really. I just didn't think I'd be good at it, so I didn't.

SS: So, teaching was never your thing?

EF: It was not. I didn't like speaking in front of groups. I did a lot of it, but it was always, and still is for me, always difficult.

SS: You didn't want to be forced to have to do it every day in front of a big class?

EF: Which probably would have been good for me, but I avoided it. I didn't like it, and it was always stressful, although I gave lots of talks to BLM groups and Audubon groups and Forest Service groups. But every time I did, it was stressful. It just was not something I liked, and so I just never applied for a single academic job in my life. I just never did. I just kind of kept doing all this temporary work, trying to figure out, "Okay, Forsman, what are you going to 01:30:00do next."

[Break in Audio]

SS: Back to where we were.

EF: Okay, so I casting about for what I was going to do next and doing all these contract jobs. And I did a whole bunch of little contract short-term things with the various agencies, but nothing permanent. And then out-of-the-blue in 1987, I got a call from Len Ruggiero. Len was the leader of the old-growth project with PNW, at least the terrestrial part of it. And he said, "Hey, I need a spotted owl biologist to do full-time research on spotted owls on the Olympic Peninsula and other areas. Would you like a job?" And -- (laughs).

SS: In spite of your pledge.

EF: Not only that, but he said, "You know," he says, "I know I can hire you because you're a vet. You have veteran's preference. I won't have to go through 01:31:00competition. I won't have to open it up," you know. And I said, "Okay." So, that's how I got into my job with PNW.

SS: So, that started in '87, right?

EF: It started in '87, right, right.

SS: Now, you've got some notes and some details here, and you wanted to really tell me about details between when you started, and when the high-profile stuff started. Do you want to fill in the gaps any more with any stories or experiences? You talked about working with the Oregon Department of Natural Resources. Correct? Or Fish and Wildlife?

EF: The Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife.

SS: Fish and Wildlife. Correct.

EF: They were just contract jobs, basically. Nothing very exciting. Although, the one I did with Charlie Bruce at the local ODF&W office [Corvallis-State of Oregon], in which I basically spent four months or more just compiling all of 01:32:00the spotted owl data from all over Oregon, putting it into a database, a 01:33:00quantitative and searchable database that helped us actually keep track of 01:34:00things. Because of all the people doing surveys, by the late '70s, the districts were doing surveys, all the BLM districts and Forest Service districts. We were getting a lot of data really rapidly.

SS: On the owl?

EF: On spotted owls. And we needed some way to make sense out of it all. So, that's why.

SS: So, you were a synthesizer, essentially?

EF: Yeah, basically, I went to every district in the range of the spotted owl in western Oregon, sat down with their biologists, went through their data and actually put together this database. And that database continues to this day. Janice Reed down at Roseburg is still trying to keep that database updated with all the historical stuff we have.

SS: Now, leading up to '87 was really when all the dynamics that would become called the "Forest Wars" were really starting to heat up.

EF: Yeah.

SS: What do you remember about that in general, aside from your spotted owl work?

EF: Oh, gosh. Well, there were just a whole series of lawsuits and counter-lawsuits that were happening in the late '70s and '80s. Eventually, there were a whole lot of other people in the '80s that got involved. Larry Harris from Florida [University of Florida-Gainesville] came out here, and spent one summer running around talking to people. I think he went back home and wrote that book, The Fragmented Forest.

SS: He studied at the Andrews a lot, yeah.

EF: Well, that book had a big impact. The Audubon Society got involved and they pulled together their "blue ribbon" panel of experts. This was in 1985, I think. They brought their weight to bear on the whole thing.

SS: That would eventually turn into the lawsuit that got to Judge Dwyer 01:36:00[William, U.S. District Court Judge,] eventually, right?

EF: Yeah, exactly. There was a whole series of status reviews that happened. From '82 to 1990. The Fish and Wildlife Service conducted four different status reviews of the spotted owl. They kept not liking the answers they got. So, the first one in '82, they did this review, then they did another one in '87, where they recommended listing but didn't list.

SS: Was that the infamous "God Squad?"

EF: No. The God Squad happened about that same time. I can't remember exactly when. But finally in '88, Judge Zilly [Thomas] ruled that, based on the status reviews that they had done, that their decision not to list the owl as threatened, was arbitrary and capricious, so it went back to the agencies again. They did another status review. Finally, they did another status review in 1990, 01:37:00the fourth one, which ended up with the owl getting listed in 1990. But, there were just a whole bunch of things like that going on in the '80s, lawsuits; counter-lawsuits, the Audubon Blue Ribbon panels, Larry Harris' book, a bunch of things like that, all happening at once, or happening in a fairly short time period.

In '88, by that time, it had become the Oregon/Washington Interagency Endangered Species Task Force. They proposed managing for 1,130 sites in Oregon and Washington, with 1,000 acres at each of those sites. So, the acreage just kept going up and getting bigger and bigger.

SS: Now, what's the difference that you noticed between Oregon and Washington in terms of populations?

EF: Well, the spotted owl population in Washington has always been quite a bit 01:38:00smaller than what it was in Oregon, just because the farther north you go, much of the habitat, particularly in the Cascades, is high, cold and simply not good spotted owl habitat.

SS: Well, the North Cascades are more extreme in topography, too.

EF: Right, it's just not very good habitat.

SS: Same with the Olympic Peninsula, right, to some degree?

EF: The peninsula, from what we can tell, has these beautiful, low-elevation old-growth forests, at least historically, but it's incredibly wet, particularly the west side. Owls out there, spotted owls, have huge home ranges compared to Oregon or California, which suggests this habitat is lower quality. Even though it is old growth, the densities of things like flying squirrels are lower out there. You don't have many wood rats, you don't have tree voles. Owls out there 01:39:00are having a tough time making a living.

SS: How did that compare to what you did up in B.C.?

EF: B.C., same thing.

SS: Were you out on the Coast Range side?

EF: Yeah, that's the only place. I got over as far east as Hope [Brit. Col.], that area, but you're over into the North Cascades or the interior mountains. Up there, the densities of spotted owls are incredibly low, in fact, now, they're almost all gone. But even when I was up there in the '80s, you had to cover a lot of ground to find any spotted owls. And for every spotted owl you find, you'd find three barred owls. Barred owls were already into B.C. in fairly high numbers by that time. So, all indications suggest that as you go north into those colder, wetter climates, the spotted owls just gradually drop out. They 01:40:00can't make a living up there. If you're mainly a predator on flying squirrels and things like wood rats and tree voles are pretty uncommon, biomass you have available is pretty low. And so, it's just a tougher place for a spotted owl to make a living, certainly.

SS: Now, going back a little bit earlier. We're going to transition into the ISC report [Interagency Scientific Committee for the Northern Spotted Owl] and more here in a minute, but talk about your personal connections to specific owls, ones that you got to know. Like, who was "Fat Broad"?

EF: Well, in 1970 when I still was an undergraduate here, it was the summer I got drafted. I was definitely very interested in spotted owls. One day, my girlfriend at the time, Karen, and I, we took a drive out by Philomath. We went up Greasy Creek. If you go on through Philomath and you go a little west towards Alsea, there's a road that takes off there and goes up a little drainage called 01:41:00Greasy Creek. We drove up that road, and I'm looking for spotted owls, what I usually did in those days. And we came around a corner, and here's a patch of old growth, really nice classic old growth. We got out of the car, stood there looking at the old growth, and I go, "Hoo, hoo-hoo, hoo," and like 100 yards away, a spotted owl responds back. It turns out that we were less than about 100 yards from a nest tree. I went back later with Richard Reynolds, and we found the nest tree. I climbed the nest tree, got up there, and it had two young. Both of them had their eyes completely stuck shut with what looked like blood. It was just kind of these gooey kind of scabs.

SS: Were they deformed or -- ?

EF: No, they looked outwardly healthy. It turns out later we found out what does 01:42:00it, these hippoboscid flies that infect young nestlings. Sometimes they occur at really-high densities. They bite the little young ones around the eye and on the soft parts of the eye enough, that they hemorrhage and bleed, and the eyes get stuck shut. Normally, if you leave them alone, which we didn't know at the time, the adults keep feeding them, pretty soon the scabs crack open, and they're probably going to be fine. Unless, sometimes the infestations could be so bad that the young are anemic and actually have physical problems from that. But in this case, we didn't know what it was.

So, we decided we were going to take one of these juveniles home that night, see if we could clean up its eyes and see what was wrong with it, then take it back the next day and switch it with the other one. So, we did that. This is 1970's, pre-ESA, pre-National Forest Management Act, pre- any of these laws. There were still laws, that I shouldn't have taken it legally, but anyway, we took this 01:43:00bird home. We cleaned its eyes up. Once we took a warm solution of warm water and vinegar and just kind of kept working on these scabs until we soaked them loose, the eyes opened up and they're fine. So we thought, "Oh, okay, we'll take it back the next day, put it back in the nest, and see if we can fix the other one." And so, we went back the next day. I climbed up the big old-growth tree again, got up there, and the other juvenile was dead. We don't quite know what happened. We suspected the ravens got in there and killed it, but you would have thought they would have eaten it. But we weren't sure. But anyway, we sat with this juvenile, a dead juvenile in the nest, and the adults were still in the area, but they were about, I don't know, some ways up the draw. And so, we hemmed and hawed and decided, okay, we'll just keep it. We'll take it home. We'll raise it. So, that's what we did.

SS: So that became that bird?

EF: That became Fat Broad, right.

SS: Okay.

EF: And this was in like April. I got drafted in August, okay. So, I took this 01:44:00juvenile spotted owl home. I began to raise it in captivity thinking this is going to be a really unique experience to learn something about developmental molt, things like that, which we did. We started keeping track of its molt right off the bat. I kept that bird until August, and at that point I got drafted. And Georgine Reynolds, who was Richard Reynolds' wife, took on the bird.

SS: Took on the bird.

EF: For the 18 months I was off in the Army, as the bird grew up in their back yard in a cage there, Georgine took care of it. I came back two years later and got the bird again. Georgine, by that time, had named it Fat Broad, I didn't. And the reason is-

SS: I was going to say, in an age of political correctness (Laughs).

EF: Oh, yeah, I know, it's kind of funny, because where the name came from was 01:45:00the B.C. comic strip. If you know B.C. [character in comic strip.]

SS: Oh, right.

EF: It still runs in the paper today.

SS: Right, I know, but yeah, and Fat Broad was one of the characters.

EF: Back in those days, the big-old heavy gal with the club that beat on the snake.

SS: Yeah.

EF: They actually referred to her in the comic strip as the Fat Broad.

SS: Okay, so.

EF: And, you know, you could get away with it then. And that's where Georgine, because this bird, because she was always well-fed.

SS: Well, blame it on Johnny Hart [creator/cartoonist for B.C.]. Right?

EF: Yep, but this bird was always this little pig because she was very well-fed and, Georgine started calling her Fat Broad, and I didn't care. So, I deny culpability. It's not my fault. But anyway.

SS: What happened to that bird, though?

EF: I kept her. And she lived to be 31 years old.

SS: In captivity?

EF: In captivity. Yeah, she went through a couple different girlfriends, 01:46:00outlasted them. She helped raise my kids, you know.

SS: So, this was a real part of the family then?

EF: Yeah, she moved with us.

SS: It must have been an emotional moment when she passed, huh?

EF: It was, yes. She moved with us to Washington when I worked up there. She moved back here to Corvallis. You know, all my kids left home and she was still there with Monica and I.

SS: That's longer than they usually live by quite a bit, isn't it?

EF: In the wild, yeah. The oldest one we've seen in the wild is about 24, I think.

SS: Right.

EF: For the last four or five years of her life she was blind, so I'd have to go out and she'd eat chicken out of my hand. But yeah, it was a sad day when she passed on. So anyway, that was the one that I was probably most attached to. But there are lots of birds -

SS: Did you have any other names for any of them, or are they all numbers?

EF: All the rest of them were numbers, yeah.

SS: Okay.

