On 7/9/2003, Scott Atkinson wrote:

>In this case I think it is silly to promote the recovery of a single species
>at the expense of many others

I guess I (and other sources you've looked at?) haven't made the point
baldly enough:


Without abundant salmon runs, the entire forest/watershed suffers.


Salmon are a 'keystone species'. They actively drive much of our
ecosystem. Because they grow up in the sea, each brings a lot of
nutrients back to the land, and this effects *all* species in the
watershed.

Salmon are a key species in another way too--many other species need
the same kind of habitat. Since salmon live in several quite different
habitats along their route, from shaded headwaters though deep ocean,
if the salmon are kept happy in each one of them, there are
automatically good healthy niches for hundreds or thousands of other
species too, from dragonflies and shellfish through kingfishers.


>Further, these are
>lands that are PUBLIC, purchased and maintained through the years with
>public funds for a variety of interests, not the domain of a single special
>interest group.

Birders and duck hunters are special interest groups too, if I'm not
mistaken. I'm a member of the public, and I consider habitat
restoration, especially of wetlands, to be one of the few really good
uses of my tax dollars.

>Shrubby/weedy areas at the Skagit WMA did increase
>with the dike system, and--imagine this--the evil humans' changes vastly
>enhanced bird diversity as a result!

But only the diversity of species that can use shrubby/weedy areas.
What happened to the thousands of former resident wetland species?
They got kicked off, and most never found a new home. Not just salt
marsh birds, but amphibians, native plants, other fish and aquatic
species. Tidal salt marsh is the most productive of all terrestrial
ecosystems. Marshes provide flood control, they help clean pollutants
out the water, they reduce erosion and stabilize the shoreline. All of
that was demolished by the dikes. All of that can come back, but only
with a lot of work and some experimentation. It's so much easier to
destroy something than to restore it.

You can make a shrubby/weedy area almost anywhere in a decade or so.
It's about the only kind of habitat that's easy to grow from scratch,
and it's a good use for a worn out farm. But there are so few places
where you can have any sort of wetland, and even fewer to have a tidal
salt marsh. You can *only* have an estuary where a river empties into
the sea, and for a tidal marsh as opposed to some other kind of
estuary, the options are even more limited. Ain't so many
possibilities, and many are already so badly damaged there's little
chance of restoring them. Each one is precious.

>Salmon, to the best of my knowledge, Allyn, do not interact with Spotted
>Owls.

Most species directly interact with comparatively few other species.
Plants do better than most animals: a native plant typically has
direct interaction with roughly 50 other species, including disease
fungi and the insects that nibble on them. If one pays attention to
only direct interactions, ecology can look fairly simple. But if you
really want a hope of understanding life, you MUST pay attention to the
indirect relationships too. That's what the web of life is all about,
why it's as robust as it is, and why we haven't (quite) yet brought the
whole thing crashing down.

What do spotted owls eat? They primarily eat rodents, flying squirrels
being high on the list. What do the flying squirrels eat? They mostly
eat truffles, which are various mycorrhizal fungi that live
symbiotically with trees. (In the process of truffling, the squirrels
also distribute spores, ensuring that new tree seedlings will have
their much needed fungal companions available, so that there will
eventually be more large trees for the owls to nest in.) What do the
fungi eat? They buy carbohydrates from the trees, paying with water
and nutrients such as fixed nitrogen and phosphorus. Where do the
nutrients come from? A significant amount come from the sea--via
salmon. This is just one strand in the web that includes the spotted
owl, but every one of them comes back to nutrients--and salmon.
Spotted owls do interact with salmon, it's just a more complex dance
than you'd like it to be.

>As a final point, birders may be interested to know that the same lobby
>wanting to breach the Skagit WMA dikes wants to "take back" adjacent
>farmland also through a purchase-and-convert to wetlands program.

Great news!

>Other
>than very high cost, more excellent bird habitat will be forfeit, in this
>case for raptors and other species that utilize the open spaces, such as
>roosting shorebirds.

And what's wrong with raptors and shorebirds? They need excellent habitat too.

>Oh well--I guess now that we want salmon recovery,
>nothing else matters....

I think you need to do more reading in something other than bird
watching books to get a better grasp of ecology and how things hang
together. A few good ones to start with:

Stewart T. Schultz, "The Northwest Coast: A Natural history"

Arthur R. Kruckeberg, "The Natural History of Puget Sound Country"

W. T. Edmondson, "Uses of Ecology: Lake Washington and Beyond"

Edward O. Wilson, "Diversity of Life"
--
Allyn Weaks allyn at tardigrade.net Seattle, WA Sunset zone 5
Pacific NW Native Wildlife Gardening: http://www.tardigrade.org/natives/
"The benefit of even limited monopolies is too doubtful, to be opposed
to that of their general suppression." Thomas Jefferson