Mike Medberry

Secesh Wildlands Coalition

P.O Box 2407
McCall, Idaho 83638
mikecmedberry@msn.com
208-630-4215

Randall Hayman
Forest Planner
Boise National Forest
1249 S. Vinnell Way #200
Boise, ID 83709

January 6, 2009

Re: Comments on the Wildlife Conservation Strategy

Dear Mr. Hayman:

Some of the most endangered species in central Idaho include the grizzly bear, several species of
butterflies, wolverine, Chinook salmon, bull trout, steelhead, lynx, several species of plants,
fisher, frogs like the spotted frog and tree frogs, a spattering of bats, and to a lesser degree otter,
beaver, marten, badger, bighorn sheep, and pronghorn. Each has different challenges to
overcome in order to enhance their survival.

Some like wolverine, lynx, and bighorn sheep are particularly endangered by state and federal
laws which include trapping seasons, control practices, and predator control that favor
economicly desirable exotic species like sheep and cattle. Must we protect the economic species
at the cost of natives on federal land? Must we listen to their complaints? You do. When the
pattern of habitat for a species is widely spread such as for lynx, or is very site specific as for
bighorn sheep, what can you do to ensure their survival? Laws protecting these animals are
generally ineffective or conflicting. How will you negotiate these hard bumps in the road?

Other animals are jeopardized by migration patterns like those of lazuli bunting, tanangers, and
bluebirds, or Monarch butterflies which are in trouble because of widespread climatic and human
created problems (by this I mean activities like the cutting of trees in Mexico where migrating
Monarch butterflies spend the winter in tight groups). When we have saved habitat in our forest
but are still losing critical species, what are we to do? How do we approach the critics who
oppose protecting habitat on the Payette National Forest because protecting anything will
damage their economic interest and protecting that habitat isn’t effective to save the species? It
will be a hard question to field!

Some species are endangered by a combination of habitat changes that the species are powerless
to respond to. These factors seem to beproceeding quickly in today’s global climate conditions.
Some changing conditions are forcing endangered species into places that have been marginal
habitat; perhaps you could include the northern flying squirrel in this category, but also the
Palouse “worm,” and the CdA salamander. What will we say about Chinook salmon, steelhead,
and bull trout? The dams? That is only one factor. Vegetation? That’s another. Ocean
currents? Fishing? Sediment? What about murrelets or spotted owls when one of the critical
variables seems to be competition to their living by other species. How will this be changed or
should it be?

Osprey and wolves have come back to the land to survive but the wolves are still threatened by
our human prejudices and osprey have been brought back, as if by providence, when DDT was
banned. What species are the osprey and wolves displacing? People who fish and hunt? And if
so, is that so bad? How does the vegetative baseline specifically affect the rare species
management? I reckon it don’t.

It seems to me that we (the people…) should be aimed at protecting what is threatened by

activities that directly affect the forest’s native plants and animals, whether that is hiking or
snowmobiling, cutting trails or mushroom gathering, fire exclusion or logging practices,
wilderness protection or managing the landscape as if it were our living room. Others will have
other thoughts, naturally, but I think that protecting what we have come to enjoy is what we
should continue to insist upon. I enjoy the natural world being as natural as it was when I first
came here. But things inevitably change and I recognize that as well.
The elimination of large ponderosa pines is a significant and obvious problem around the region
and wildfire control practices are another. In addition, we should define the species that we’re
looking for as they actually occur rather than only defining their occurrence in theoretical habitat
models. The occurrence of habitat might be only one factor in determining their rarity.

Please produce a long term plan of 150 - 200 years (from 1900 – 2100 let’s say) that would
obviously be changeable for the future and fixed in the past but that would set a general
directionthat is not vulnerable to the latest vogue management practices. The Forest Plans last at
most 20 years at the end of which we throw the process open. The century’s plan would not
propose any specific actions and wouldn’t be a particularly publicly designed plan; it would
allow the specialists to define what they think may be possible in this moveable world. It would
exclude the politics of Forest Planning, which are substantial.

I think every proposal that the Forest comes up with is likely to be looked at by later employees
as mistaken in some ways. In any case, this centuries plan should be based on the best current
information, to be sure, but it should be equally based on past information (which was
meticulously, if with biases, compiled) that would give clues as to how we got to the current
conditions. It is more than a future and defines our past. I will only mention our timber cutting
program as one example and suggest that it could easily be repeated 30 years hence; that would
be a mistake. We have no great superior knowledge now that others were ignorant of, it is only
changes in education (and something has been lost in gaining greater specificity) that has
increased. Let’s prove that we have the wisdom to retain the best thoughts of those who came
before us--if only to respectfully disagree, for instance, that the world is flat--and let’s add to
their wisdom. It is the thought process and changing “facts” of native conditions that we need to
retain. The existing Forest Planning process is a failure in my opinion because it has too short a
timeline and allows willy-nilly decisions to be made based on the politics of the day. This makes
a mocking of the public involvement process.

But the WCS is, as you say, the management strategy that we employ to amend the Forest Plans
and I applaud you for proposing this strategy because it intends to preserve important species.
What will really matter, however, is the site-specific species inventories (and habitat projections
to a lesser degree) and the proposals that follow themand should be based on the WCS and Forest
Plan. What I believe should be the formula for protecting threatened species is the following:

1. Prepare (at some well defined point) an internal 200 year century’s plan to let you know
what you’re hoping to accomplish, recognizing that it is a two century process;
2. Define what is threatened by activities that directly affect the forest’s native plants and
animals that can be fixed at the local level;
3. Use the NEPA process to inform and engage citizens on the WCS;
4. Modify the WCS to protect species that are specifically endangered by identified
variables in the three national forests;
5. Make amendments to the Forest Plan;
6. Reassess the century’s plan to determine if you are headed in a right and sensible
direction.
I am woefully uninformed to offer these opinions, but have had 25 years of environmental
advocacy to make these off-the-cuff comments and would like to hear that they are heard. Thank
you for considering them! Please include me in future decisions on the WCS.

Respectfully,

Mike Medberry