EF: I kept quite a few spotted owls in captivity. I kept a number of barred owls in captivity. I kept two tawny owls in captivity. I kept saw whets in captivity. So, I had a lot. The other bird that my wife and I got very attached to was a great horned owl. I got a call from my brother Pete down in Eugene. He said, "Hey, there is a great gray owl sitting on the swing-set out in the back yard." You know, it does not look healthy. So, I drove down to Eugene, got out and walked out in the back yard, and here's this great big, fat great horned owl juvenile with jesses on his legs, the leather jesses that falconers use when they raise birds in captivity.

SS: Oh, right, yeah.

EF: Somebody had taken that bird out of a nest and raised it, and it got loose. But it was imprinted by then. It thought it was a human being. It was a big-old, imprinted-juvenile great horned owl that somebody had.

SS: Did you ever find out who it was?

EF: Never did. Brought it home, and Monica and I raised it there in the house. We had a cage for it. I eventually just turned it loose there. We were living out on Elliott Circle, which is out north of town. I turned it loose out the back door and it hung around all that winter. It would roost in the pear tree out in the back yard there, and feed on local things. I picked up pellets, and they'd be full of Norway rats and things like that from the barns around there. But, he was an imprint and was unafraid of people. I'd come home from work in the afternoon or the evening, and during the breeding season, he would come flying in and land on top of your head and try to copulate. He'd be up there doing the treading act thing that they do when they sit on the back of a female, they kind of hold like this and go, "whoo-whoo-ooh." He'd be doing that on top of your head.

SS: Foreplay.

EF: Foreplay. For Monica and me, we were used to it. But neighbors didn't appreciate that, you know. I remember one time, the neighbor guy said, "Hey, I saw your bird. Had the back of the Chevy station wagon open, and the big-old bird had flown in there with a rat, gutted it on the floor in the back of his station wagon, and there were rat guts all over." One time we were sitting there and Monica heard a crash out in the kitchen, we looked out and he's sitting there. She had put an avocado seed in a bowl of water, and it had taken root. And there he sits, he's got this avocado seed in his mouth with the roots hanging out one side and the leaves hanging out the other, and he's just goofing around with it. So, he was a character.

SS: What was his name?

EF: He never had a name. I don't think I ever called him anything.

SS: Should have called him "Trouble."

EF: Yeah. He was hilarious, but he was just always getting in trouble. Finally, 01:50:00I gave him to a guy who lived up in the Cascades, who said he was going to try to "hack him" back out into the wild. And, you know, imprints, they're pretty-well screwed. But he took it up there, put it in a cage, and a racoon got in the case and killed it. So, that was the end of that great horned owl. SS: Raccoons are nasty sometimes.

EF: But anyway, I had a bunch of birds like that in captivity.

SS: Why have owls been associated with being wise?

EF: I think it's just the way they look.

SS: An anthropomorphic transfer [human perceptions-beliefs].

EF: Well, I think the wise-old owl, it's just the expression that owls with the big eyes that face forward, kind of like a human, and that somber look that they're not smiling, they're kind of giving you that, just kind of that somber look. I guess, that's all I can figure out. I don't know.

SS: One of the presents I got with my doctoral graduation, it said "Class of 01:51:002002," was an owl doll with a little mortar board on its head.

EF: Yeah, yeah. I don't know, because they're not particularly smart. (Laughs)

SS: I was just going to ask you.

EF: I mean, they're not dumb, either, but compared to some of the- [birds]

SS: Well, birds' brains are fairly small compared to their body size, right, relatively speaking? I mean, they're about average for some?

EF: Well, yeah. There are some birds like crows and ravens and some of the pscittacines, the parrots, that are actually pretty-darned sharp for birds. But owls, I think, are probably not quite up there with that group.

SS: Okay, thank you for clearing that up for me. (Laughs) Just wanted to make sure that I'm not too affected by cultural stereotypes. So Eric, you're with the Forest Service now, in '87. You're doing this synthesis work and we're leading up toward the big events that would lead to the ISC Report, all the things that would lead up to the Clinton Summit and even the Gang of Four Report, the 01:52:00congressional hearings that came from that. Let's take you up until you've started to get involved with the ISC Report and worked with Jack Ward Thomas.

EF: So basically, all those lawsuits that happened in the late '80s that led up to, actually, I think Dwyer was actually later than that. That was in '91.

SS: And you're talking about the lawsuits before the Seattle one. The Seattle Audubon Society lawsuit was the one that led to the injunction, the first Dwyer one. Then, there was a second one.

EF: Yeah, right.

SS: But you're talking about the lesser-known lawsuits throughout the '80s first. Right?

EF: Yeah, right. It was incredibly frustrating because the Forest Service and the BLM were trying to come up with some kind of a plan that would get them over all the legal hurdles, and they never quite got there. They kept getting sued on the grounds that ones they had done were just not adequate to ensure a viable 01:53:00population of northern spotted owls. That was part of it.

SS: Now, did you think those lawsuits were fair, or were they just being done, almost out of spite?

EF: No, I think, if you take the National Forest Management Act at face value, then I think they were fair. Because, the National Forest Management Act said the Forest Service was supposed to maintain viable populations of all native vertebrates within a planning area. Okay? And, I mean, certainly the environmental groups wanted to end all harvests, period. I think, at least a lot of them did, or, if not, something close to that. So, they were using those laws as much as they could to try to slow down the harvest.

SS: And they were doing that.

EF: Well, they were doing it. But, all the way through the mid-'80s, they were cutting a lot of board-feet, and even their own foresters were telling them, 01:54:00this is not sustainable. You know, you can't keep setting these artificial targets and expecting us to meet them, because we can't do it.

SS: So, it's basically the Congress and the really top brass in the Forest Service that were mandating these things?

EF: Yeah, oh, yeah.

SS: Then the lower people were carrying them out.

EF: We can't keep doing this. Right? We can't meet those targets. But that's how the rangers were getting evaluated, by meeting the targets. If you did, you were a good camper, or a good employee. So, I think that their own people were telling them we can't manage for spotted owls and murrelets and everything else, and meet the timber targets you guys are setting. We just can't do it. Whenever they went to court, the courts usually looked at that and said, you guys are not meeting them from what we know of their populations. By the early 1990's, we started to get some population data, quantitative data, on actual trends in the spotted owl population.

SS: In other words, the synthesis work that you were part of?

EF: Yeah, and that others were. Gary White, Ken Burnham and others were starting to get involved, in terms of starting to look at the population data we had. It was pretty minimal data, but there were some indications from that, despite what the agencies were doing, it was not adequate.

SS: And the population was declining.

EF: Population is just-

SS: Precipitously or steadily declining?

EF: Back in those days, we kind of thought it was relatively gradual, which is different than what I would say now. But in those days, we thought it was a relatively low rate of decline. But, nevertheless, it was declining. I think the concerns were valid and justified. The other thing happening back in the mid to 01:56:00late-'80s, was the focus tended to be on single species. There was a lot of focus on spotted owls and, to a lesser extent, murrelets and others. But the elephant in the room was that the law, the National Forest Management Act [NFMA], in particular, mandated not a single-species focus, but that you need to be concerned with the whole range of diversity that was out there. Until then, the agencies didn't want to talk about that. There was kind of this, "Let's keep the blinders on and focus on what we have to do with the damned spotted owl," you know. And so, the NFMA, people talk a lot about the ESA, but NFMA really had some teeth to it. And I think the environmental groups picked up on that pretty quick.

SS: Well, in previous forest management acts, 1944 and 1960 for example, and even going back further, it actually added something that was beyond merely 01:57:00multiple-use and the old model [humanistic context], but you had to add in the biological components [ecological/holistic context].

EF: Right, right.

SS: You could no longer say, "Oh, we're going to be kinder and softer toward the land, but still do the same thing." They were actually saying, "Well, no, this has to be considered as well." But that was very difficult for them to retrofit their expectations, as well as their planning models. Correct?

EF: Yep. And not only that, but they had to know something about the species that were out there.

SS: And they didn't until people did the work.

EF: And they didn't, that's right. By the late '80s, we'd done a lot of work on spotted owls and quite a bit of work on murrelets, but the rest of the stuff that's out there, they didn't know much at all about many of those other old-growth-related species, and that really put them in a world of hurt.

SS: Now, I think you could say it's fairly obvious why, but I ask, why did the 01:58:00spotted owl become the symbol of environmental battles in the Northwest?

EF: Well, if you've ever been around spotted owls, I think the answer to that is kind of obvious. They're just an incredibly, what's the right word?

SS: Charismatic?

EF: They're charismatic. They are unafraid of humans. You can walk right up to 'em. The media loved 'em because you could take field trips out, and these owls would come flying in and literally land on your camera, or you hold a mouse out, and they come in and take it out of your hand. They're wild birds that haven't ever seen a human before.

SS: And even before you got to know these birds, they still did that. Right?

EF: Yeah, that's just the way they are. They've evolved in landscapes where historically they probably weren't exposed to humans that much, the deep forest. The natives didn't go back in those places. And so, they just are unafraid of 01:59:00people, which can get them in trouble. They're just very easy for school kids or media folks or whoever, to go out and just sit there and commune with this animal that comes right up in your face. They're beautiful birds, and they're very interesting to watch.

Whereas a murrelet, for example, is a seabird that's out there in the ocean most of its time. And when it does come in, it's way the hell up in a big old-growth tree, and you can't see it. So, it's kind of hard for a school kid or an Audubon group or whatever, to see and kind of get up close. It's this combination of their behavior and the way they look, and that just makes it the perfect symbol, I think. And whereas murrelets spend much of their lives at sea, this bird lives its entire life in those old forests, and is very kind of retiring, and unless 02:00:00you know how to go look for them, they're kind of hard to see. I think they just were kind of emblematic of this whole, dense, dark, old forest, even though they're certainly not restricted to that kind of forest, it's where they're most abundant. They nest in these big cavities way up high in these trees, you know.

SS: In addition to the anthropomorphic identifications that people would have that we're talking about, "wise owls" and all that cultural baggage, too?

EF: Yeah, I think humans kind of relate to owls in general just because they kind of look like we do a little bit. They have these forward-facing eyes and big heads.

SS: That's what I meant.

EF: Yeah, it's kind of something a lot of humans just find neat and cool.

SS: Marty Raphael was telling me about how murrelets, like it's really hard to find their nests, and they're way the heck inland.

EF: Oh, yeah. They couldn't even find a nest until the '70s, and they finally 02:01:00found, like one or two, and everybody's excited, but they're hard to work with. They're difficult to see on land, period, unless you go out there and stand around at daybreak and listen. I've climbed a lot of murrelet nest trees, and it's just hard to get up there and see them, which makes it a whole lot harder to sell them as a symbol. They're amazing little animals, with incredible life histories.

SS: But you also have in addition to the symbolism and the human cultural identifications, you also have the authentic biological, ecological connector of them as indicator species, correct?

EF: Yeah. That's the other thing that I would say, is that they're a top-level carnivore in a system where they are very reliant on many of the small mammals and birds that live in that system. They feed on those species, so it's all tied 02:02:00together, it's all linked in terms of the structure that they need for nests, the kinds of food they eat. Often, if you're a tree vole, they're more abundant in old forests, flying squirrels are more abundant generally in old forests. It's all kind of linked and the spotted owl is just sort of the symbol for all these other things further down the food web that we need to be concerned about. So, yeah, I think they're a perfect symbol for that system.

SS: Now, I do want you to think about the symbol of the spotted owl versus the ecological complexity of the real forest, and how that you can puncture holes in that from, let's say, an antagonist, anti-preservation perspective. But we'll 02:03:00get to that when we're talking at the very end, about the holes in the Northwest Forest Plan and problems with implementation, certainly. But we'll talk about that later.

EF: Okay.

SS: So, how did you get involved with the ISC Report and working with Jack Ward Thomas?

EF: Well, I knew all the players. I'd been involved with all of them on various committees or working groups, I mean, as sort of the lead researcher on spotted owls in Oregon for the previous-

SS: Fifteen years.

