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Forest Habitat Black Bears at Risk Vermont's Lamb Brook, a 5,561-acre area in the Green Mountain National Forest, is a wild, special place. In the words of former Forest Service planner James Northup, Lamb Brook is still relatively unroaded and undisturbed. A large ring of mountains surrounds the core of the area and completely insulates . . . backcountry hikers from the sights and sounds of highways, houses, and other human developments. When in this basin, one experiences a sense of wildness and solitude that is exceedingly rare in southern New England. Lamb Brook is bear country. The areas remoteness and rich, nut-bearing beech groves provide habitat critical to the survival of a key population of Vermont's black bears. According to the state Fish and Wildlife Department, these bears need to live in large, remote habitats like Lamb Brook. In the words of the agency's bear management plan, Black bears require a minimum of not hundreds but thousands of acres undisturbed by human activity in order to maintain a viable population. In addition, bears must feed on large quantities of beechnuts in the fall in order to survive the winter and reproduce successfully. Although bears are normally solitary animals, Lamb Brooks abundance of beechnuts has drawn bears from afar for many years as evidenced by the trees scarred by climbing bears claws and by bear nests formed when they sit in the treetops, pull limbs toward them and snap them off to feed. Lamb Brook is also a bear nursery, providing habitat for a high density of cub-producing females. Unfortunately, this last bastion of truly wild habitat in Vermont is threatened by a Forest Service proposal to punch a 30-foot-wide logging truck road into Lamb Brooks remote forest core and to contract for the logging of more than 3 million board feet of timber. This project would not only destroy Lamb Brooks superb wild characteristics, it would extirpate or drastically reduce its black bear population. The Lamb Brook timber sale would offer 984 acres of wild forest for clearcutting and shelterwood cutting a form of clearcutting that involves leaving some trees behind in the hope that new seedlings will sprout after the initial cut and be sheltered by the remaining trees, which are then cut down a few years later. Since a board foot of timber is a piece of wood one foot square and one inch thick, the 3 million board feet proposed to be logged equates to a wooden board one inch thick, one foot wide, and 574 miles long. The logging road, known as FR 266, would be improved (designed primarily for heavy logging truck traffic) and extended deep into Lamb Brooks wildlife habitat. The bears wont be the only losers under the Forest Service plan. As is so often the case, the taxpayers will be big losers when the Forest Service sells the trees cut down at Lamb Brook at a loss to Americas taxpayers of $34,650, not including agency overhead costs. Lamb Brooks fate has not yet been sealed, however. Jim Northup, who was the principal author of the Green Mountain National Forest Land and Resources Management Plan, joined other individuals and a coalition of conservation groups to file a lawsuit over the plan. Among other things, the group challenges the Forest Services claim that its logging and roadbuilding would have no significant impact on black bear and other wildlife habitat. Two renowned bear biologists supported their case. Dr. Albert Manville is the director of the Adirondack Mountain Club and a wildlife biologist who teaches at the U.S. Department of Agriculture Graduate School in Washington, D.C. He testified that in all my work assessing bear feeding habitat ...in New England, Wisconsin, or elsewhere in North America, I have never seen such a heavily bear- utilized stand as this one in the Lamb Brook area. If the project goes forward, he concluded, bears will abandon this prime feeding area. Professor Michael Pelton of the University of Tennessee, perhaps the most respected black bear biologist in the world, also visited Lamb Brook and opined that the areas carrying capacity for bears will be significantly compromised, calling into question its ability to support a population into the future. The Lamb Brook litigation is pending in the 2nd Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals. Jim Northup and the other conservationists won their claim concerning impacts on black bears in the federal district court despite the fact that the Forest Service argued, and the judge agreed, that the conservationists expert testimony from Manville and Pelton should be suppressed from the evidence considered in the case. As a result of this court victory, logging and roadbuilding in Lamb Brook have been stopped for now. The Clinton administration chose to appeal the lower courts decision. Now the fate of this lonely wild area of Vermont's Green Mountain National Forest and its bears lie in the hands of a panel of federal judges. Areas of Concern: Contact: Vermont Chapter More on forest habitat | Report Contents Up to Top HOME | Email Signup | About Us | Contact Us | Terms of Use | © 2008 Sierra Club |
