American Notes CONSERVATION

Mule deer, mountain goats, bald eagles and three-toed woodpeckers are naturally at home among the stately firs, hemlocks, cedars and redwoods in the "old growth" forests of the Pacific Northwest. So are goshawks, flying squirrels and red tree voles. But amid this Noah's ark of creatures, none is so influential as a dark-eyed bird with a doglike bark and a yen for mice -- the northern spotted owl.

By proposing to make the owl a threatened species, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service may enable the birds, now numbering only about 2,500 pairs, to succeed where environmentalists have failed: it may halt or slow down an insatiable logging industry that has been turning ancient trees into lumber at the rate of more than 55,000 acres of old growth a year. But for the owl to prevail, its status as a threatened species must be formally declared, a process that may take another year. Then it could become a federal crime even to disturb the owl's habitat, and multitudes of buzz saws that have been felling the trees would have to stop. Loggers warn that unemployment would follow. Sad, but not as ineffably sad or final as extinction.