A critical look at lynx habitat

Inter Lake editorial

Plum Creek Timber Co. and Stoltze Land and Lumber Co. are leading the way in proposing a crafty and effective alternative to the arbitrary and wasteful imposition of "critical habitat" for Canada lynx.

We've long been detractors of the critical habitat game, especially as it has been applied to lynx.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service last February proposed a designation that includes 11,304 square miles of mostly state and federal lands in the Northern Rockies, with boundaries taking in lands above 4,000 foot elevation as an attempt to capture boreal forests.

One doesn't have to be a biologist to know that lynx use lands below that elevation, too, because in fact, lynx use many kinds of habitats, including lower-elevation managed forests that produce bountiful populations of snowshoe hare, a primary prey source for lynx.

One problem with this designation is that it is a shotgun application of critical habitat. Why, for instance, does U.S. 2 in Western Montana appear to be a line of demarcation separating critical habitat and non-critical habitat?

The biggest problem with the designation is that it doesn't actually do anything for lynx, but it may do a lot for environmental litigators and regulators. In the minds of some, a critical habitat legal hammer will eventually provide benefits to lynx, but it will also be an encumbrance on 1.3 million acres of private lands in Montana that are owned by people who are in a position to actually do things that enhance lynx habitat.

And that's where the Montana Partnership Conservation Agreement comes in. Plum Creek, Stoltze and a coalition of outfits such as the Montana Forest Council and the Montana Tree Farm System are making financial and networking commitments to reach non-industrial landowners and educate them on ways to improve lynx habitat.

Most of the private forestlands entailed in the proposed designation are non-industrial and owned by hundreds of people, many of whom may not be aware of practices such as leaving downed wood for denning habitat or applying varied thinning techniques to improve snowshoe hare habitat.

The private conservation proposal is an approach that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service cannot match with its limited resources, partly because it is saddled with a mandate to engage in costly and time-consuming critical-habitat paper-pushing. It took the service most of this year to produce a three-inch thick economic analysis estimating that the nationwide costs related to the designation will total $1.49 million over the next 20 years.

We have to wonder if an analysis needs to be done to calculate the costs of producing the economic analysis, and whether it is really worthwhile.

Partners in the coalition believe that the economic analysis does not reflect the hidden, unforeseen and unintended costs of a critical habitat designation. They view the designation as a burden that does nothing to earn the cooperation of landowners, and the conservation proposal as an alternative with incentives to produce results on the ground.

They are right to make it a conditional offer: exclude private forest lands from the regulatory layer the designation would bring, in exchange for measures that will actually benefit lynx.