Even More Praise of the Dead

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When I read Wuerthner’s contribution I was struck by how it could be perceived as “kingdomist”, that is animal “kingdom”-o-centric. Actually “kingdom” is sexist so we should probably pick another word. So I rewrote it from a less “queendomist” perspective… with apologies in advance to anyone who is offended ;)..

Dead. Death. These are words that we don’t often use to describe anything positive. We hear phases like the walking dead. Death warmed over. Nothing is certain but death and taxes. The Grateful Dead. These are words that do not engender smiles, except among Grateful Dead fans. We bring these pejorative perspectives to our thinking about forests. In particular, some tend to view dead animals as a missed opportunity for a meal. But this really represents an economic value, not a biological value.

From an ecological perspective dead animals are the biological capital critical to the long-term health of the forest ecosystem. It may seem counter-intuitive, but in many ways the health of a forest is measured more by its dead animals than live ones. Dead animals are a necessary component of present forests and an investment in the future forest.

I once visited a District Ranger who went on and on about his plans for an fall elk-hunting trip. Maybe he didn’t realize the importance of dead elk remaining exactly where they should be so that the ecosystem can flourish, instead of the vital nutrients being wasted in a municipal sewage system. Or perhaps a septic tank, depending on where he lives.

I had a good lesson in the value of dead animals a few summers ago when I was taking a class in carnivores. We learned how many different species feed on elk and bison carcasses, from grizzlies and wolves to crows to various invertebrates. And of course, bones and other pieces of animals leach into the soil, nurturing plants.

Dead animals are a biological legacy passed on to the next generation of forest dwellers including future generations of wildflowers and trees..
Dead animals have many other important roles to play in the forest ecosystem. They provide homes for invertebrates.
Dead animals are the biological capital for the forest. Just as floods rejuvenate the river floodplain’s plant communities with periodic deposits of sediment, episodic events like major freezing, starvation or disease events are the only way a forest can recruit the massive amounts of dead animals required for a healthy forest ecosystem. Such infrequent, but periodic events may provide the bulk of a forest’s input of nutrients for a hundred years or more.
All of the above benefits of dead animals are reduced or eliminated by our common forest management practices. Hunting removes these all important nutrients to where they are unavailable to plants. Creation and recruitment of dead animals is not a loss, rather it is an investment in future forests.
If you love birds, you have to love dead animals. If you love fishing, you have to love dead animals. If you want grizzlies to persist for another hundred years, you have to love dead animals.

So when you get a whiff of a particularly ripe carcass, try to view these events in a different light-praise the dead: the forest will be pleased by your change of heart.

Will Peace Break Out in the US/Canada Softwood “Wars”?

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I like peace and deals, in general, as opposed to litigation…I like the optimism of this article from the Vancouver Sun. Thanks to Craig Rawlings, Forest Business Network, for this! Note the quote below: “we’re learning to work together rather than fight over litigation.”

Here’s an excerpt:

Although there’s little doubt U.S. agitators will continue to pursue these kinds of actions, the threat to U.S. producers from Canadian lumber exports is not what it was. The recession and U.S. housing crisis altered the dynamics of the market, as both lumber production and prices fell. Canada’s share of the U.S. market dropped to barely 25 per cent — exports of softwood lumber fell from $9.6 billion in 2004 to $2.6 billion in 2009. Many analysts now expect Canada’s average market share will not return to previous levels but rather hover around 27 per cent for years to come.

As Canada’s exports of softwood lumber to the U.S. declined, so too did Canada’s dependence on the U.S. market. In 2004, 81.1 per cent of Canada’s lumber exports were destined for the U.S; by 2010, the proportion was 58.7 per cent.

What happened is that Canada — and, for the most part, we’re talking about British Columbia, which accounts for nearly 60 per cent of Canada’s lumber exports — found a voracious new market in China.