EF: Fifteen years. I had most of the data these guys were trying to understand and base their recommendations on. So, it was just natural for me to end up on those committees. So, when Jack was selected in 1989, when the-I'm trying to say, not the Regional Forester, by the Forest Service Chief --

SS: Dale Robertson?

EF: In '89, Forest Service Chief Dale Robertson and BLM Director Merle Storms said, "We need to put together a committee of experts to come up with a plan. We keep going to court and losing in court, so we've got to come up with something that's defensible." They appointed Jack as the lead, and Jack immediately went to people he knew that knew something about spotted owls. He went to Chuck Meslow, Jerry Verner, Barry Noon, Butch Olendorff, and me. But Butch got sick, so Jack then called on Joe Lint from BLM to take over for Butch. So, there were 02:05:00six of us on that committee. In addition, we had a couple of advisers/observers, including biologist Larry Irwin from NCASI [National Council for Air and Stream Improvement], and ecologist David Wilcove from Princeton. (phone rings)

[Break in Audio]

SS: So, we're back on and will talk more about the process leading up to the ISC Report and Eric working with Jack Ward Thomas and others. He had started before we took our short break, and now he's going to continue.

EF: Basically, because of all the lawsuits in the late '80s, it reached the point where the Forest Service and BLM were just being challenged one time after the next, to try to come up with a viable plan. And they kept losing in court. 02:06:00So finally, the Chief of the Forest Service requested they initiate the ISC Committee with Jack Thomas in charge. Actually, it was both the chief of the Forest Service and the national director of BLM, who jointly requested this committee meet and try to come up with, once and for all, a holistic plan to manage for spotted owls that would provide for viable populations. They were on a very short time schedule. Jack was told to get this committee together, and I think he came up with that report in three months or something like that. It was a pretty short time.

SS: So, it was similar to all the other reports that came later, including FEMAT [Forest Ecosystem Management Assessment Team], where everything was on a rushed schedule?

EF: Oh, yeah, incredibly rushed. We hit the ground running, did a number of field trips to different places in Oregon, Washington and California, in the first couple of weeks together as a group. Then we went back to Portland, sat down in the, I forget what that building is called over there, and in a very short time period, produced the report we hoped would provide for a viable population of spotted owls. And that report, or the recommendation of the committee, ended up being unlike anything that had been proposed prior to that in terms of how to manage spotted owls. So, there were six of us on the group with Jack in charge, and yeah, it there was very much a lot of pressure to get something out quickly.

SS: It brought you back to the days of cramming for or finishing something in school?

EF: Oh, it was worse than anything I ever did.

SS: Really?

EF: Before, yeah. Yeah, we-

SS: Oh, was it worse than FEMAT later?

EF: I think, I think-

SS: In terms of the time crunch?

EF: You know, probably not. But it was just about that bad. The difference between FEMAT and ISC, was with ISC, there were only six of us. And we could all sit in the same room together and talk something through and beat it around and get it worked out. With FEMAT, it was so huge that a lot of us never even knew people that were working on other aspects of the plan. I mean, my little group, we were folks on spotted owls.

SS: You were on terrestrial ecology in FEMAT. Right?

EF: Yeah, and there were all the people working on different things, the sociologists, for example. I knew of them, but I didn't know them well. The economists were off doing their thing, the silviculturists were off doing their 02:09:00thing. It was just all over the map. With FEMAT, the only people that really knew the big picture, were Jack and Marty Raphael [PNW], who were kind of in charge, overseeing the whole thing. The rest of us were focusing on our little pieces of the puzzle. With ISC, it was a small group of biologists that kind of tended to think the same way. There were certainly others in the room, particularly Larry Irwin, who was a biologist, but very much was representing a different constituency, and had that bias going for him. But then, Dave Wilcove was there representing environmental groups, and he definitely had his agenda, also.

SS: Were any timber group people there?

EF: Nope, well, I would say Larry Irwin is a "timber people" person.

SS: Because he was from within an agency with it?

EF: He works for a consulting firm that is totally focused on timber. And they tend to produce reports that are supportive of timber agendas. So, yeah.

SS: Any particular stories or anecdotes, humorous or otherwise, about the ISC process, about you folks working these long days and nights?

EF: Oh, man, we were stuck up in Portland in motels about half the time, you know, working incredibly long hours. The one that impressed me the most of that whole group, was Jerry Verner. Jerry could go twenty hours a day on almost no sleep and was productive as heck, in terms of helping us pull things together in terms of the writing. The guy was amazing. He could really put in the hours. All the guys on that group, I have a lot of respect for. They are or were a very bright, dedicated bunch of people.

And like I said earlier, Jack Thomas was the right guy for the occasion. If Jack had not been there in that leadership role, we never would have gotten things done or gotten the products done that we did. He had that personality, and he was good with people and incredibly dedicated. Jack also had a strong moral center. He wanted to do a good job. He cared about the resource, he cared about people, and he didn't walk in there with an agenda, one way or the other, I don't think. He wanted what he thought was best for the long-term survival of the human species, I think that's kind of where I think Jack was coming from. He 02:12:00cared about people, but he really was concerned about maintaining a healthy environment for the people to live in. So, that's kind of where his heart was at.

SS: The ISC Report was kind of a model for what came after. Am I correct?

EF: Yeah.

SS: The Gang of Four and the FEMAT report was also an EIS for the spotted owl, like in '92, right?

EF: Yeah, it formed the model for all of those, I think.

SS: So, the HCA's, the Habitat Conservation Areas, are essentially analogous to things that were named differently later on, but connected to the Late Successional Old-Growth Forest Reserves? [In Northwest Forest Plan]

EF: Right. Yeah, that's what I said earlier about the ISC Report, was kind of the first time this idea of large reserves surfaced. Always before with spotted owls, we were talking about habitat or SOMA's [Spotted Owl Management Areas], or 02:13:00these pair-by-pair sorts of areas that you would protect. You know, protect a thousand acres here and a thousand acres here, for individual pairs of spotted owls. With the ISC Report, we kind of gave up on that approach. We said, "We can't manage one pair at a time, we've got to manage for these large reserves," these areas that will hopefully be relatively resistant to perturbations. And if they are, if one does burn up, they're redundant enough that we'll have another one nearby that can take up the slack in the short-term while the other one recovers. So, this idea of redundancy in the reserve system was kind of built into that ISC Report. And the idea was that these reserves, we called them HCA's, Habitat Conservation Areas, would be large enough to support on average, twenty pairs of spotted owls in each one.

SS: And that was based on the 1,000-acre size?

EF: Not really.

SS: Or 2,000?

EF: No, we were assuming more like probably 2,000 to 4,000 acres per pair.

SS: Okay.

EF: These reserves, or HCA's, were on the order of 40,000 to 100,000 acres. They were big areas, very large, some even bigger than that. But the idea was that they would be big enough to sustain at least twenty pairs per HCA, and they would be close enough together so that you would get dispersal in connecting the reserves of the HCA's, you would get movement between the HCA's. So, they wouldn't become genetically-isolated. That was kind of the idea that we came up with.

We talked about a whole bunch of other approaches. I can remember we sat there one day, and talked about if we just put a six-mile-wide strip all the way down the Cascades, and just have that be our reserve. That's the sort of thing we 02:15:00talked about. And have another one down the middle of the Coast Range, you know, just a big, long corridor so that everything's connected. And so, we tossed around all kinds of ideas about continuing to manage for pairs of spotted owls, or for managing larger reserves that would support three or four pairs of owls, each in these little pockets, and you have them scattered all over the landscape. We knocked around all kinds of ideas like that, and finally settled on this idea of these large reserves. And we focused mainly on areas where we knew we had spotted owls or where we thought we could maintain spotted owls. But we also talked about other things like forest species composition and trying to include different species of trees or different forest composition sorts of 02:16:00things. Some things like that, but the main focus was on setting up a set of reserves that would provide for a viable population of spotted owls.

SS: So, you finished this report. How was it received? Different groups are going to have different opinions.

EF: Well, yeah. Yeah.

SS: Give me your best take on what different groups responded?

EF: That summer, I think, was also one that the northern spotted owl finally was listed as threatened, 1990.

SS: 1990.

EF: So, suddenly, they had that issue to deal with as well. The initial reception was kind of lukewarm from the agencies. The timber industry hated it because it was going to have a big impact on the cut. Environmental groups hated it because it still allowed a fair amount of cutting in old growth. Those two groups came at it from opposite directions.

SS: Didn't it get litigated from both sides?

EF: Yeah, but it's kind of funny, it ended up, I don't even remember all the details, but they got sued. Basically, the environmental groups challenged that plan on the grounds it didn't satisfy NFMA. To my recollection, the main criticism was that it's a single species plan, and it doesn't deal with all the other species of vertebrates that are out there. And NFMA says you will manage for viable populations of all native birds.

SS: And that's why Judge Dwyer agreed to it, right?

EF: And Judge Dwyer said, "You're right." He said these guys, you know, we thought that people would look at our plan, the ISC plan, and say, "Well, yeah, it's owl-centric, look how big these reserves are. These guys did think about more than just spotted owls." Which we did. We thought, "Jesus, these kind of reserves [large sizes], there's going to be plenty of flying squirrels and tree 02:18:00voles and all these other species in these reserves that it probably will maintain viable populations of a lot of species," most of the species we were concerned about. But, you know, the murrelet folks weren't happy. They said, "Well, there's all this terrestrial stuff and it doesn't have the reserves in the right places for murrelets," and blah, blah, blah. So, they were complaining about that, you know, again.

SS: This is the environmental community side?

EF: This is the scientific community that works on murrelets.

SS: Science, okay.

EF: Yeah, people like Kim Nelson over here were saying, "Well, you just focused on spotted owls, you dumb shits," you know, "you should have been thinking about murrelets more. And obviously, you didn't protect all these habitats that are close to the coast where we think murrelets are going to be," and blah, blah, blah. So, immediately, all these different groups started taking pot-shots at it for different reasons. And then Judge Dwyer rules, "Well, okay, you're not satisfying NFMA, you need to basically quit cutting old growth."

SS: That's when the shut-down happened. Right?

EF: That's when the shut-down happened. And that was in, I think about 1991. He said, "You don't cut any more on the national forests until you come up with a plan that follows the law."

SS: What do you remember about the reaction from timber communities or the timber industry, but especially the local communities in the mountains? And of course, you were working and would go out and be in these areas. I don't know how much you ever got to know people around, or they knew what you did. What do you remember about that dynamic?

EF: They were incredibly angry and frustrated and fearful, that these kinds of changes coming down the pike were going to change things, as for the last fifteen to twenty years, they had been on the crest of the wave. I mean, they were cutting trees like there was no tomorrow, and everybody had work. There 02:20:00were a lot of jobs. I can remember driving from Port Angeles to Forks, Washington, to go to my study area, and having fifty log trucks pass me in that hour between Port Angeles and Forks, coming west from the coast. From the perspective of the small, local towns out there in the hinterland, what had been going on was what they had grown accustomed to. And the idea that this would change, or it meant people were going to lose jobs, and there's just no two ways about it. That, plus mechanization in the mills, meant fewer jobs in the mills, fewer jobs for loggers in the woods. And yeah, I think those fears were certainly valid. If you'd been living out there your whole life, you grew up in 02:21:00Forks, your dad had been a logger, and you had planned on making a living as a logger, and all of a sudden they're saying, we're not going to be cutting trees.

SS: Did you ever receive a lot of hostility when people knew who you were, the "owl guy," for instance?

EF: Oh, I can remember being in some situations where it was very tense. But, I never got physically threatened. I can remember being in court on that court case up in Washington. I can remember; Jack and I testified.

SS: Was this after the ISC?

EF: I think it was after ISC. Jack was up on the stand and they opened the courtroom to let people in. Tons of people were outside demonstrating, and they let them file through the back of the courtroom. I remember this guy walking across the back of the courtroom and he's got his little year-old baby, holding his baby up, as he's walking across the back.

SS: Like you're taking food out of the mouth of my family?

EF: Exactly. Yeah, you're destroying my family. And I had my crews out in the field. I think the worst was out in the Olympic Peninsula in the early '90s. We were doing telemetry out there, late 1989 to '71[91] or so.

