Mail Tribune

SELMA — Perched precariously on a large limb in a mammoth Douglas fir some 70 feet above the ground, Nathaniel Mitchell first spotted rice-sized scat.

Then he saw the fir needles that looked like so many tiny peeled green bananas.

"Bingo! Found a nest — it's inside this branch, inside a woodpecker hole," yelled Mitchell, 28, an arborist from Ashland.

A member of the Northwest Ecosystem Survey Team (NEST), Mitchell had just found the nest of a red tree vole. He began shouting down data to fellow NEST member Laura Beaton, a sociology student at Southern Oregon University, who recorded the information.

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The NEST volunteers, trained to survey for voles by researchers at Oregon State University, are committed to protecting the habitat of species associated with old-growth forests.

The red tree vole, a small nocturnal rodent, is a food source for the northern spotted owl.

The voles feed on fir needles and use the needles' resin ducts to make nests.

Since 2000, Mitchell has spent his summer months searching for the little rodents, which spend most of their life high above the ground. This summer, he and Beaton found 122 previously undiscovered red tree vole sites on federal forestland in southwestern Oregon.

On this day they were in a 23-acre unit of the 377-acre South Deer timber sale on the U.S. Bureau of Land Management's Medford District. Although the 3.1-million-board-foot sale in the Deer Creek drainage was sold last year, logging has yet to begin. The timber sale is part a more than 7,000-acre project the BLM is undertaking in the region.

The NEST crew, which is at the end of its survey season, hopes finding red tree vole sites that were not located during earlier BLM surveys will cause the agency to set aside a 10-acre buffer zone around the nest trees. Both the BLM and U.S. Forest Service have set aside buffers on timber sales where nests have been located before the trees were sold.

"Before a record of decision has been made on a sale, it's a lot easier to get them to take our data," Beaton acknowledged as she continued to record the data. "It's not set in stone that if we find a vole nest that the area will magically be saved.

"We will mark the tree and submit it to the BLM," she added. "If they ignore our data, we also give the information to attorneys working with environmental groups who are keeping an eye on the sale."

The information will be considered, observed Abbie Jossie, manager of the BLM's Grants Pass Resource Area.

"If they submit the data to us, we'll take a look at it," she said. "One thing we will want to do is determine whether (the NEST survey) meets bureau standards.

"But not having the information before the decision was made, it's a long shot" that additional buffers will be created, she added.

Because the sale was awarded more than a year ago and had already been surveyed for voles, the discovery may be a moot point, she said.

"Every case is different," she said. "It may mean we have to go back and survey some acres. But, according to our protocol, the survey needs to be done before the decision is made, which it was.

"Just because somebody finds a red tree vole in a tree after a sale is purchased does not require us to change that sale," she noted. "Red tree voles are not rare and endangered species."

Forester managers must look for voles under the "survey and manage" requirements of the 1994 Northwest Forest Plan. The plan had called for surveying — known as looking before you log — for more than 400 plant and animal species, including the voles, that scientists originally believed could be at risk if logging occurred in their habitat on federal lands that were allocated for timber harvest.

After the Bush administration announced it would drop those requirements, a federal judge this past winter struck down the decision to ease old-growth logging restrictions on public land in the Northwest. The judge required the agencies to meet the earlier requirements on any new decisions.

Agency surveyors often divide a harvest area into a grid, walk transect lines looking for visible nests, then climb the trees where nests can be seen.

"But we climb likely trees because red tree vole nests are hard to see from the ground," Beaton said.

The tree Mitchell climbed was about 160 feet tall and 5 feet in diameter at chest height.

Before climbing, he shot an arrow with a rubberized weighted tip from his 75-pound compound bow over a thick limb about 100 feet above the ground. Attached to the arrow was a 20-pound-test fishing line spooled on a fishing reel attached to the bow.

After Beaton retrieved the arrow, she attached a stout cord to the fishing line. Mitchell reeled in the line, pulling the cord over the high limb. A stout climbing rope was hooked to the cord, then pulled over the branch and back to the ground.

After anchoring one end of the rope securely to a fir tree a foot in diameter, Mitchell stepped into a climbing harness manufactured by New Tribe, a small Merlin firm that builds tree-climbing gear. He quickly scaled the tree until he came to the vole nest.

Watching from below were Orville and Mary Camp, who live on nearby forested acres they manage with a type of sustained-yield approach they describe as "ecostry." The Camps hope the vole nest discovery will provide a buffer.

"This area here is one of the last remaining flatlands with old-growth timber in the Deer Creek drainage," Orville Camp said of the 23-acre parcel that is as flat as a pool table. A natural selection process he developed has been approved for managing some 500 acres of the overall South Deer project.

"Where they (NEST) climbed, they have found vole nests in nearly every other tree," Mary Camp said. "That showed me there are a lot of voles in South Deer trees. They just weren't surveyed properly by the BLM.

"What we don't want is for the functions of the full ecosystem and web of life to be broken up," she added. "If there is no food for the owls, that's the end of the owls."

Reach reporter Paul Fattig at 776-4496 or e-mail him at pfattig@mailtribune.com.