Since 2003, B.C.’s softwood lumber exports to China have risen by 1,500 per cent; and the value of exports was up 60 per cent in 2011 alone, surpassing the $1-billion mark for the first time. Lumber sales to China have grown from $900 million in 2006 to $3.2 billion in 2011, representing growth in the share of exports from 6.6 per cent to 28.8 per cent.

John Allan, president of the B.C. Lumber Trade Council, explained that China is drawn by the attributes of wood — namely seismic performance, carbon sequestration and energy efficiency, adding that B.C. producers are unlikely to abandon the Chinese market no matter what happens south of the border.

“We learned a lesson in diversifying our markets to China and ignore that lesson at our peril,” he said. “We’ll need to keep an eye on the U.S. recovery and housing starts and that will dictate where negotiations go toward a new agreement.”

Another sea-change that will affect future negotiations is the warming relationship between Canadian and U.S. producers. They have found common cause in the promotion of wood and have joined forces to market it globally. The so-called checkoff system, developed over the last three years by the Binational Softwood Council (established by the Canadian and U.S. governments under the Softwood Lumber Agreement) and overseen by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, imposes a charge on all lumber producers to fund a marketing scheme to promote the use of wood. “We’re learning how to work together versus fighting over litigation,” Allan said.

The reduced threat from exports, more diversified markets and a new spirit of cooperation will change the tenor of negotiations and their outcome.

It may even come to pass that no treaty with restrictions, quotas, tariffs and taxes will be necessary. Perhaps the risks and rewards of free trade will finally be extended to lumber, not only giving Canada access to the U.S. market but spreading the benefits of building with wood to the rest of the world.

Praise the Dead: The Ecological Value of Dead Trees

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The following is a guest post from George Wuerthner. 

Dead. Death. These are words that we don’t often use to describe anything positive.  We hear phases like the walking dead. Death warmed over. Nothing is certain but death and taxes. The Grateful Dead. These are words that do not engender smiles, except among Grateful Dead fans.  We bring these pejorative perspectives to our thinking about forests. In particular, some tend to view dead trees as a missed opportunity to make lumber. But this really represents an economic value, not a biological value.

From an ecological perspective dead trees are the biological capital critical to the long-term health of the forest ecosystem.  It may seem counter-intuitive, but in many ways the health of a forest is measured more by its dead trees than live ones. Dead trees are a necessary component of present forests and an investment in the future forest.

I had a good lesson in the value of dead trees last summer while hiking in Yellowstone. I was walking along a trail that passes through a forest dominated by even-aged lodgepole pine. Judging by the size of the trees, I would estimate the forest stand had its start in a stand-replacement blaze, perhaps 60-70 years before.  Strewn along the forest floor were numerous large logs that had fallen since the last fire. Fallen logs are an important home for forest-dwelling ants. Pull apart any of those old pulpy rotted logs and you would find them loaded with ants.  Nearly every log I pass along the trail had been clawed apart by a grizzly feasting on ants. It may be difficult to believe that something as small as ants could feed an animal as large as a grizzly.  Yet one study in British Columbia found that ants were a major part of the grizzly’s diet in summer, especially in years when berry crop fails.

Who could have foreseen immediately after the forest had burned 60 years before that the dead trees created by the wildfire would someday be feeding grizzly bears? But dead trees are a biological legacy passed on to the next generation of forest dwellers including future generations of ants and grizzly bears.

Dead trees have many other important roles to play in the forest ecosystem. It is obvious to many people that woodpeckers depend on dead trees for food and shelter. In fact, black-backed woodpeckers absolutely require forests that have burned.  Yet woodpeckers are just the tip of the iceberg so to speak. In total 45% of all bird species depend on dead trees for some important part of their life cycle.  Whether it’s the wood duck that nests in a tree cavity; the eagle that constructs a nest in a broken top snag; or the nuthatch that forages for insects on the bark, dead trees and birds go together like peanut butter and jelly.  Birds aren’t the only animals that depend on dead trees. Many bats roost in the flaky bark of old dead snags and/or in cavities.

