Mike Stephens is a bear of a man--appropriately enough, for someone who spends much of his time in the redwood forests of Mendocino County. Also like a bear, he prowls those woods mainly at night, alert to the subtlest of sounds. In particular, he is listening for hoots and whistles. Stephens is a conservation biologist, contracted by the nonprofit Conservation Fund to monitor spotted owl populations on several tracts of land the Fund has purchased in the past several years. This May I went to Mendocino to spend an evening with him--hoping, of course, to get a glimpse of these rare birds.

You will recall the war the spotted owl sparked in the late 1980s, when the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposed listing the bird as threatened throughout its range (northern California into Washington) due to loss of old-growth habitat, primarily as a result of timber harvesting. Listing occurred in June 1990, and in 1991 all logging in national forests ceased by court order. The loss of 30,000 of 168,000 jobs was predicted, and in short order stickers reading I LIKE SPOTTED OWLS--FRIED and KILL A SPOTTED OWL--SAVE A LOGGER adorned pickup bumpers, and plastic spotted owls were hung in effigy in Oregon sawmills.

In fact, by the 1980s the timber industry was already in big trouble. Between 1947 and 1964, according to a University of Wisconsin study published in 1988, logging jobs had declined in number by 90 percent in the Pacific Northwest, as old-growth forests dwindled and automation became the rule. While individual loggers and small sawmill operators decried what they considered misguided and excessive environmental protection, larger timber interests saw the writing on the wall: the industry needed to adapt and change. The industry sponsored the Sustainable Forestry Initiative, promoting best management practices that dovetail with stricter regulatory requirements. Large commercial timber companies also continued to sell off forest lands.

Some of the divested lands have “been fragmented into small holdings for single-family homes or weekend getaways,” according to the Conservation Fund website. Most acreage, however, has been “sold to timber investment or real estate investment companies, whose harvest practices are often geared toward short-term profit as opposed to long-term sustainable management typically employed by commercial forest products companies.” In 2004, to permanently protect an especially sensitive natural area in Mendocino County, the Conservation Fund went out on a huge (or, depending on how you look at it, incredibly spindly) financial limb, purchasing the 24,000-acre Garcia River Forest from Coastal Forestlands Ltd. for $18 million, in partnership with the Coastal Conservancy, Wildlife Conservation Board, and Nature Conservancy. Two years later they upped the ante, paying Hawthorn Timber Company LLC and the Campbell Group $48.5 million for 16,000 acres of redwood and Douglas fir forests surrounding Big River and Salmon Creek--home to coho salmon, steelhead trout, and northern spotted owls.

The Owl Guy
To pay off the large mortgage on these precious lands, the Fund needs to harvest and sell their timber--and they wish to do so sustainably, with a strict eye to such long-term ecological goals as enhanced water quality, wildlife protection, and improved wildlife habitat. For that to happen, they needed wildlife consultants to census and monitor the more sensitive populations of flora and fauna. Enter (among a small army of others) Mike Stephens, “owl guy."