One issue that loggers frequently have to deal with, whether on private or public land, is conservation of protected species.  Special precautions must be undertaken on lands where protected species may live, and entire logging operations can be shut down, depending on the species, the relevant laws, and the groups protecting the species.

The Northern spotted owl is perhaps the most well known of these.  The Northern spotted owl was listed as Threatened under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) in 1990, and quickly became the center of a firestorm of controversy.  Spotted owls require large areas of old growth forest to survive, and heavy timber harvests in the Pacific Northwest had decimated these forests for over a century.  Logging, one of the biggest industries in the Pacific Northwest, was effectively halted in old growth forests across much of the owl’s range.  In 1992, Secretary of the Interior Manuel Lujan Jr. proposed an exception to the ESA (which mandates every step necessary to increase a threatened species’ population) to allow logging to continue in the spotted owl’s range as long as the population stayed stable.  This measure was met with a heavy storm of criticism from environmentalists.  After heated debate, some land was designated critical habitat for the spotted owl that year, and in 1994, the Northwest Forest Plan was drafted to provide further protection for the owl and other species reliant on old growth forest habitat in the Pacific Northwest.  The critical habitat list was updated further in 2008, and then again in 2012.

These days, loggers in the Pacific Northwest must deal with the Northern spotted owl as a fact of life.  Many logging and land management companies conduct surveys for the owls before any activity is initiated, and monitoring continues even after projects are completed.  Northern spotted owl numbers have continued to decline, however, and barred owls have begun to outcompete Northern spotted owls across most of their range.  It’s quite possible that the northern spotted owl will go extinct despite all the efforts to save it over the past two decades.

Final note: It is important to remember that the Endangered Species Act is often used as a tool to protect a larger ecosystem and not just listed species.  The spotted owl is a proxy for old growth habitat, and if an environmental organization wants to save that habitat, the spotted owl is the easiest way to do it since it is offered particular legal protections that other species are not.  This tactic made recent headlines with the American burying beetle, which has caused delays in construction of the Keystone XL pipeline.