When a dead tree falls to the ground, the trunk is important habitat for many mammal species. For instance, one study in Wyoming found that without big dead trees, you don’t have marten. Why?  Marten are thin animals and as a consequence lose a lot of heat to the environment, especially when it’s cold. They can’t survive extended periods with temperatures below freezing without some shelter. In frigid weather, marten dig out burrows in the pulpy interiors of large fallen trees to provide thermal protection. They may only need such trees once a winter, but if there are no dead fallen trees in its territory, there may not be any marten.

Many amphibians depend on dead trees. Several studies have documented the close association between abundance of dead fallen logs and salamanders. Eliminate dead trees by logging and you eliminate salamanders.  Even fish depend on dead trees. As any fisherman can tell you, a log sticking out into the water is a sure place to find a trout lying in wait to grab insects.  If you talk to fish biologists they will tell you there is no amount of fallen woody debris or logs in a stream that is too much. The more logs, the more fish.

Even lichens and fungi are dependent on dead trees. Some 40% of all lichen species in the Pacific Northwest are dependent on dead trees and many are dead tree obligates, meaning they don’t grow anyplace else.

Dead trees fill other physical roles as well. As long as they are standing, they create “snow fences” that slows wind-driven snow. The snow that is trapped, melts in place, and helps to saturate the ground providing additional moisture to regrowing trees.  Dead trees that fall into streams stabilize and armor the bank, slowing water, and reducing erosion.  Dead trees create hiding cover and thermal cover for big game as well.

I was once on a tour with a Forest Service District Ranger who wanted to conduct a post fire logging operation. We were standing near the open barren landscape of a recent clearcut that was adjacent to the newly burnt forest.  I pointed out to him that the black snags still had value. He couldn’t see anything but snags waiting to be turned into lumber. I said the snags were still valuable for big game hiding cover. He dismissed my idea out of hand.  So I challenged him. I said I have a rifle and you have two minutes to get away from me. Where are you going to run? He didn’t have to ponder the point very long.

Even more counter-intuitive is that dead trees may reduce fire hazard. Once the small twigs and needles fall off in winter storms their flammability is greatly reduced.  By contrast, green trees, due to the flammable resins contained in their needles and bark, are actually more likely to burn than snags under conditions of extreme drought, high winds and low humidity. Under such extreme fire-weather conditions, I have seen trees like subalpine fir explode into flame as if they contained gasoline.  Fine fuels are what drive fires, not large tree trunks. Anyone who has fiddled around trying to get campfire going knows you gather small twigs, and fine fuels. You don’t try light a twenty inch log on fire.

Dead trees are the biological capital for the forest. Just as floods rejuvenate the river floodplain’s plant communities with periodic deposits of sediment, episodic events like major beetle kill and wildfire are the only way a forest can recruit the massive amounts of dead wood required for a healthy forest ecosystem.  Such infrequent, but periodic events may provide the bulk of a forest’s dead wood for a hundred years or more.

All of the above benefits of dead trees are reduced or eliminated by our common forest management practices.  Sanitizing a forest by “thinning” to promote so-called “forest health”, post-fire logging of burnt trees , or removal of beetle-killed tree bankrupts the forest ecosystem.  And even our mostly ineffective efforts to suppress wildfires and/or feeble attempts to halt beetle-kill reduce the future production of dead wood and leads to biological impoverishment of the forest ecosystem.  Creation and recruitment of dead trees is not a loss, rather it is an investment in future forests.

If you love birds, you have to love dead trees. If you love fishing, you have to love dead trees. If you want grizzlies to persist for another hundred years, you have to love dead trees.
More importantly you have to love or at least tolerate the ecological processes like beetle-kill or wildfire. These are the major factors that contribute dead trees to the forest.

