Humboldt Marten Recovery Plan Fails to Address Threat from Timber Industry

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service recently released their draft “Pacific Marten Recovery Plan.” The draft Plan is incomplete and inadequate to provide for the recovery of the marten (which EPIC usually calls the “Humboldt marten;”; others sometimes call the species the “coastal marten ”).

You can read our full comments below:

EPIC Coastal Marten Draft Recovery Plan Comments.docx.pdf

Download PDF • 1.45MB

Under the Endangered Species Act, such plans are required and should provide a roadmap for the recovery of listed species—so that when the recovery actions are completed, the species should no longer be at risk of extinction. Such plans are influential in land management and help guide other federal agencies, like the Bureau of Land Management or the Forest Service, in fulfilling their obligation under the law to protect listed species. 

Via California Department of Fish and Wildlife

Historically, recovery plans—while contentious and a reflection of the push/pull of politics—have been guided by science and provide clear directions for protecting a species. The draft Recovery Plan for Pacific Marten largely falls short of this standard. The draft Plan itself is skimpy—just five pages of substance, 10 pages in total. By contrast, the 2011 Revised Recovery Plan for the Northern Spotted Owl ran 277 pages of highly detailed and specific recommendations.

The draft Plan also seems deeply sensitive to angering the timber industry, euphemistically referring to logging (and its effects on habitat) as “vegetation management.” This is unfortunate, as one of the primary stressors to the species, particularly the Northern California subpopulations, is industrial timber production, which removes marten denning habitat, makes juvenile dispersal more difficult, and decreases the survival of adult martens by providing more habitat for their predators, like bobcats.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has long seemed afraid of what a listing of the species might mean. When the species was finally listed, the Service exempted Green Diamond from its prohibition on “taking,” citing a voluntary “Safe Harbor Agreement” that the company negotiated with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife as justification. EPIC and the Center for Biological Diversity challenged that Safe Harbor Agreement but unfortunately lost in court. 

Recovery of the Humboldt marten in California means building greater redundancy in the population by creating more populations of martens that are large enough to be self-supporting. It also means greater resiliency in the species, connecting large blocks of suitable habitat together through migration corridors to allow for gene flow between subpopulations. Ultimately, this will require a change in forest management to allow for the complex older forests that martens require. But, of course, the timber industry doesn’t want to grow older forests; they want to clearcut young forests, stunting their potential to ever serve as viable habitat. 

The Humboldt marten was once thought to be extinct until a population was rediscovered in the 90s on Six Rivers National Forest. We have a second chance. We shouldn’t squander it.