Owl Watching in the Experimental Forest
On a warm May afternoon, Fred drives me upslope along Forest Road 130 behind the Andrews headquarters through a collage of forest types that are the result of varied logging strategies tried out over recent years. He is a tall, lean timber of a man, gray-bearded as the licheny Northwest trees, with a gentle yet intense manner. He tells me about the sites he’d like me to visit.
“You might want to go sit on that gravel bar in Lookout Creek.”
It feels more like conversation than instruction, though I know each writer who comes over the duration of the project will be asked to visit the same locations: creek, log decomposition, and clear-cut sites. I’m expecting science to be the boss here. After all, my host has been studying this terrain for decades. It takes me a few interchanges before I realize that he really means to make me a full partner in the enterprise of understanding this pace.
We park at the Blue River Face Timber Sale Unit, an area partially cut one year, then burned the next, and planted with seedlings the following year. The cutting prescription was set on a 180-year rotation with 30 percent live tree retention. Fewer cuts were made close to the river to decrease erosion and silting. Snags were left standing as habitat for voles and flying squirrels.
Fred strides down into the cut, peering at stumps, scanning the tree rings for signs of an earlier wildfire in these firs that had lived five hundred years. I wander along the charred ground, trying to hold onto his language for the place. I write “patch cutting.” “too much edge,” “min frag,” “owl injunction,” “new forestry.” Fred has an excited mind and verbal acuity that are hard to keep up with, especially when his commentary is filled with a lifetime of learning about this forest. But what really interests him are volcanoes. He calls himself a “closet volcanologist.” He’s visited eruptions in Hawaii, the Galapagos Islands, and Mount St. Helens to see how much a scale of disturbance registers in the forest. He says that “the organism perceives the interpretation of the mechanism.” All the way down to the molecules, nature is a self-correcting process.
Continue reading “Owl Watching in the Experimental Forest” in Deming’s collection Zoologies: On Animals and the Human Spirit.