So when you see fire-blackened trees or the red needles associated with a beetle kill, try to view these events in a different light-praise the dead: the forests, the wildlife, the fish– all will be pleased by your change of heart.

Wilkinson on 4FRI

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I thought it was interesting that High Country News published this piece, by Charles Wilkinson, a law professor at University of Colorado. Here’s a link to his bio. Historical note: yes, the same person who was on the Committee of “Scientists” for the 2000 Planning Rule, so he’s been following these issues for some time.

Below is an excerpt of the piece. You can also find it at here at the Summit Daily News (thanks, Bob Berwyn) and other papers where Writers on the Range is syndicated. Because HCN and the syndication reach many readers who are not following this issue, I think it’s important to take a look at what Wilkinson says- what most people (outside the area) will read about what’s going on. The stakes are high for a landscape scale collaboration, so it is interesting to follow this, even for those of us far removed. What is interesting to me is the continuing story/question that the FS is screwing up with its choice of contractor, or about to screw up (before the EIS is released..??). Do people really think that the FS would go back on the general agreements that they worked so hard, for so many years, to get?? Or is this about something else entirely?

This blog is one of the few places that we could actually have this discussion with the details and knowledgeable people involved, so I am hoping when the EIS comes out we can track it here. Also, I think it’s the proposed action we’re interested in and not the EIS, but I guess I’m being pedantic again. I like to keep those separate in my head because I think it helps clarity.

We have discussed the 4FRI selection of contractor before here on this blog. including here, here and here.

The first link discusses the FS reasons for selecting the contractor. Like I said in that post, there is plenty of wood around the SW and Interior West, if folks have a good business plan maybe they could take it and develop 4FRI II elsewhere?

But a red flag has gone up: On May 18, the Forest Service announced its choice of contractor for the 4FRI process — Pioneer Associates, whose representative for the project just recently worked for the Forest Service. This was the largest stewardship contract awarded in the agency’s history, and yet the agency bypassed the contractor most deeply involved in 4FRI, the one whose business plan was closely tied to the project’s unique provisions.

Several 4FRI organizations have strongly criticized the choice of Pioneer Associates, citing the inadequacy of its business plan. The Eastern Arizona Counties Organization, for example, detailed “glaring deficiencies” in Pioneer’s bid and concluded that the award was “not based on either economic or ecological merit.” What’s troubling to many observers is that the choice of contractor may indicate that traditional attitudes are tearing away at the agency’s support of 4FRI.

The Forest Service, with its long and rich history, has run into trouble with the public and Congress in modern times over two main issues: Its timber harvests for far too long were set way too high, and far too often the agency insisted on doing things its own way. This approach — “we are the experts” — persisted in spite of contrary public opinion.

Both problems have been alleviated over the past decade or so. The timber cut is way down. The Forest Service now touts its commitment to collaboration with citizen groups, an approach that is widely agreed to be preferable to litigation and top-down, federal decision-making.

Doubters in Arizona, however, see the recent selection of Pioneer Associates as a bad sign. Tommie Cline Martin, a Gila County supervisor, predicts that, given the chosen contractor, the Forest Service will follow the same path as in the past, and that means “cutting big trees before getting to the small stuff, which is the threat to our remaining sickly forests.”

In the next few months, the Forest Service will face a major test on 4FRI, perhaps the agency’s most ambitious and carefully prepared collaboration effort. The regional office in Albuquerque will release — probably in July or August — the draft environmental impact statement for the collaborative effort. Does the choice of contractor suggest a lesser Forest Service commitment to 4FRI? Will the draft EIS weaken 4FRI’s environmental safeguards?

An immediate sign of trouble ahead is the news that Pioneer failed to include in its bid any funding for the regular monitoring of restoration efforts, an essential activity for good public land management. Will the draft EIS insist upon monitoring that will meet the standard set by the collaborative effort? Another hallmark of 4FRI’s approach is its commitment to thinning small-diameter trees because they, and not the large-growth trees, constitute the fire hazard. Will the draft EIS continue that emphasis?