SS: You mean, '91.

EF: I'm sorry.

SS: You said seventy.

EF: Okay, 1990, about 1989 through '91 or so, we were doing telemetry.

SS: At the height of all this?

EF: Yeah, and my crews a couple times were threatened. I remember, Doreen had a crummy load of loggers coming down the road. ["Crummy" is vehicle to carry forest work crews] She was out early in the morning doing telemetry by herself, this crummy stops and this guy starts yelling at her out the window, "Blah, blah, blah, I'll run your damn car off," that kind of stuff. He's threatening a Forest Service employee. He's logging on Forest Service lands. We talked to the 02:23:00district ranger, the ranger went out and talked to the crew, and that got stopped. But, I can remember, one guy that worked on my crew up at Forks. He said he was standing there on the land, getting locations one day, and this four-by-four goes by and the guy just flips him the bird as he's going past him. That kind of shit, you know. That was at the same time when there were a few owls killed by people. We don't know who killed them, but....

SS: And that's what I was going to ask you about. Were there just some intentional, vicious killings of owls?

EF: Yeah, there was a little of that. I don't think it was ever very large-scale, but there was a case where they killed what they'd thought was a spotted owl, and hung it on a kiosk near a visitor center near the [Olympic] national park. They'd thought they'd shot a spotted owl, but it was a barred 02:24:00owl. They screwed up. But then, Ivy [co-worker] and I found two babies [spotted owl] that had been clubbed to death. We were pretty sure they [citizens angry about political situation] did that. We could never prove it. When we worked in the woods those years, on the peninsula or anywhere, we kept a low profile and didn't go out of our way to advertise what we did. The people knew we were there, but we never had any physical altercations. A few times, people fired guns in the air at night when people [researchers] were trying to call for owls.

SS: I think we're seeing in this country right now, a violent counter-reaction to everything post-modern. And I think the Bundy [rancher family from Nevada] 02:25:00dynamic, I think, really reflected what happened in the election.

EF: Yeah.

SS: I don't mean to get too sideways here.

EF: No, no.

SS: But I'm making a relational point to you and federal employees being concerned about their safety in this environment, even more so than when you were talking about.

EF: Yeah, to me, the Bundy stuff plays, fits right in with what we're seeing with Trump, that whole group. This idea that we would take these federal lands and turn them over to states, which I think, that's what worries me most about Trump, is he would be receptive to that kind of crap. If some of those people in his administration, the Bundy types and the states' rights type people, suggest that to him, I'm guessing he'd say, "Well, that makes sense to me, turn it over to the states." Once you've done that, you've lost all the federal lands. It's just.....yeah.

SS: Anyway, turning back to the early '90s, what do you remember about the whole thing that led up to the Clinton Summit? There was the Seattle Audubon lawsuit, there was the Dwyer injunction, the first, and then there was the second, and now, you guys did an EIS somewhere in the middle of all that, correct? After ISC on just the owl; am I correct?

EF: I didn't. Well, we did a couple of different efforts. We did a paper that we called the Scientific Review Committee, or SAT, Scientific Advisory Team, was our report where we looked at [other species], because the ISC Report was challenged because it only focused on spotted owls. The agencies said, "Okay, what other species do we have to be worried about?" And so, we did a report, and 02:27:00again, Jack Thomas was in charge. And it's the SAT Report where we came up with these lists of all potential species that we thought were associated with old forests. So, that was one report we did. Grant Gunderson was on that one.

SS: And that's before FEMAT by a year or so, right?

EF: Yeah, because we did the SAT Report. And we did the RAT Report, which was the Re-Assessment Team Report, where we looked at just the Olympic Peninsula, and we tried to assess whether or not that population would be viable given the distribution of reserves and stuff. So, that was another one we did. Those are the two that I can remember. I don't remember anything to do with the agency, you know, reviews and stuff. I kind of stayed out of that. I tried to just get involved as a scientist in all of this. I tried to stay out of the management parts of it, just tried to provide the input they needed to develop plans and 02:28:00not get too involved in the nitty-gritty of coming [up with], like all the various [options].

SS: Now, what did you know about the whole Gang of Four dynamic?

EF: Okay.

SS: In other words, going back to go before Congress. [They interacted with congressional members and committees]

EF: Right.

SS: And there was this report by the "Gang of Four," then the "Gang of Four Plus Two," Sedell and Gordie Reeves were added [to represent aquatic issues]. But what do you remember about this whole dynamic, this report, and how well do you think this report addressed the owl and any of the other commensurate issues?

EF: Their focus was on old forests and trying to maintain old forests and the full range of species composition of old forests in the Pacific Northwest. So, that was the main focus. I went over maps with those guys. I sat there with Jerry, and he'd be standing there saying, "Okay, what do you think about tweaking the boundaries on that habitat conservation area to capture this little 02:29:00bit of old growth over here?" That's the kind of stuff we did. We looked at the areas they were concerned about, they came to us, and we sat, Chuck and I, and I don't remember who else.

SS: Charles Meslow, right?

EF: Chuck, yeah. We sat down and said, "Well, okay, here's this HCA," but right over here is a patch of beautiful old growth the Gang of Four wanted to capture, and "could we tweak that boundary a little bit to bring in that and cut off some over here?" For the most part, we said, "Yeah, fine."

SS: A lot of horse-trading, in other words.

EF: A lot of horse trading, yeah. Which I said, I didn't care. I thought and felt like that the reserve network was so robust, that tweaking some boundaries one way or the other was okay.

SS: You're talking about the ISC?

EF: ISC.

SS: The HCA reserve idea concept, okay, right.

EF: Yeah, I kind of felt, hey, man, tweaking some boundaries is just, you know. [Acceptable]

SS: So, basically, they called them Old Growth Late Successional Reserves. [In Northwest Forest Plan]

EF: Right, right.

SS: You guys called them HCA's, but they're analogous, more or less.

EF: Yeah, and we kind of tried to merge it to where we could, we made them match 02:30:00up, so that you didn't, you know, that's kind of from my recollection of that, my involvement with that with the Gang of Four. I looked at the preserve network to be a pretty robust system and I wasn't too worried about trying to integrate the concerns with other forest types and that sort of thing with what we had done. I thought all of it was an order of magnitude better than what we started out with back in 1972.

SS: Twenty years.

EF: Yeah, they'd started from nothing and essentially a focus on [owls]. Like when I started working on spotted owls on the Siuslaw National Forest, Carlos Pinto was the biologist. Anyway, we talked about their existing plan. This would have been the early '70s, for the Siuslaw National Forest, in terms of the 02:31:00long-term objective, and it was to convert ninety-five percent of the forest, basically into early seral, and only have about five percent of the forest in some kind of reserve status. It was totally a focus on forestry and producing wood volume, especially on the Siuslaw. What we're talking about here with ISC and the Gang of Four, is just an order of magnitude change.

SS: What was the dynamic in the 1980's in the Mapleton Ranger District that had to do with, I think it was the early phases of the Endangered Species Act and the owl, or maybe it was connected to something else where they were going to allow a certain area to be cut, and then they weren't? And there was a negotiation, where they started, and then they went ahead with it. Was it in the mid-80's?

EF: Mid-80's?

SS: Yeah.

EF: Oh, gosh, I don't remember that. I do know that on the south end of the 02:32:00Siuslaw, back in those years, they were getting challenged more from the standpoint of soil stability and landscape stability issues, than they were owls. The country was steep and they were concerned about landslides, and they got pushed pretty hard, I think, to not log a lot of that.

SS: And of course, we just had that fatal landslide in Florence two years ago.

EF: Yeah, yeah.

SS: Where that woman's house was buried basically.

EF: Yeah.

SS: And they're suing now. I'm not sure who.

EF: But anyway, that was a big part of it back in those days, the landscape issues, as much as owls. [The Mapleton Ranger District case had to do with clearcutting and roads increasing landslides that damaged salmon habitat in the Siuslaw River watershed.]

SS: Especially because of the high saturation due to the rain, right?

EF: Yeah. And I don't recall if the issues with the thing you're talking about, was somehow related to that, or was related to owls, I don't remember that particular situation.

SS: Okay, you want to talk a little bit about the "God Squad," which was essentially a BLM entity, am I correct, or was it interagency?

EF: Yes. Well, basically, the BLM. I don't recall the exact details, but they wanted a bunch of exemptions from restrictions on timber sales. When they got denied, they requested that the "God Squad" be brought together and rule on the issue. The God Squad [reference] is when a group of very high level federal appointees who evaluate a situation and make a decision. That happened in 1992, after ISC.

SS: And it was basically a pejorative term to people that think they have the "power of God" to determine who lives and who dies?

EF: That's right, yeah. Right, it's when all else fails, you bring in the "god."

SS: Kind of like Nero and the Coliseum. Thumbs up or thumbs down. Right?

EF: Yeah, and I don't remember the exact outcome of that whole proceedings, but I do know that once more, the outcome suggested that they couldn't keep cutting BLM lands like they were or had been, and then we're going to end up in court again. So, again, this is just before Clinton shows up and tries to fix the problem.

SS: So, were you impressed with the Gang of Four Report?

EF: Yeah, I think those guys did a good job. They came into it wanting to do, I think, good things for the environment, but also, they were concerned about the long-term effects on the timber industry. So, they tried to produce a plan that would solve both problems long-term, but recognizing, I think, that any of this 02:35:00was going to have a pretty good, a pretty significant effect on timber in terms of the annual cut. So, yeah.

SS: Okay, we're after the Gang of Four, and in '92, Bush goes out of office, and Clinton is elected. And Clinton, as part of his campaign during a stop in the Northwest, promises to do something about this thing that's peaking, or it's continuing to peak for several years, but it's just a series of peaks and political intensity. And he said he'd do that, well, right afterwards, he actually did, and convened the Forest Summit. Correct?

EF: Yeah, that's right, and despite all the flack that Bill Clinton took because of his other little issues along the way, I continue to maintain that in terms of our environment, he did a remarkable job in terms of trying to solve the problem here in the Pacific Northwest. I think he was somewhat naïve, in 02:36:00particular, because he came in and said, "Hey, I'm going to try to fix this problem. You've guys have been struggling, fighting over this now for almost thirty years, and I'm going to pull together a team and they are going to fix this problem, once and for all. We're going to come up with a plan that will beat the law, will also provide for a healthy environment, and also will provide jobs for local communities." That's what he said. That's what he wanted. You know, and he jumped into it, and came out here and had his forest conference. Then Meslow and all the high muckety-mucks went up there, sat and talked for a day. [Clinton Summit]

SS: Were you there?

EF: I stayed out of it. I didn't -- (Laughs)

SS: Did you ever testify before Congress, by the way?

EF: I have never testified before Congress.

SS: Okay.

EF: I have gone back, the ISC Committee went back and met with a bunch of the high-level administrators, but Jack did most of the talking.

SS: So, you left that to the higher people up, like Jack and Jerry and Norm and all those guys?

EF: Yeah, those guys loved that stuff. I'm more, just let me work on my owls and write up my reports, and leave me alone. I'm much less of a dynamic personality in terms of getting up there in front of a bunch of, you know, congressmen or senators, and being able to bullshit with them. Jack was a master, and Jerry's not bad, but Jack is a master. (Laughs)

SS: Yeah, I've heard that, about how he was a big personality and he liked to play a room. Is that a fair assessment?

EF: Yeah, he's good at it, yeah. So, anyway, well, where was I?

SS: We were talking about the Clinton Summit and you segued into that and I asked you if you had testified before Congress, because several of the other people I've interviewed did testify back there.

EF: But, Clinton basically said, "Okay, you're going to pull together this group 02:38:00and you're going to come up with a solution." So, the Forest Service and the BLM and Fish and Wildlife Service, all those different groups, basically came together, and under Jack's leadership pulled together this team. And we had very, very little time to get out the report. It was crazy.

SS: And this is the FEMAT dynamic?

EF: This is the FEMAT, yep.

