Mexican spotted owls apparently love the canyons and pockets of big old trees on the watershed of the C.C. Cragin Reservoir — Payson’s crucial future water supply. The dozens of potential nesting territories for these small, deep-forest-loving owls has complicated and slowed the environmental analysis for a thinning project intended to prevent a forest-destroying wildfire on the 50,000-acre watershed.
However, a series of recent studies suggest owl experts may have over-estimated the need of the owls for thickets of trees. Moreover, any way you figure it — a high intensity fire on the watershed will do far more damage than any combination of thinning and controlled burning, according to eye-opening new surveys of wildfire impacts on spotted owls.
The conundrum applies to both the C.C. Cragin watershed and the larger, million-acre analysis for the Four Forest Restoration Initiative, which has been underway for years. A decade of drought and overstocked conditions brought on by decades of grazing, logging and fire suppression now pose an existential threat to almost every forest-dependent species, especially in the ponderosa pine forests of northern Arizona.
Payson struggled for 20 years to win rights to 3,000 acre-feet of water annually from the 15,000-acre-foot C.C. Cragin Reservoir and this year will complete a $52 million pipeline to take delivery of the water. However, studies show a crown fire on the densely forested watershed could cause such devastating subsequent erosion that the deep, narrow reservoir could quickly fill with mud.
Payson, Salt River Project, the Forest Service and the National Forest Foundation have joined forces to use fires and controlled burns to thin the watershed from perhaps 1,000 trees per acre to more like 100 trees per acre. The Forest Service has spent more than two years working on an environmental assessment of the project, with the dozens of spotted owl nesting territories on the watershed posing a particular challenge.
From the Payson Roundup: https://www.paysonroundup.com/news/good-news-for-spotted-owls-and-thinning-projects/article_c33deb1e-f2de-520d-b48c-c8418cd11888.html