Larimer County wildfires burned homes, buildings valued at $55 million

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Here’s a link to a Denver Post story.
Below is an excerpt.

While the losses to homeowners are immediate and huge, the effect on the county’s tax base won’t be felt until 2014, Larimer County Assessor Steve Miller said.

Tax collections in 2012 were based on assessments conducted in 2010. The county will be reassessed this year to establish tax collections for 2014. In the meantime, tax bills for 2013 will reflect the fact that homes and adjacent structures burned.

“Say a home was there for five months and gone for the other seven,” Miller said, “we’ll prorate that amount.”

The recovery of lost tax collections will be slow, even if people do decide to return to the burn zone, Miller said.

Unlike the Waldo Canyon fire, which was concentrated in a Colorado Springs neighborhood, rural areas rebuild slowly. He cited the 2002 Hayman fire, which charred 137,760 acres in the mountains southwest of Denver and burned 132 homes.

“A lot of (the Hayman fire) area has still not come back to what it was beforehand, and that was what, 10 years now?” he said.

Another factor that influences how quickly an area recovers economically from a fire is what kind of structures were lost. The Waldo Canyon fire, which ripped through 347 homes in the Mountain Shadows neighborhood, occurred in an area with higher real estate values than rural Larimer County. The value of those lost homes is estimated at $110 million.

“What burned here was some vacant land and some residential,” Miller said. “The Waldo Canyon fire, that burned up some very expensive real estate, whereas we had more moderate and older structures.”

Feds on Track for Record in BAER Spending?

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Here’s the link and below is an excerpt.

Nearly $25 million has already been spent to prepare for the immediate aftermath of this year’s wildfires, putting the U.S. Forest Service on track for another possible record year of spending on burned-area recovery efforts.

The formula for recovery is just as complicated as the factors — drought, decades of fire suppression and climate change — giving rise to more severe fires in the West, experts say.

“With the kinds of intensity we’ve seen on some of the recent fires, there is, for all practical purposes, permanent impairment of the ecosystem,” said Wally Covington, director of the Ecological Restoration Institute at Northern Arizona University.

He pointed specifically to last year’s Las Conchas Fire near Los Alamos, which burned through hundreds of square miles of tinder dry forest, destroyed dozens of homes and threatened one of the nation’s premier government laboratories.

Flooding from the Las Conchas burn scar still remains a concern.

On Wednesday night, a wall of water rushed down Santa Clara Canyon, washing away months of restoration work done by Santa Clara Pueblo and government contractors.

“Our prayers are that it does not get any worse than what it is,” Pueblo Gov. Walter Dasheno said.

In the canyon, post-fire flooding has moved car-sized boulders and toppled trees as if they were toothpicks.

“Until you’re on the ground and you see it, you can’t gauge how much stress it’s placing on our families,” Dasheno said, explaining that the pueblo sits at the mouth of the canyon.

Sherman was aware of the flooding near Santa Clara, but said there have been no reports of major flood damage related to the recent string of fires in New Mexico and Colorado.

Aside from those two states, Sherman said burned-area response specialists are working in Arizona, Nevada, Utah and Wyoming. Contracts are being finalized for seeding and mulching, roads and trails are being stabilized, culverts are being prepped for higher flows of water and warning signs are going up.

On the massive Whitewater-Baldy Fire in southwestern New Mexico, seeding started Thursday on more than 26,000 acres and straw mulch will be spread over another 16,000 acres.

WSJ: U.S. to Seek Claw Back of Closed Montana Biomass Plant’s Funds

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Justin Scheck of the Wall Street Journal has the full story. Snips are below:

The U.S. Treasury Department plans to demand back more than $5 million it granted a Montana power plant that later filed for bankruptcy, in what would be a rare foray by the government into the courts to claw back job-creation funds distributed under the 2009 economic-stimulus package….