SS: So, they had the summit, and approximately how long was it before when you were given your sixty days, initially.

EF: Oh, gosh, yeah. It was-

SS: Wasn't it a month or so?

EF: Yeah, it was really fast. And we did. And this time, instead of just being six biologists sitting in a room, it was hundreds of people from all different interest groups.

SS: Well, you rented a whole floor in the big bank building?

EF: In the "Pink Tower" in Portland [U.S. Bank building] and, yeah, I mean, we had every kind of "ologist" you can imagine. This time fisheries played a big part in the development of the plan.

SS: Because they were not involved with the ISC. That was a small group.

EF: I mean, we talked to them in ISC, but not in FEMAT. You know, Sedell and those guys were there the whole time.

SS: Well, this is an outgrowth of the Gang of Four thing, because when they were testifying back there [in Congress], apparently Norm and Jerry both told me that congressman and even some other people, said you've got to the fish people involved.

EF: Right, right.

SS: Because we can have all this other stuff for the owl and all the terrestrial.

EF: You're going to get sued if you don't deal with fish.

SS: Yeah, essentially, that's what they said. And so, they were the ones that brought that in, so the whole thing comes together. You're in the pink tower; tell me about that experience.

EF: Okay, again, it's kind of a blur, as we had a very short time to get things done. We had to do all kinds of bringing in outside experts to help us evaluate 02:40:00different species and how they were likely to perform under different kinds of alternatives. I don't recall specific discussions, but from the very outset, I think we all pretty much agreed that this was what we were going to be proposing. I mean, the President wanted more than one option. He wanted options in terms of that he could choose from. But I think we all pretty much were resigned to the fact that our options were going to be based on some kind of big reserve system.

SS: Similar to the Gang of Four report?

EF: Similar to the Gang of Four and ISC.

SS: ISC, right.

EF: I think we all thought, we've got to have these reserves for terrestrial species, but we've got to be worried about fish and all those connecting waterways that cut up the landscape. And so, our reserve system got to be some 02:41:00combination of these terrestrial reserves and aquatic reserves. From there, we just kind of played around with different combinations. I mean, we came up with a total of ten different options that ranged all the way from what we called "big green," I think, if I remember right.

SS: Or the "green dream." [Reference by FEMAT participants for most environmentally-friendly option.]

EF: The "green dream," which is everything pretty much is off limits to business as usual, you know.

SS: Alternative 9 was closer to the green dream.

EF: It was.

SS: Than it was to the other end. Right?

EF: Option 9, definitely. Chose option 9 [Alternative] as it turned out.

SS: Do you want to look at the map here?

EF: Nah, I don't need to look at it.

SS: Okay.

EF: It basically tied up about 85 percent of the federal lands within the range of the spotted owl reserve network, either in a terrestrial HCA kind of, or Habitat Conservation Area kind of reserve, or some kind of an aquatic riparian reserve, where you're dealing with corridors along streams. The aquatic reserves 02:42:00were never mapped, so it's kind of hard to tell exactly where they were, but the combination of those things, wilderness, outright spotted owl reserve, or whatever aquatic riparian and the various landscapes that have some kind of restrictions on them because of just harvest issues, steepness [slope] or whatever, like 85 percent of the federal lands ended up in with some fairly major restrictions on harvest. And that's not far from the green dream.

SS: So, when you saw Alternative 9, you came out of this experience with, what, Alternative 9, as an owl guy. Knowing the demography and habits as well as anybody, did you feel that this was adequate?

EF: I felt, in terms of spotted owls, pretty much in terms of everything, I 02:43:00thought, wow, there's no way we could do any better than this. In fact, I thought, wow, if anything, probably this is more than we need for spotted owls, for example, that given all of the other concerns we have about jobs and timber production.

SS: And you're referring mainly just to the reserves, for the most part? Right?

EF: Yeah.

SS: Because there's the other lands, the Matrix, and the AMA's, and so on?

EF: Yeah, well, again, I thought at the time, being naïve, that if they truly did manage that Matrix land like we specified in option 9 that they would be able to meet their harvest targets. And that's, I think, where we all were a little bit naive because, obviously, that hasn't happened in a lot of those 02:44:00matrix lands because of court challenges, or legal challenges, ended up not getting harvested. As a result, we've never really come close to meeting the harvest targets that were specified in the plan.

SS: Now, Jerry told me that he called them the "B Team," in other words, the people that did the next level of recommendations.

EF: Right.

SS: Would that be the Standards and Guidelines? [NWFP Implementation rules and guidelines]

EF: Probably, yeah.

SS: And Jack, I guess, felt the same way, that they originally had what they called a coarse filter for how this would be implemented in terms of management for species and biodiversity and forest health. But, when they added "survey and manage" [surveys for hundreds of designated species], and all other potential species, even including invertebrates, that Jerry and Jack both had the same opinion. I think, that it was not a death knell, but it was going to be very problematic to manage realistically.

EF: It was. Yeah, it was. I agree with that. I think the survey and manage did 02:45:00some amazing stuff in terms of, I mean, the positive thing about survey and manage was it forced the agencies for the first time to really conduct a bunch of field work to figure out where these species occurred, how common there were, and so on. So, in just a short span of a few years, we learned a lot about quite a few species, tree voles in particular, that we never would have had we not done that. Because they did tree vole surveys all over the region, I've been able to publish monographs and because now we know a hell of a lot more about those species than we did before. The same thing is true of mollusks and a bunch of things. So, from that perspective, I think survey and manage was great.

SS: From a scientific perspective, I would say, yes.

EF: But from the effects on the ability to harvest on those lands, yeah, it just 02:46:00knocked holes in everything. I mean, the requirements that they protect tree vole nests in their proposed timber sales, you're going to find them pretty much all over the place, not abundant, but here and there.

SS: My first reaction, Eric, when I first started preparing for this project, knowing I was going to have to read a whole bunch of stuff and become enough of an expert to be a really intelligent interviewer, when I saw the survey and management thing, before I even knew what this was, I said, how is that realistically doable by agencies that have limitations on labor, time, capital, money, etc.? That was my first reaction.

EF: Yeah. And for a few years, they got some funding to do it, but once they started doing it, and it started to impact timber sales, then it just became very difficult to cut much of anything. And so, yeah, they didn't meet their 02:47:00targets, or they didn't meet the 1.2 billion board-feet a year or come anywhere close to that, which we, or the ISC group had sort of implied we could do, and we're still dealing with that and we're still not cutting much. We're not dealing with fire very well also.

SS: Why are we not dealing with fire well? Because things are so paralyzed that even intelligent thinning and other type projects are problematic, also. Would that be true?

EF: Well, that's part of it, but I think just socially, it's very difficult for the agencies to do what it would take to deal with fire very effectively. You would have to do some pretty dramatic things to the landscape, and they get challenged every time they try to do anything like that. Plus, I think they're 02:48:00not very good at planning in terms of taking a whole landscape and saying, we're going to do this, this and this, and then sticking to it. But on top of that, with climate change, and that's got us into a whole other ball game, I think, in terms of fire. It's just going to keep getting worse, if the climate continues to warm and we get these long, dry summers.

SS: Now, did you come out, or did you feel that the team came out, but also you and your, and the owls but also the terrestrial ecology area, do you feel that what you guys came out with was a successful plan?

EF: I think it was successful or has been successful in some respects. I think the plan has done a good job of protecting habitat for a lot of species that occur, both plant and animal, that occur here in the Pacific Northwest. It has, 02:49:00but walking out of the room, I thought it was going to be a successful plan, I thought it would maintain spotted owls in the long run, I thought it would do a good job of protecting virtually all the terrestrial vertebrates that we have, murrelets, things like that. Plants, for sure. I was concerned that it was not going to produce as much wood volume as was being predicted, not so much because of the lawsuits that have happened, things like that, just because I was concerned that our estimates were rosy, that just to be able to produce that much wood was going to be difficult.

SS: Basically, out of highly diminished areas? [Potential acres for sale/harvest]

EF: Yeah, yeah.

SS: Areas. Yeah.

EF: So, I was concerned about that. But, I also kind of felt like I've felt with 02:50:00ISC, that this plan was just going to be a stop-gap measure on the way to eventually developing a plan that was much more integrated and much more holistic.

SS: Tell me what you mean by integrated and holistic.

EF: I mean, a plan where the whole landscape is fair game, where everything is part of your reserve network.

SS: You mean, independent of ownership in terms of the state?

EF: No.

SS: Oh, okay, all federal lands.

EF: The ownership is hopeless. It's my opinion that once we start talking about private lands, you simply can't do anything.

SS: Because that's just the way it is.

EF: The way land ownership is in this country, you can't mandate to those [private lands], other than, as long as they maintain fairly good water quality, 02:51:00and don't destroy their land, then there's really not much you can do. But, in terms of the federal lands, where I thought we were going, where I still think we're going is a landscape where every inch of the federal land ownership sort is part of the plan. And you have a long-term plan for moving patches of forest and waterways in and out of your reserve network, depending upon what happens at the time, where they are, how they're distributed and so on and so forth.

SS: And the comparative ages of the stands?

EF: And the age of the stands, yeah. Maybe that's too Pollyanna, I don't know. But that's kind of where I keep thinking we should end up, except for wilderness 02:52:00areas and national parks that are sort of hands-off. That nothing is hands-off forever, that everything eventually gets somehow managed. And again, maybe that's just too Pollyanna. People just don't trust the agencies enough to do that, I don't know. But anyway, I kind of felt like walking out of FEMAT that we had a pretty good plan, if we can meet the targets for timber that we had sort of promised.

SS: But you were concerned that those couldn't be met.

EF: Well, I wasn't sure. I was pretty much dependent upon the timber planners and so forth, the silviculturists that were in the room. But in terms of how the plan has worked out, it certainly has not worked out in terms of producing the wood volume like we thought. It certainly has not worked out in terms of protecting the spotted owl.

SS: And that's because of the barred owl, as much as anything?

EF: And it's because of the barred owl. If it weren't for the barred owl, spotted owls would be doing fine, I think.

SS: If I recall right, in the first few years of the monitoring program, it basically showed a continued slight decline in spotted owl population, but that was actually predicted. Correct?

EF: Yeah.

SS: And then, the barred owl started to show up in numbers. Right?

EF: Well, the barred owls actually showed up quite a while back. I mean, they showed up here in Oregon up on the Andrews. There was the first one I ever heard, which is about 1973, I think. But for many, many years after that, they were very rare. I mean, we'd once in a while encounter one. It was only about 1990 that they really started to show up in numbers. And when I first started here in the Siuslaw in 1990, with our demography study, there were about maybe six percent of the sites, we had recorded barred owls. We're up to damned near 02:54:00100 percent of them now. There are just barred owls everywhere. When we were doing all these plans, ISC, FEMAT, those of us in the room who were biologists that knew about spotted owls and barred owls, kind of just put our blinders on like this and said, "Well, we're just going to focus on spotted owls, we're not going to really talk too much about barred owls, because we don't know what's going to happen." You know, that's kind of-

SS: This is in the early '90s?

EF: That's kind of what I did. You know, I just felt like if I start thinking about barred owls and what may happen long-term, I don't think anything's going to work. So, I put the blinders on and just said, "Well, I'm going to do the best job I can at managing habitat, and we'll kind of see where the barred owl thing goes." Right then, I just didn't feel like we could say for sure because 02:55:00there were so few of them around. But, we were worried. If you look at the papers that I published back in, like the report we did up in British Columbia in 1987, I think it was the year I went to work for the Forest Service, we said, hey, this doesn't bode well. We basically said, there are more barred owls now in British Columbia than spotted owls, and it's not looking good.

SS: Is that basically the pathway, where they came down, was from the north?

EF: They kind of came from the east and north. They came over through Montana, Idaho, kind of west, and from Canada down through the Cascades, mainly.

SS: Is there any reason for the population movement other than just the long-term dynamics of animal population movement and migrations?

