Proposal to expand martens’ habitat
Conservation efforts for one of the region’s most vulnerable carnivore species have resulted in a proposed designation of more than one million acres in protected habitat space.
As announced by the environmental nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is putting forward a proposal that, if finalized as is, would add 1,413,305 acres of protected habitat for the Humboldt marten across the North Coast and southwestern Oregon.
More specifically, the proposal outlines five units of protected critical habitat spread out over
Del Norte and Siskiyou counties in California and the counties of Coos, Curry, Douglas, Josephine, Lane and Lincoln in neighboring Oregon.
Tom Wheeler, executive director and staff attorney at the Arcata-based Environmental Protection Information Center, or EPIC, said the proposal was a small start in protecting the species.
“If we want to ensure that we have Humboldt martens left on the planet, to ensure that we don’t allow this species to go extinct, we have that power in our hands, and we need to do things to protect the Humboldt marten,” he said.
Quinn Read, Oregon policy director at the Center for Biological Diversity, one of the groups pushing for conservation measures, expressed himself on the announcement.
“Decades of unchecked logging across the Pacific Northwest pushed the Humboldt marten to the edge of extinction,” he said in a news release. “These proposed protections are long overdue … For Oregon’s small and isolated populations of martens to survive, they’ll need much more than disconnected fragments of habitat where they’ve managed to survive and avoid decades of logging.”
The Humboldt marten is a cat-sized member of the weasel,
mink and otter family and is characterized by its triangular ears and bushy tail. Martens support their diet by preying on birds, reptiles, smaller mammals, insects and berries. Larger mammals and raptors prey on the martens.
The species is currently believed to number below 400 wild specimens and is absent from 93% of its native historical habitat.
The species’ habitat is most threatened by logging practices and wildfires, while rodent poisons used in cannabis growth sites and being run over by cars contribute to direct human-related deaths. Marten trapping was banned in California in the 1940s, but Oregon did not put an end to the practice until 2019.
The Fish and Wildlife Service is considering potential exclusions for land owned by Green Diamond Resource Company, contingent on “the best scientific and commercial data available,” as described in a Federal Register post.
A Center for Biological Diversity release states the exclusion is based on a safe harbor agreement with the state of California which allows for logging on the species habitat for a 2,100-acre reserve, marten monitoring and a speculative proposal to relocate specimens to the Redwood National and State Parks.
“Green Diamond biologists have been studying martens for over a decade. This has provided information that supported working with the state Department of Fish and Wildlife to develop a Safe Harbor Agreement for the coastal marten,” said Gary Rynearson, chief communications officer and forest policy director at Green Diamond Resource Company. “We believe our second and third-growth forests have a high potential for both marten foraging areas and denning sites. There is also an opportunity to expand the current range of the marten and included measures in the Safe Harbor Agreement that retain or enhance key habitat elements that include the retention of large trees and trees with cavities, the creation and retention of slash piles for resting age shelter areas, and riparian areas that represent 26% of the landscape for travel corridors and late serial development areas.”
Wheeler says protecting the habitat on lands owned by the company are vital in keeping the species’ genetic variety from stagnating into a bottleneck effect, as the populations of martens are separated by these.
“So one of the things that’s important is to have multiple self-sustaining populations, and then ultimately, to have populations be reproductively connected to each other,” he said.
Efforts to protect the martens by EPIC and the Center for Biological Diversity date back to 2010, when the organizations petitioned to list the species under the protected species act.