The Treasury paid Thompson River $6.5 million in 2010 from a piece of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act known as Section 1603 that reimbursed developers of renewable energy with cash payments equivalent to 30% of their projects’ costs. The program has given out more than $11 billion, the Treasury Department says….

The grant to Thompson River, majority-owned by a Minnesota private-equity firm, was to convert a coal-fired plant to burn wood, which is considered a “renewable” power source. But since receiving the money, the plant never operated either as a coal- or wood-burning plant, according to Montana regulators, and has produced neither power nor new jobs. It is now mothballed. It is not known how many new jobs the firm promised to create, or how many currently are employed at the plant….

Thompson River was an old coal-fired power plant on which a new ownership group, led by Wayzata, spent more than $20 million to bring into compliance with emissions rules and burn “clean coal,” said people familiar with the project. After finishing the work, said a person involved in the project, Wayzata announced that the plant would burn only wood—making it eligible for the Recovery Act money as long as the plant was technologically capable of producing power. But its owners found they couldn’t operate the plant profitably by just burning wood, said three people with knowledge of the project….

UPDATE: The Missoulian’s new columnist, George Ochenski, also takes a look at the Thompson River Biomass Debacle in today’s paper:

“It’s not hard to recall the fiasco of the University of Montana’s recent biomass proposal, which ignored both economics and environmental impacts while being endlessly promoted by the university, Sen. Jon Tester and his handful of industry and environmental collaborators.  It is equally important to remember that the Thompson River venture was initially sold to the public as a wood-burning plant, but quickly morphed into a super-polluting coal-burner once the economics of wood chips kicked in. Could that happen elsewhere? You bet it could.”

Nanocellulose Pilot Plant at Forest Products Lab

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Nerve cells growing on nanucellulose
article here http://www.nanotech-now.com/news.cgi?story_id=44752
Nanocellulose Pilot Plant to be Unveiled at Forest Products Lab

Production facility for renewable, forest-based nanomaterials first of its kind in the United States

MADISON, Wis. – The U.S. Forest Service, Forest Products Laboratory (FPL) is poised to become the country’s leading producer of forest-based nanomaterials with the opening of a $1.7 million nanocellulose pilot plant. The facility will support an emerging market for new wood-derived renewable materials that will create jobs and contribute an estimated $600 billion to the economy by 2020.

High-ranking industry, government, and academic officials will gather for a ribbon-cutting ceremony and media is welcome to attend.

What: Grand Opening of FPL’s Nanocellulose Pilot Plant

When: Wednesday, July 25th, 2012

10:00 a.m. – 11:00 a.m. Presentations by USDA, Forest Service, and Industry Leadership

11:15 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. Ribbon cutting and media opportunities for interviews

Where: U.S. Forest Service, Forest Products Laboratory

One Gifford Pinchot Drive, Madison, WI

Who: Attendees include USDA Under Secretary Harris Sherman, Forest Service Northern Research Station Director and FPL Acting Director Michael Rains, and industry representatives from companies such as IBM and Lockheed Martin

The United States and other nations will see numerous benefits from the commercialization of wood-derived cellulosic nanomaterials, as they have many desirable characteristics. They can be stronger than Kevlar fiber and provide high strength with low weight. These attributes have attracted the interest of the military for use in lightweight armor and ballistic glass, as well as companies in the automotive, aerospace, electronics, consumer products, and medical device industries.

As new lightweight, high-performance products are developed and commercialized, fossil fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emissions will be reduced, manufacturing in rural areas will increase, and many new high-paying jobs will be created. FPL’s new facility will aid in the commercialization of these materials by providing researchers and early adopters of the technology with working quantities of forest-based nanomaterials.

For over 100 years, FPL’s work with academia, industry, and other government agencies has led to ground-breaking discoveries with great benefit to the public. Additional information on FPL’s research is available at www.fpl.fs.fed.us.