EF: We don't know what caused the range expansion. Somehow, they got across the Great Plains. Kent Livesay wrote a paper that summarized what we know about the history of the movements of barred owls. And there were these sorts of historic 02:56:00locations scattered out there in some weird places in Colorado and west of Colorado in the 1800's or 1900's, and then they showed up in Montana in about 1920, and B.C. in about 1940 or so. So, we're not sure exactly how they got across. All we know is that, somehow they got through. And once they hit the forest of the West Coast; they're a forest owl, they just exploded. They just kept coming west and south, and they're all the way down into southern California now. So, they're kind of like the red-tailed hawk of the owl world, they're incredibly resilient and very much a generalist. They're bigger than spotted owls. They're very territorial. They have small home ranges. As a result, this plan that we thought was going to protect spotted owls, is not 02:57:00working well at all for spotted owls. In fact, in most study areas, they're going extinct, and the rate of change has accelerated. In the '90s, as you said, the rate of change was relatively gradual, from what we can tell.

SS: But that was expected for other reasons.

EF: It was.

SS: It was almost like a lag effect.

EF: Yeah, we kind of thought--

SS: Of the timber harvest dynamic and the implementation of the reserves, there'd be a lag effect of five or ten years. Right?

EF: Right, that's what we assumed. We actually assumed it would be longer than that, that there would be like a fifty-year lag effect, as these stands recover in the reserves, and spotted owls would gradually recover. The population decline would sort of level off and remain stable, or even increase a little 02:58:00bit. So, we weren't surprised in those early years by the continued decline. But what has been pretty remarkable in the last ten to fifteen years, is on many of our study areas, the decline has accelerated. On the Olympic Peninsula, in Cle Elum, or other study areas in Washington, they're about all gone. They went from being fairly common species with lots of reproduction, lots of good years, to very rare and almost no reproduction. That's what we're seeing on those study areas now. They try to reproduce and they fail, probably because they're competing with barred owls for food and they're getting harassed by the barred owls. So, what we're seeing is, I think, the extinction. We're headed that direction. And I think there's nothing we can do, Northwest Forest Plan or otherwise shooting barred owls, is going to stop that. I think we're stuck with barred owls 100 years from now being the only large Strix owl in this region. I think spotted owls are gonna go. It's a dismal thought, but that, based on the 02:59:00data, that's about all I can conclude.

SS: It's kind of humbling to think about; for all the work and passion and good intentions that went into this, that "mother nature" had other ideas?

EF: Yeah, yeah, oh, yeah.

SS: I mean, is that a fair way to assess it?

EF: Yeah. If you had asked me when I was 25-years-old, 30-years-old, a young biologist working on spotted owls, if you develop a good habitat management plan for spotted owls, would they do fine? I would have said, "Sure, no problem." But as I've gotten older, and you see things like this going on, you begin to realize that nothing in nature stays the same. It's constantly changing, and these sorts of species interactions have gone on for hundreds of millions of years, if not longer. And that 99.9 percent of the species that have ever existed have gone extinct because of competition with other species. You begin 03:00:00to realize that this kind of thing is common place, we just happen to be watching in this case, and measuring something when it happened.

SS: And that in itself is a valuable lesson.

EF: Oh, yeah.

SS: Even though it may be painful to watch because of the passion you have for a particular species.

EF: Oh, it's incredibly humbling.

SS: But it's still a humbling and an honest lesson to learn, wouldn't you say?

EF: Oh, yeah, yeah. From my perspective and short span of one human life, it's incredibly sad to have seen this happen, but at the same time, I get through the day by telling myself, "Hey, this was just one case where we were watching when one species started to interact with another in a competitive sort of interaction, and one species, I think, is going to go extinct." Now, I would 03:01:00make that statement in terms of the Northwest, the northern spotted owl, and probably the California spotted owl, at least in the foreseeable future. I don't expect to see that happen with the Mexican spotted owl because the Mexican spotted owl occurs in those really dry canyon lands in the Southwest where barred owls don't do well, as far as we can tell. Barred owls simply are very much a species of the mesic northern forest. And to date, anyway, have not been able to make inroads into that southwestern population of the spotted owl. So, again, at least for the short-term, I think that subspecies is probably secure, but this one up here, I just don't find much reason for hope. I think the Fish 03:02:00and Wildlife Service can shoot barred owls until they're blue in the face, and it's not going to in the long run change a damn thing.

SS: Don't you find that morally problematic? [Shooting barred owls]

EF: Oh, yeah, I do. That's one reason I retired. I didn't want to deal with it. I did not want to be --

SS: Because, just like sea lions being shot by dams [to help fish runs], I mean, I find that morally reprehensible myself. EF: Yeah.

SS: That's an opinion, for the record, but I find that troubling.

EF: Yeah, well, at least with the dams, short-term, I think if they shoot those sea lions, they can probably get some fish going up the river. But here, with an owl that runs around in the middle of night in the middle of forest, it's hopeless. I mean, you just can't do it, even if you wanted to.

SS: I mean, it goes back to the whole pejorative term, the "God Squad" at the BLM people [and U.S. Fish and Wildlife] playing god?

EF: Yeah. That was one of the main reasons I retired, because right before I retired, they were starting to implement these barred owl removal studies, and I just didn't want to do it. And I told people that. I told the media. I told 03:03:00anybody who would listen to me. I just don't believe this will work. I think it is a study you'll learn something in terms of cause-and-effect of competition between species, but in terms of a long-term solution to our problem, it's not going to be. So, it's just sort of like learning for the sake of learning without out, you know, really --

SS: And you're also killing a beautiful creature.

EF: You're killing a bunch of animals and it's not going to do you any good.

SS: Anyway, let's go back to something more positive. The NSO monitoring program in the wake of the FEMAT report, the Record of Decision, Standards and Guidelines, how was the monitoring program set up? There were certain key components, and do you want to just describe how that came about, and the objectives and the methods and the models that you were using?

EF: Okay. Well, the monitoring program actually kind of got started, the studies 03:04:00themselves actually started before we had a monitoring program. The first one was started down in California by Franklin and Rocky Gutierrez, and that was started in 1985.

SS: Oh, so the one that produced, or at least came out of this work here, that we see in this [book on spotted owls being viewed], correct?

EF: Yeah, yeah.

SS: Okay, 1985.

EF: The same year, I started banding birds down on Roseburg BLM. Joe Lint wanted me to start down there, so I went down and started banding a few birds on Roseburg BLM. So, those two studies started in 1985. Shortly thereafter, once we got the ISC plan, we decided we needed to start doing something more quantitative than just having these two studies in these two widely-based areas. Actually, it was even prior to that, when the old-growth program got started at 03:05:00PNW up in Olympia with Len Ruggiero and those guys. I got hired, and we started then doing some marking studies up on the Olympic Peninsula. We started another one over on Cle Elum over on the east side, in 1990. The H.J. Andrews got started in '87. But it wasn't until, I'm trying to think of when we officially, it was when Joe Lint wrote that monitoring manuscript.

SS: I have it here.

EF: I forget what year it was.

SS: So, Eric's looking at the 1999 Forest Service monitoring plan in which the primary author is Joseph Lint, and there were, what, et al., seven others?

EF: Yeah, Barry Noon, Bob Anthony, me, Marty [Raphael], the usual cast of characters was in there. So, we started all these studies at different times 03:06:00between 1985 and I think the last ones got started about 1990 or so, so over about a five or six-year time span. We started all these studies, but we never really had a formal overarching document that pulled all that together and said this is our monitoring plan. We just sort of started all these studies because we had the money to do them. The study areas were never picked randomly, we just we got a little money here, and we started one there, we got a little money someplace else, we started another one. So, that we got all these studies going, all these mark and recapture studies, and then we began to realize, hey, we need a formal protocol so we do the same thing on every one of these areas, so they're all comparable. And that's what precipitated this document here.

SS: And that happened after the forest plan was created, because you kind of realized, for legal and political and economic reasons, you needed to have 03:07:00something that said, okay, well, here's what we're spending our time and money on. Correct?

EF: Right, yeah. We needed a formal document that sort of laid out how we were going to be doing the surveys, so that we were doing them, conducting them the same way, so that we could actually bring all the data together and do a meta-analyses and actually draw some conclusions out of it. So, basically that was what this, the Lint, et. al. paper, was. We had a number of other sort of informal protocols, one of which I wrote up that we tried to follow in all the study areas, in terms of when you check the birds, and how many mice you used to locate the nest tree, and all that kind of stuff; all these protocols.

SS: And the basis was population and demography, mainly?

EF: Yes.

SS: How many and what was the range? Those were the main two factors, correct?

EF: We were worried about having big enough samples to actually draw conclusions 03:08:00about population trends on each study area, and we were worried about having the study areas be representative of the whole range of the owl. The sample size thing was relatively straight-forward. We tried to shoot for at least forty birds on each study area; in most cases there were a lot more than that. But the representative part was a bit more of a problem because, obviously, none of them are on non-federal land, so we don't really have any data from private lands, or at least they weren't initially. And they weren't randomly selected. It would have been hopeless trying to pick a random study area because of land ownership problems. But, from the very beginning, we argued that, well, yeah, they're not randomly selected, but they are so big and there are so many of them distributed across the Pacific Northwest, they cover something like nine percent of the range of the spotted owl that we believed.

SS: Wasn't there like ten or twelve areas, main areas?

EF: It's varied over time. There are eight on federal lands.

SS: Oh, okay.

EF: But there have been a number of others that have kind of come and gone over 03:09:00the years, and they were included in some analyses, but they've dropped out. For example, there was one conducted by NCASI over on the east slope of the Cascades in Washington. That study area is now gone. They didn't get enough funding to keep it going. There was another one down at the Point Reyes bird observatory, they did that one for a few years, and it's now gone. So, in the last meta-analysis, I think was eleven study areas in total. A couple of them are on non-federal lands, so now we do have some data from non-federal lands, one on the Hoopa Reservation in California, and one on Green Diamond property in northern California is entirely on private land. So, we do have some data from federal lands. In some of the meta-analyses that we conducted early on, we analyzed the sample separately to see if there were differences between federal and non-federal lands. In the most recent analysis that we published a year or 03:10:00so ago, we concluded that we've done these comparisons, and we don't really see much difference in what's going on in the federal and non-federal, so now we're just going to combine them. So, in the last analysis, we had eleven study areas so which we analyzed as one, big sample.

SS: Now, one of them is the Central Cascades in Oregon, too, centered on the Andrews, correct?

EF: The H.J. Andrews, yeah.

SS: It's called the Andrews, but it's somewhat analogous to the, it's close to the AMA that's in that area, too, isn't it? Or it is included in that? Right?

EF: Yeah, the center of the study area is the H.J. Andrews, but there are all these peripheral sites around the Andrews, down south, Cougar Reservoir and all that area, up into the French Pete Wilderness, and a bunch of sites peripheral to the Andrews, that are part of that sample.

SS: And of course, the demography and the population decline there is pretty much similar to everywhere else that you're seeing in the Cascades?

EF: It's similar to, without having the last report in front of me, I can't tell 03:11:00you exactly. It's certainly doing better than the study areas in Washington. It's doing better than the study area over here in the Coast Range, but it's still declining pretty dramatically. And there are barred owls everywhere on the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest. So, they're facing the same competitive issues up there that they are in the Coast Range, it's just that there are fewer barred owls, but there are still a lot of them. So, the Coast Range, you can't turn around without running into a barred owl any more, they're just everywhere. But, overall, the areas that are doing best tend to be the areas in the southern part of the range, the southern Cascades study area down around Ashland, in that area. Roseburg BLM is doing a little better than other study areas. (phone rings)

(Break in Audio)

SS: Continuing talking about central Arizona-excuse me, the areas that are doing the best, in southern Oregon?

EF: Yeah, southern Oregon is doing well, and the southern Cascades area, but some of the study areas in California, until they started doing removals down there like on the Green Diamond study area, that population was declining pretty rapidly, too. It just looks like barred owls really thrive in those coastal, very wet types of coniferous forest, which is what you have. Like Green Diamond is right along the coast of northern California. And the same thing is true of the Hoopa Tribe just south of there, on the Hoopa Reservation. Barred owls have just really exploded there and done well. And so, those populations [spotted owl] have been declining pretty rapidly, too. Until they started shooting barred owls, and then, they've kind of rebounded a bit. But I haven't paid much 03:13:00attention to them.

