Sheldon National Wildlife Refuge Western Juniper Habitat Destruction – Clearcutting and Pile Burning
No place is safe from widespread destruction of mature and old growth western junipers, and the nesting habitat they provide for migratory birds ranging from cavity nesters like Mountain Bluebird and American Kestrels to the lovely little Black-throated Gray Warbler and Gray Flycatcher. The tree foliage is also emergency food for Mule Deer during deep snow winters, and provides security cover screening animals from human disturbance poaching, and cooling shade in summer. It’s not just the cutting down of the trees and all the habitat they provide– there is the added agency insanity of cutting the trees into pieces and heaping them into dense piles. Then one or two years later, after chipmunks and other small animals have started to live in the piles, work crews torch the piles, scalding the soil and killing all the native bunchgrasses forbs/wildflowers and sagebrush and biocrusts under and surrounding the piles.
Sometimes the piles smolder for many months – and “wildfires” spring up from the smoldering piles. Huge wildfires (and ensuing lawsuits) in New Mexico were caused by Forest Service “prescribed pile burn” activity.
Pile burning pollutes the air, robs nutrients from the landscape, and releases large amounts of carbon into the atmosphere. It results in a landscape pocked with thousands – or tens of thousands – of individual burn pile sites Each one of these bare soil sites is a great opportunity for flammable invasive weeds like cheatgrass and medusahead to gain a foothold in formerly weed-less sagebrush landscape areas.
Pile burning a year or two ago killed the native bunchgrasses, biotic crusts, low sagebrush and wildflowers surrounding the burn pile. This is typical “collateral damage” in the agency War on Junipers. A tumblemustard plant in the foreground shows flammable weeds already colonizing the Wildlife Refuge site. Agencies sometimes monitor sites for 2 or 3 years after “treatment”. It often takes around 5 years or so until the flammable annual weeds really take hold. They then move outward into the surrounding sagebrush.
USFWS pile burning scalded the boulder. The fire burned so hot it caused rock chunks to break off/exfoliate.
USFWS propaganda about past wildlife protectors. What the current federal agency “management” has lost is any sense of balance and ecological awareness. Instead, in the case of the juniper killing frenzy that has swept western public lands in the last 20 years, agency managers cast the trees as a great enemy of Sage-grouse – embracing the long-standing livestock industry hatred of trees growing where they want forage grass to be instead). The agency views has become that the trees are fit only to be destroyed in very expensive “restoration” projects – with no regard for biodiversity and the impacts on many and diverse animal species that rely on junipers. The more Sage-grouse decline across landscapes with no junipers – the more BLM, USFS and USFWS and unquestioning media hype juniper deforestation projects as a panacea for “saving” Sage-grouse. Meanwhile, slow-drip Sage-grouse extinction proceeds.
The juniper-killers killed one old growth tree but left another stand.
Look at the great cover the junipers and adjacent shrubs provide. But how long will they be left standing? Agencies use the “treatment” and fire funds Congress shovels out to pad budgets for road blading and anything remotely related to deforestation projects, and to retain extra staff. This means the bureaucracy needs to keep feeding itself with more and more tree killing projects. We often see agencies sequentially conduct a series of small project after small project in the same general area, so the forest is incrementally lost/”disappeared”. But not in one fell swoop, so the public doesn’t notice a dramatic change, and so they can avoid doing a larger NEPA analysis.
A stormy day dawning
Old growth wood in a big dense pile drying out. In nearly all the following photos, you can see lichens on the tree bark, and around the base of the tree – if it’s still exposed – is small mammal scat or bits of juniper berries animals had chewed on.
When this is burned, the lichens on the boulder will be killed.
Lichen biodiversity on old growth juniper in a Fish and Wildlife Service juniper burn pile.