# # #

Black sludge coats Poudre River after High Park Fire- Denver Post

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From this piece in the Denver Post:
Here’s a video.

Excerpt below.

“The ash will be disappearing soon, but erosion along the river will continue — through summer 2013. We’ll see lower erosion rates by 2014,” said MacDonald, who specializes in watershed science.

It could take three years for relief in the harder-hit spur canyons, engineers told Solley. Rebuilding should wait, they said.

While the ash in the river is not harmful to rafters or even swimmers, except for its power to obscure potentially dangerous debris, the fish have much more serious problems.

The 2002 Hayman fire caused the loss of 70 percent of adult fish in the the South Platte River, said Colorado Parks and Wildife aquatic biologist Ken Kehmeier . The South Platte still hasn’t responded well to efforts to repopulate the fish, he said.

“We still hear complaints from anglers on the South Platte. The Poudre fire will be that bad or worse,” Kehmeier said, partly because there are no large reservoirs filtering out heavy sediments to the benefit of the river downstream.

“We know we’re losing fish now, but the impacts could last more than 10 years,” Kehmeier said. “It’s a devastating thing. It’s a lengthy recovery process, and we will be continually working for years to bring the fishery back.”

One of the early efforts to save fish was made during the fire, when officials evacuated 100,000 small fish over two days from the Watson Lake Rearing Unit in Bellvue. The fish left the hatchery in a semi truck outfitted with seven 500-gallon tanks. Some were released in Horsetooth, Carter and Flatiron reservoirs. Others went to Chatfield State Park’s hatchery, Kehmeier said.

Now as storm runoff from burned areas hits the river, some sediment and ash is carried along and some settles, dropping into the small spaces between river rocks and gravel, smothering insects and other invertebrates that are food for fish.

The river’s pH changes, Kehmeier said. Ash makes it more basic. Yet in some parts of the river researchers are seeing the water become more acidic, possibly because of decomposing pine needles. The shifts in pH are one more stress on fish.

Note from Sharon: I’m not trying to say that we shouldn’t have fires, which are “natural” and we couldn’t stop ’em if we tried. My point is that we ought to be clear-eyed about their costs and benefits when we manage them, which we will always do, as long as there are people in the woods and people using the water from the woods. I wonder if seeing them through the “timber wars” lens keeps us from seeing clearly.

Poisons on public lands killing rare forest creatures

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UCD researcher Mourad Gabriel with a sedated fisher. Poisons being used on public lands are killing rare animals. (Courtesy UC Davis)

Here’s the link to the story. I wonder if this poison also impacts other carnivorous avian and mammalian species?
Below is an excerpt.

Rat poison used on illegal marijuana farms may be sickening and killing the fisher, a rare forest carnivore that makes its home in some of the most remote areas of California, according to a team of researchers led UC Davis veterinary scientists.

Researchers discovered commercial rodenticide in dead fishers in Humboldt County near Redwood National Park and in the southern Sierra Nevada in and around Yosemite National Park. The study, published July 13 in the journal PLoS ONE, says illegal marijuana farms are a likely source. Some marijuana growers apply the poisons to deter a wide range of animals from encroaching on their crops.

Fishers in California, Oregon and Washington have been declared a candidate species for listing under the federal Endangered Species Act.

Fishers, a member of the weasel family, likely become exposed to the rat poison when eating animals that have ingested it. The fishers also may consume rodenticides directly, drawn by the bacon, cheese and peanut butter “flavorizers” that manufacturers add to the poisons. Other species, including martens, spotted owls, and Sierra Nevada red foxes, may be at risk from the poison, as well.

In addition to UCD, the study involved researchers from the nonprofit Integral Ecology Research Center, UC Berkeley, United States Forest Service, Wildlife Conservation Society, Hoopa Tribal Forestry, and California Department of Fish and Game