06/21/2022
If you are a fan of our eagle family, and all our forest creatures, please read this and then contact your House Representative Jay Nolte and our California Senators Dianne Feinstein and Alex Padilla to ask for consideration of nature over destructive human activities.
The San Bernardino National Forest is proposing to do major landscape clearing, including removing tens of thousands of trees over 13,000 acres, all across the north side of Big Bear Valley (from the dam to Baldwin Lake), which includes the bald eagle nesting area, as well as roosting and foraging sites.
The Los Angeles Times came to the valley to research it and just published this article…
https://www.latimes.com/.../forest-thinning-proposal...
While fire prevention is of course important, this environmental analysis done for the project has some major flaws in many areas, including in the plans made to supposedly lessen the impact to the bald eagles. Sadly, there are also many flaws in the overall plan regarding fire prevention itself. Under the guise of “thinning”, supposedly to stop wildfires and protect nearby homes, the vast majority of this clearing would occur in forest wildlands distant from homes.
This proposal not only effects Jackie, Shadow, their future eaglets, and their habitat, but all wildlife, plants, some of which are endangered, threatened and are found only in the Big Bear Valley and no where else in the world, not to mention the quiet solitude of nature itself on the north shore of the lake.
Apparently logging and e-bikes are a large part of the driving force behind the plan, yet this proposal is disguised as protection for the community. The proposal also includes adding 47 miles of new trails on the north shore and rerouting an existing trail to go directly through the eagle habitat very near Jackie & Shadow’s nest. This would allow hikers, bicycles, and e-bikes to pass by the nest. Yes, the habitat is closed to all during breeding season, but this nest is active year-round with visits from Jackie & Shadow. They also frequently roost in close proximity to the nest even during the off season. That, and the plans to do mechanical cutting and prescribed burns in that area right up to January, would have severe impact on our treasured nesting bald eagles and would likely drive them out of the area. For this project to be done, it needs to be done with proper negative impact evaluation and proven mitigations to reduce those impacts as much as possible. This has not been done with the project plan as it currently stands.
We will keep you posted as we get new information about this project.