SS: How many owls have been shot? I mean, are you talking about thousands?

EF: Not yet, but that's where we're headed. This year, I haven't talked to Dave Wiens, but I think they've shot close to 400 barred owls maybe, something like that.

SS: So, what are the most important scientific points that have been made or that came out of the monitoring programs since the Northwest Forest Plan, or you can even continue back to the beginning?

EF: Well, basically what's coming out of the monitoring plan, is we have a long-term data set that pretty well lays out population trends of spotted owls, basically since about 1987 or '90. So, for the last 26 years, we've got pretty good data on population trends. The analysis shows that during that period, the population pretty much range-wide, has declined, continued to decline, and in 03:14:00some areas very dramatically, and in other areas less so. For a few years in the '90s, it looked like some of the populations farther south like at Roseburg BLM, in that area, were close to stable or only declining a tiny little bit. But in the last meta-analysis, not every one of the areas, but virtually all the areas, we're seeing continued declines, and in the study areas in the northern part of the range, the declines are on the order of six, seven percent per year, and that's just not a sustainable population. That's going downhill fast. For example, the Cle Elum study area on the east slope of the Cascades in Washington. When we started that study in 1990, we had probably eighty-some pairs of spotted owls on that study area. And this last couple years, we've had 03:15:00like four or five. So, we've gone-

SS: A precipitous drop.

EF: Oh, yeah. We've gone nearly to extinction, which has been incredibly difficult on the field crews. On these study areas, we've been able to keep these studies going because we've got some very dedicated people who have spent virtually their entire adult lives doing these studies. Stan Sovereign over on the Cle Elum study area, and Margie Taylor over there, they started that study in 1990. Stan's still working on it. But for them to go out there every year and just watch their owls that they get incredibly attached to, you know, twenty years old or more, disappear one-by-one and not get replaced.

SS: Well, they are being replaced by barred owls.

EF: They're being replaced with barred owls, but it's psychologically, it's 03:16:00incredibly difficult to do that kind of work.

SS: What about what we've learned about other endangered species, or species in general within the Northwest Forest Plan area? I've interviewed Marty and we've talked about the murrelet, but he also crossed over and gave his opinion on other things. Do you want to give your take on, just your general take on biodiversity habitat health in general, regarding the plan and its implementation, now 20 years into it?

EF: Like I said earlier, I think this plan has done a pretty good job of protecting habitat for late seral, for old-growth species, other than a few examples, notably like the spotted owl. I think in terms of things like flying squirrels and red tree voles and white-footed voles, and I don't know much about murrelets. But certainly a lot of these terrestrial species I think are doing fairly well on federal lands. Certainly, the fire [issue] is a concern, and 03:17:00there are some issues that in the long run may be problematic. But, at least to date, I think we have done about as good a job as we're ever going to do at protecting old forests, and thereby, protecting the kinds of species that occur in those old forests.

The trick from here on out though, is going to be continuing to do, protect those kinds of forest, while at the same time dealing with fire and climate change, and I think we're kidding ourselves if we think we can make things stay the same as they were historically, because the forests are going to change. I mean, when climate changes, we'll be dealing with different species compositions and altitudinal changes.

SS: Well, especially, as the climate changes. That seems to be the big elephant 03:18:00in the room.

EF: Right, right.

SS: I mean, across the whole planet. So, okay, how much work have you done with Native American communities?

EF: Essentially zero.

SS: And why is that?

EF: Mainly because they never expressed any interest in what I do. You know, I certainly never tried to act as an ambassador to Native American communities, because I've never done that with anyone. I've given lots of talks to environmental groups, but I've always usually done that when somebody comes to me and says, "Hey, will you come talk to our group." Will you come talk to our Audubon chapter or will you come talk to our Society of American Foresters meeting in Portland next month? So, and I've never had any Native Americans do 03:19:00that to me, come to me and say, "Hey, I'm interested in what you're doing. I want to hear."

SS: But in terms of the plan in general, because Native American interests were involved in lands, there wasn't a lot of cross-over with your work?

EF: No, no. Which is frustrating, because in all the years I've done this kind of work, we've had one Native American person on our crew, and he was a super-neat dude. He came and worked on our spotted owl crew here in the Siuslaw for a year.

SS: What tribe was he from?

EF: I don't even remember. But he was interested in biology as a science. He went to college and got a degree in teaching, and he's teaching, I think, high school biology, down in California. But that is incredibly rare. And I often talk about this, again, in these discussions, and I think there's just a 03:20:00fundamental disconnect between how scientists tend to look at the world, and how Native Americans look at the world. Those two things just don't jive. I think Native Americans look at scientists, this is my gut feeling, I haven't talked to any Native Americans about this, but just my gut feeling is that they look at my way of looking at the world through data and rational sorts of experiments and reasoning, as not the correct way to look at the world. It's just, you know, more of a religious sort of world-view.

SS: It's a much more pantheistic, interconnected view, and scientists by 03:21:00definition have to atomize the world.

EF: We take everything apart in little pieces, right.

SS: You have to, and that is contrary to a holistic, pantheistic, interconnected view of the world.

EF: Yeah, it's too bad, because I think we're on the same side, you know? At least, to some extent. I also think maybe we're not when it comes to timber harvest in the Coast Range of Oregon. But I think fundamentally, we share the same concerns about the health of our environment, whereas I think the Donald Trumps of the world could give a shit. But I think most scientists, we tend to be really concerned about the long-term survival of our species and the landscapes we live in, and I think Native Americans are concerned about the same things. But I think a lot of city dwellers and the Donald Trumps of the world are so disconnected, and they simply don't give a shit.

SS: What do you feel changed regarding the collaborative dynamic between federal, even state agencies, but focusing on federal agencies during this whole process over the Endangered Species Act, the spotted owl and other species, kind of forced at least the Forest Service and the BLM to be more intensely collaborative than they had been in the past. Would you agree with that assessment, and how did you see that manifest itself, and has it continued?

EF: Yeah, it certainly did force the agencies to work together. And I think there was a fairly narrow window (break in audio)--

[End of Part 1, Start of Part 2]

EF: When that sort of change and that sort of collaboration was possible. And like I said earlier --

SS: What happened? Oh, no, it's on File 80 now. Sorry, for the recording, I had to double-check that I didn't do something stupid. So, we're back on.

EF: So, I think there was, from sometime in the late 1960's until about the time of the Northwest Forest Plan, about 1994 or so, I think there was a fairly brief window there when the stars were in alignment when there were a number of new laws like NFMA and the [National] Environmental Protection Act [NEPA], that for the first time caused the agencies to be concerned about ecosystem health, trying to protect endangered species and that sort of thing. I think that there was also a very dramatic increase in environmental groups in terms of their 03:24:00interaction with federal agencies and getting involved in the process. I think there was sort of a progressive attitude in the Congress in terms of people thinking that we can make changes. We can do a good job of managing our environment. I think there were a lot of people thinking along those lines, including our representatives. They may not have been too enthusiastic about the effects on jobs, but they at least were open to talking about things we could do to do a better job of being good stewards. And I think that's what resulted in a lot of changes that took place during that fairly short time period.

I think as that happened, and it became apparent to some of these agencies that this was going to be a pretty big change in terms of how they did business, and 03:25:00that it was going to have a big effect on jobs in the agencies, and in local communities, some of those agencies kind of retrenched and became much less open to continuing that sort of collaboration and those sorts of changes. I think that's particular true of BLM. I think the Forest Service just kind of gave up and said, "Okay, we'll do whatever. Just tell us what we need to do and we'll go for it." The BLM has kind of dug in their heels, and now, through their district plans, they are basically rewriting the whole book, saying that we're no longer going to necessarily follow the Northwest Forest Plan. We're going to do our individual plans and we'll figure out where we end up down the road. And to a lesser extent, the Forest Service is doing that, too, with their new planning process. But, so I think it's now changed and the two agencies are sort of going 03:26:00their separate ways now.

SS: Again, like before.

EF: Again, where they were, right before. I keep waiting for a lawsuit where someone says, hey, if you are not going to follow the Northwest Forest Plan, this sort of inter-agency plan, and you're going to all start doing these different things, then that's in violation of the Northwest Forest Plan. We haven't seen that, but I do kind of wonder if we're not going to end up there at some point.

SS: Do you think there's any danger of this thing becoming completely disassembled? Because it was essentially an executive action, more or less.

EF: Yeah, I don't know. I suppose it's possible. But even if that happens, I'll be amazed if we saw a backtracking to where we were in the 1970s or '80s. I just 03:27:00don't think that would be socially likely to happen. I think, if they were to say, we're going to go back to business as usual and cutting seven billion board-feet a year or whatever it was, that, legally, that would be a problem. I think there would be so many lawsuits flying.

SS: Plus, the people would start living in trees again. [Protest to stop logging.]

EF: Well, yeah.

SS: And more than they did before.

EF: Yeah, probably. So, I don't see a complete reversal. I wouldn't be surprised, I don't think, considering the current political situation in Washington, D.C., backtracking, or at least trying to do more cutting on national forests and BLM districts. That wouldn't surprise me. But I don't think that, at least not in my lifetime, I'd be amazed if we go.

SS: If you were going to talk, I'm obviously not a timber guy, but let's say it 03:28:00was a panel. If you were going to talk to traditional timber communities that have either died off or struggle to survive today, what would you tell them about what was intended and what didn't go according to plan?

EF: Boy. Well, the intent was always to try to maintain a healthy environment, not just for humans, but for those species that we share this environment with. That at least from my perspective, that was kind of the driving force behind my involvement. I always felt like humans have got no end of spokespersons in terms of what their wants and desires and needs are, the animals that live out there don't have many at all. And that my role was to try to be a rational 03:29:00spokesperson for those voiceless organisms that I think are just as important as humans in terms of the grand scheme of things. We tend to think that we're the most important species on the planet, but we're no more important than a freaking rotifer as far as I'm concerned, in terms of the big picture. In fact, we may be less important, if we nuke ourselves and the rotifer ends up surviving.

I'm kind of getting off the point. So, my hope was that by developing these plans, we could make sure that these species that we all care about had a place to live and survive, but that we humans also had a place to live and survive, and work and make a living. And I knew from the beginning that something had to 03:30:00give. There's no way we can all have everything we want without giving, you know, something to somebody or something else. And that's the painful part of this. If you only think about humans, even then, I think you end up screwing up in the end. Because, if all you think about is humans, you're going to end up in a place that's pretty boring to live and probably pretty unhealthy.

SS: Not sustainable.

EF: Yeah, if you don't worry about air quality and you don't worry about the lichens and the mosses, and you don't worry about the mice and the voles and the salmon, we're all part of that system and you need to worry about those things. The unfortunate thing is the human population can't keep growing indefinitely and have this all work out in the end, because we overwhelm our resources. 03:31:00That's kind of the way I look at it. I recognize that in trying to manage for these other species, we definitely have, in the short-term, reduced the number of jobs that might be available to somebody living in a rural community, but in the long-term, I hope that I'm making the place healthier for their grandkids, or ten generations down the road. So, that's kind of how I justify the short-term pain that I know these decisions cause.

SS: Kind of capstone questions, a couple, and then we'll finish up here. What do you think is the most important reason for having gone through this whole process of planning, creating and implementing the Northwest Forest Plan?

EF: The most important reasons for doing it?

SS: Yeah.

EF: Well, to me, the most important reason was what I just talked about. Basically, it's to try to preserve the long-term health of the environment in which we live, thereby, improving the long-term likelihood that humans are going to be able to persist in that environment. That, to me, is why I've done what I've done.

