Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Anti logging activist missing after fire burns his house

Them spotted owls were almost tame. I had one hit my hat one night as I walked out of the woods after bowhunting elk on a spring/wallow all day. I was wearing a wool hat with a ball on top. It was right at dusk. I felt something brush my head then an instant later he lit on a branch in front of me, just above eye level. I took off a wool glove, did some mouth squeaks, shook it a little and threw it on the ground under the tree. He kinked his neck bath and forth looking at that glove on the ground and finally glided off.

Have had them land in a tree close to me other times not at all alarmed by my presence. Fun little birds.

Actually, that article takes me back to my previous life as a forestry writer, for Evergreen. One fiasco that kept me busy in the early 2000's was the Biscuit fire and the junk "science" that came out of it. Biscuit burnt 10 billion feet of mature timber, four of it in wilderness, with about four billion a complete no-brainer in terms of legality and salvage under normal circumstances. That was reduced to two billion just because there was so much dead and so little capacity to take the wood in the two-year salvage window. How much came off? 285 million feet or so.
A couple of years later, there was a short item in Science, a one page paper that popped off 58 separate national media stories, the paper became known as the "Donato paper." My computer blew up that night as a number of forestry academics called BS on the paper, which basically said "Thou Shalt Not Salvage Because Thou Art Killing Seedlings."
Never mind that in SE Oregon, having too many seedlings germinate is actually a problem, and it's good to kill a good number to limit competition for light and water. Never mind seedling mortality had been studied in 1947, quite definitively.
So, away I went to Oregon, to Congressional hearings, field trips, and university campuses. First, I found out that Dan Donato's Forest Service liason and grant administrator, Tom Sensenig, had been cut out of the loop by Donato's OSU academic advisor, J Boone Kaufmann. In turn, Boone had led zero-cut Sierra Club rallies in Potland in the 1990s, AND was one of 8 authors of something called the Beschta Report, never peer reviewed, basically, Thou Shalt Not Ever Log or Salvage Anything Ever Again, that kept popping up as "science" in multiple northwest court cases.
Even more disgusting, after I'd done a FOIA at OSU, I waded through an 8 inch stack of correspondence and learned this "paper" had only one peer reviewer, who had taken "20 minutes" to review and approve it for publication in Science. The reviewer? Jerry Franklin, the guy responsible for a lot of the stupidity in the Northwest Forest Plan.
I've written lots about this abuse of "science" -- it really made a cynic out of me, how so many credentialed people are total snakes, pure ideologues. If any of you want more, you can probably find my articles by Googling "Dave Skinner" with Biscuit and any of the names here. But yeah, that was a low point for me personally in terms of science, and "science journalism."

But, Dave, you support climate change don't you?

Boone is about as agenda driven as science gets. I was at the Dept at OSU during '96-'02, but stuck mostly to sagebrush stuff and at a pion level.


Feeding spotted owls white mice don't seem too sciency to me neither.

Yeah, I support climate changing. And I noticed it USED to be "global warming" but they decided to cover any contingency.

The problem with the changeists is, they haven't come up with any answer as to why such massive disruptions are appropriate in order to "prevent warming." And honestly, so the eff what if Northwest Territories actually has orange groves?

Crazy eyes, but the sharpie marks is for the purpose of defeating facial recognition technology.

My paternal grandfather literally lived in and around old growth throughout western Oregon, timber faller from way back, like Depression era. NEVER even once saw a spotted owl and he was in the woods hunting running hounds... Passed on in '93 and I know today's Oregon would sicken him.

Climate changes, no doubt about it.

Boomer, Boone isn't a scientist. He's an advocate with a fancy degree.

And get this. The Beschta report was particularly singled out as garbage by USFS Chief Dale Bosworth, for not being peer reviewed, but basically a talking points paper done for a green group -- I think Pacific Rivers Council. Fast forward a couple of years, and J Boone Kauffman ends up being deputy chief of research for USFS Pacific Islands Research Station. That's where he went after the Donato fiasco, which tells me how clueless Bosworthless's leadership turned out to be.

Another guy, who WAS Deputy Chief of Research for the entire forest service, Bob Buckman, put it like this to me: "All scientists have their values. I have mine, too. But if I let my values override science, then my science loses all value."

That period, The TWS, OR-TWS was soo full of chit with their New Paradigms in Wildlife Management. Fuggin salamanders, KMAFB! Just nonsense galore.


Or the dicccheads that'd go with "best science available" even when knowing it was wrong. Coooocksuuukers.

I have some questions about how to lessen wild fires. I've heard that in Slick Willy Clinton's terms as Prez, the greenies got a lot of legislation passed that stopped the logging and that's when the price of lumber went through the roof. And this added fuel to the fires because it took away the fire breaks. How true is this? I mean I can see it, it makes common sense.

Now on face book there is an article that is preaching controlled burns to reduce dry leaves and scrubs on the ground which add fuel to wildfires. They also help control tree diseases and kill invasive plants. There's so much CONTROLLED BURNS and CONTROLLED LOGGING will benefit the forests and people that live in and around them.(Why did they quit calling them forest fires? That's what they are, forest fires. Maybe some greenie BS. But they are FOREST FIRES. A wild fire could be in town.)

I mean I can see all this as good conservation. Why do the Greenie Tree Huggers oppose it? I mean if it's about the spotted owl hell they gotta know one of these fires probably kills hundreds of them. If you cut a tree down the owl will fly off and find another tree. It's common sense, unless someone on here knows a good reason against it. These people must be truly looney, and not the good kind of looney that goes with guns. WHY!

That’s silly, I’d recognize her anywhere!

This article describes some of the challenges on fire management of the west side of the Cascades. Ignore the GW stuff. GW isn't going to make the forest drier, but it might extend the fire season.

https://www.oregonlive.com/news/202...s-the-unprecedented-was-predictable.html

September has always been peak fire season around here and this is no exception.

This area is pretty much temperate rain forest. Most of our fall winter and spring are damp and large area are not largely frozen or snow covered most of the winter. This is perfect conditions for growing not only large trees but also under brush. If you log an area or it burns off, most of the brush will be back in a few years. This makes the kind of prescribed burns that are possible in other areas, impracticable here. You'd have to burn it every five to ten years.

Now while I said we're wet most of the year, our summers are usually very dry. We normally get very little rain from about mid-June to Mid- September. This year it's been very dry.

This set the conditions for fire. Historically we have had these types of conflagrations every 50 or so years in the state, with most areas seeing it burned every 200-300 years for the past 11000 years. The article mentions forests with all the same age trees. That's from the big fires.

When we get a dry east wind in a forest that's bone dry, it doesn't take much to set it off. The winds at Timberline Lodge were recorded a 80mph for most of last week.

What's different with the fires going on now is that there are so many. Some of them were cause by lightning fires that were smouldering. Some were power lines. One I know was a vehicle caused fire. One of the fires in Ashland was arson. The rest they're still investigating.

Personally given the history of fire in the area, I doubt there is much we can do about them. If you have a fires that are burning at 20-30mph you can't stop it.

Well said Steve. ^^^^^