I also think that just in addition to our being able to survive in these environments, I think in terms of sort of a philosophical view that humans, I think if we lived in an environment where all we had was other humans and a few crops that we grew or beef cows that we lived on, if we lose that species diversity, is important, I think. That we draw, maybe some more than others, 03:33:00that we draw pleasure and sustenance from being able to interact with an environment we find interesting and visually stimulating and pleasing. A world without spotted owls and tree voles and flying squirrels would be a pretty boring place. And for that reason, I think it's important that we try to preserve biodiversity as much as we can, and not willy-nilly wipe out millions of years of evolution in just (snaps fingers) the blink of an eye, which we're doing all over the damn globe. So, those are the arguments that I find rational in terms of doing things like the Northwest Forest Plan or any other environmental sorts of restrictions we put on ourselves to try to avoid 03:34:00destroying our environment.

SS: How do you feel the Northwest Forest Plan and the whole process has affected forest and natural resource planning in the U.S., but also abroad in terms of people watching what happened here, and I know you have colleagues elsewhere. They've watched, and I'm sure you've communicated with them, so how do you feel it's affected you here, but also in terms of other countries that have been watching us?

EF: I think it's had a big influence here across the country, across the U.S., particularly on federal lands. I think watching us go through this battle out here in the Northwest, has influenced management on a lot of the national forests all over the country. Certainly, not to the extent they've thrown everything into big reserves like we have, but in terms of being more focused on non-game sorts of issues and just environmental quality issues, things like that. And I think NFMA had a lot to do with that. But, even across the globe, 03:35:00certainly, I think we've had a fairly significant impact. I mean, India, for example, you know, people like Marty [Raphael] and Bruce [Marcot] and those guys, have made multiple field trips to India to try to help them with establishing reserves or some kind of management for endangered species and threatened species there.

SS: And they have a much more intense scarcity dynamic there than we have.

EF: Oh, yeah, it's horrible. Australia, they have struggled with management down there, of their forests and things like powerful owls and things like that. I went to a conference down there many, many years ago, and they definitely were watching what was going on up here, trying to implement some kind of management along those lines to protect non-game kinds of species. Like you said, I think people from all over the world, at least in a lot of countries, were paying attention to what was going on here.

SS: Are there any memorable experiences or stories with any the aspect of your involvement with the owls or the forest plan that you haven't talked about yet, something that maybe is on your mind that, oh, yeah, I didn't talk about that? I mean, you probably have gotten more stories than we have time for, but maybe some nice capstone anecdotes and thoughts?

EF: You should be talking to Jack Ward Thomas. That's the kind of stuff he's good at.

SS: That's what I heard about Jack, but unfortunately, he's not here anymore.

EF: I went to Jack's memorial service about, it's been four or five months ago, over in Montana. One of his grad students got up there, this gal, and just gave a fantastic talk. She was with Jack the months just before he died, and interacted with him quite a bit. She said she went in there one dayh all flustered about something, having some kind of major problem with some 03:37:00administrator or something, and was all in a big tizzy. And Jack's laying there, he's on his way out, and he said, "Sis.....you only get issued six silver bullets and you don't want to waste 'em on pissants." (Laughs)

SS: Did that capture his personality?

EF: Yeah, that captured it, yeah.

SS: Along that line, you've already given me some anecdotes about Jack, but I want to ask you about a couple of the other big players. Just a paragraph about people that were central to this whole thing. Jerry Franklin?

EF: Jerry's definitely been a key player all the way through. Like I said, early on, Jerry, he struck me as pretty much a forest ecologist, kind of focusing on 03:38:00forest succession, things like that. But eventually, he came around and got interested in old growth, spotted owls, and long-term preservation. Once he got into that arena, he had a huge influence. You know, he's one of the "gurus," and people listen to Jerry. He's a good speaker and a very strong personality. And he has amazed me that he has continued to stay involved. He's probably ten years older than I am.

SS: He's 80.

EF: 80, so, shit, he's eleven years older than me, and he's still out there fighting the good fight. He and Norm, just getting beat up right and left, you know, and keep at it.

SS: He just retired.

EF: Yeah.

SS: I mean, he announced his retirement after next semester.

EF: Yeah, but he's not going to quit going out there and fighting battles.

SS: You know, he still gets up in the morning when he's out doing his cone count stuff, and he still yodels to the trees. Do you know that?

EF: No, I didn't know that.

SS: I've been told that.

EF: Doesn't surprise me. Yeah, I think he definitely is key, in terms of making people aware of the unique structure and composition of these forests, and the fact that once gone, they can never be replaced. You know, and trying to do something with the agencies to get us out of this spiral that we're in, Jerry and Norm [Johnson] both. A lot of us get entrenched on one side or the other of the argument, but those two guys have tried their darnedest to get, I mean, they recognize the political issues that we're dealing with. And the fact that we're not getting the cut out, that makes a lot of people angry, and not supportive of the kinds of things we're trying to accomplish. And so, they [Franklin and Johnson] have tried to find some middle of the road where we could ramp up the cut a bit and keep more jobs, and still accomplish our environmental objectives.

I don't always find myself agreeing with exactly what they're saying, but I know surely they're trying. Nobody else is, at least not many people are except the politicians, and they just want a black-and-white solution. And those two guys are trying to come up with some kind of an ecological compromise that, you know, I don't know if we'll ever get there, but I give them an "A" for effort.

SS: Your compadre on the other endangered species that was high profile, Marty Raphael. Talk about Marty a little bit.

EF: Oh, Marty, (laughs) Marty's great. You know, he's your typical Berkeley graduate, kind of an easy guy to talk to, not argumentative or in your face. He is a good leader. He, you know, he helped Jack a lot, like in FEMAT, for 03:41:00example, get through that effort. He was kind of second in command under the general [Jack] and ushered a lot of us through the process.

SS: So, he was kind of the calm presence behind Jack's big personality?

EF: Exactly, and he's been a great boss for me. He was my boss for most of my career after Len [Ruggiero] left, and just an incredibly easy guy to work for. As long as you put in your time and kept publishing papers, Marty was very supportive. And I liked the guy. But he's good at dealing with people in that he's not in your face. He's not at all like Jack was. Jack was a strong personality, but Marty's very kind of, you know, he just gets along. And he was, 03:42:00at least in my career, very helpful to me in terms of just leaving me alone to let me do my work, which I appreciated.

SS: How about Norm Johnson?

EF: Again, he and Jerry have tried their damnedest to find a solution, some middle-of-the-road solution to managing forests in the Pacific Northwest, in a way that will meet all our objectives in terms of owls and things like that, and also provide jobs. And again, I don't always find myself agreeing with those two guys, but they're trying. More than anybody else, those two guys have kept banging their heads against the BLM wall, and to a lesser extent the Forest Service wall, trying to find a consensus that people will live with. They get attacked by the environmental groups, they get attacked by industry groups, you know, the industry groups call them a couple of dummies that don't know how to 03:43:00manage trees, and the enviros call them dummies that don't know how to manage habitat for owls. And, yeah, I wouldn't want to be in their shoes, actually.

SS: They're committed?

EF: They're committed. I think they've done a lot of good, just in terms of forcing people to consider more alternatives than just to either clear-cut or lock-it-up. I think in the long run, that's where we're going to end up no matter whether we want to be there or not, because all these forests eventually are going to burn up or blow down or something, or bugs are going to kill them or something, and you've got to be able to manage to produce a new forest. To do that, you need to consider a fairly broad range of alternatives other than just turn it into a reserve or turn it into an intensively managed forty-year 03:44:00rotation. So, I think they're sort of in a way ahead of their time. I think we're going to end up there eventually, but we still have the luxury of having these old forests that haven't burned down, yet that people don't want to give up.

SS: How about the aquatic guys, Gordie Reeves and Jim Sedell?

EF: Well.

SS: Jim's no longer with us, obviously, but just talk about them a little bit?

EF: I mean, you know, on the fish side, those two guys, again, have had a huge influence. I mean, they sat up there in the FEMAT exercise and kept telling us we had to think about fish and how we needed to worry about riparian reserves, and we needed to worry about wood in the streams, and all those things that we needed to be thinking about. So, I think Jim was kind of the guru, but Gordie has continued to stay involved. He continues to give talks about what he thinks 03:45:00are important things we should be concerned about. So, yeah, they're key.

You can pick almost any of the main species groups or whatever I can think of, like when we were up there in FEMAT. We had, I can't think of the name, but the woman that worked on lichens and bryophytes. She kept beating us over the head with, "You need to be thinking about, you dumb shit vertebrate biologists, need to be worried about lichens and fungi, because they're key drivers in the system and they're important, even in small patches, and you need to be thinking about those species and how they're going to disperse." It wasn't Cameron, it was Robin Lesher. I think was her name. It's the people like that made us broaden our horizons a bit and think about more than just spotted owls as key.

SS: How about Tom Spies, who's been involved, kind of behind the scenes more, and now he's kind of leading the twenty-year review, I believe?

EF: Yeah.

SS: Just tell me about Tom?

EF: Well, Tom's just, kind of a quiet guy. Not like Jerry at all, not out there in front of everybody talking a lot, but very knowledgeable. He wrote the book on old-growth forests a few years ago. That's really a good book.

SS: Old Growth in a New World.

EF: Yeah, and he was really involved pretty heavily with Jerry early on, and like that paper that they wrote talking about structure of old forests. He was a co-author with Jerry on that, I'm pretty sure. And I think Jerry, he first hired Tom. Tom came here as a young scientist. I think Tom was responsible for doing some of the structural kinds of work that Jerry talks about a lot. But like Tom 03:47:00actually took some of the old-growth structural data that I collected back in the '80s, and used that, I think, if not in that book, in some other paper he wrote on structure of old forests. So, he's been very involved, very important in terms of FEMAT and helping us write those sections.

SS: So, how would you rate the whole experience with the Northwest Forest Plan in terms of your career?

EF: Well, I've kind of gone on since then and gotten more and more sidetracked by red tree voles and working on again, another single species kind of issue.

SS: And you also worked with other raptors, too, right?

EF: Oh, yeah. Golden eagles, bald eagles, I've done a little of everything. But in terms of my career, the Northwest Forest Plan was the culmination of thirty 03:48:00or so years of work in terms of finally reaching sort of a resolution to the issue in terms of coming up with a plan that applied across the whole range of the spotted owl. But again, I just kind of feel like in the long-term, I think it's sort of a step along the way that eventually it will get redone, it will change. My guess is that we'll go to gradually a more holistic, range-wide approach that will be less focused on reserves and more focused on trying to deal with the whole landscape in some sort of a kind of an amorphous, changing entity, which for anyone who has been involved up to this time, is incredibly 03:49:00difficult to think about because of the trust issues. You know, the idea that the agencies can be trusted to do anything. And for the old-timers that have fought for all these years have dealt with all the pushback from the agencies, no matter which side you're on, it's kind of hard to trust anybody to do something right. So, I think there's that concern. But that's I think where we're headed in the long run is some kind of a more holistic range-wide plan. But I don't know.

But in terms of my career, well, particularly after I retired, but even before I retired, I had gradually, I had gotten so burned out with constantly fighting over spotted owls, that I looked for something that I could enjoy.

SS: That's why you got into studying other raptors now, right, more?

EF: Well, it's certainly why I started working on tree voles.

SS: Oh, tree voles.

EF: I felt like there I was dealing with a species that probably wasn't going to go belly-up overnight because of competition with some new species. And they're just in terms of an interesting critter to study, they're just, yeah, it's just a little mouse. Everything eats them, but, god, their whole life history is just amazing. I mean, they're one of the more specialized little voles in the world, in fact, probably the most in terms of how they live. So, that's made it fun again instead of just feeling, oh, shit, you know, one more time into the battle and so on.

SS: There must have been quite a fatalism that was creeping in as the barred owl thing became real, and the inevitability of it.

EF: Oh, yeah, it definitely has. You went from being this idealistic young 03:51:00biologist thinking you could solve the world's problems, to being this old fart that, just you're pretty pessimistic about your ability to solve those kinds of problems. So, yeah.

SS: But at least you tried.

EF: Well, yeah, we tried.

SS: With that, we'll sign off.

EF: Okay.

SS: And I'll thank you very much for a great interview. Thank you, Eric.

EF: Yep, thank you.