If you could picture a stocky little bird that resembles a clown, a parrot, and a penguin all rolled into one, you would be looking at a tufted puffin.
This unique species of auk spends most of the year out at sea feeding on forage fish with serrated beaks that can hold 20 to 30 small fish at a time. The rest of the year they nest in burrows on the cliffs and slopes of rocky islands along the Pacific Northwest coast. Puffin pairs mate for life, and their offspring are adorably called pufflings. One of the most observed tufted puffin colonies can be found at Haystack Rock in Cannon Beach, Oregon, where their population has fallen from 600 in the early 1980s to approximately 120 today.
That’s also where you can find our family during Thanksgiving. For as long as we’ve been a Montana family, our tradition is to spend the holiday together with friends on the Oregon coast reveling in stormy days, gorging on steamy Dungeness crab, and hiking in the misty Sitka spruce forests. Most afternoons, you’ll find us walking the beach to explore the tide pools of the fortress protruding from the ocean that is Haystack Rock. The puffins are long gone by this time of year, but their massive summer lodge is a reminder of unique and brilliant wildlife that call this part of the country home.
In addition to the tufted puffin, the Pacific Northwest hosts endangered Southern Resident orcas, the most-watched population of killer whales in the world, quite particular in its diet (Chinook salmon only, please), and sensitive to noise from shipping traffic. The orcas are among 30 marine mammals, including harbor seals and Steller sea lions, found here.
Charismatic sea otters are also native to the region, but their century-long absence from Oregon and Northern California waters has contributed to an explosion of sea urchins that are eviscerating nearshore kelp forests. It is also home to the mighty Roosevelt elk, the largest of the four elk subspecies in the country, who emerge and then disappear like ghosts into the shrouded coastal forests. And like the Rocky Mountain elk closer to my home in Montana, they often consume great amounts of forage cultivated by landowners for livestock. That the giant Roosevelt elk outweighs all of the other types of elk in America is no surprise. Almost everything is bigger in the Pacific Northwest.
In David Lavender’s epic regional history, Land of Giants, published in 1950, he wrote of the literally massive allure of the Pacific Northwest to overland travelers in the 1840s:
“Bigger bears than any hunter had ever seen at home. Taller pine trees, fatter fish. Snow peaks incredible against the sun. And something more than romance: there in the greener grass a man’s dream of himself—and all of mankind—could somehow come true … Two years later a name would be invented for the feeling—Manifest Destiny.“
Even environmental conflicts are bigger out here. The largest of them all might be over a small owl that lives a life of seclusion among the mossy giants of the Northwest’s ancient forests. Efforts to list the northern spotted owl under the Endangered Species Act gave rise to the famed timber wars of the late 20th century, pitting rural working-class loggers against urban environmental activists.
The wood wars introduced Americans to tree-sitting, gate-blocking, and timber-spiking. Meanwhile, the unsuspecting owl became the mascot and surrogate for old-growth forest protection. And the resulting Northwest Forest Plan, which turns 30 this year, protected more than 10 million acres of federal forests. Logging on federal land in the region subsequently fell by 90 percent, and the economies of entire communities were ravaged. Yet along with loggers, spotted owl populations have continued to decline thanks to the westward destiny of the prolific and rivalrous barred owl.
The saga of the Pacific Northwest has been a never-ending dance between the ocean, land, and wildlife and those eking out a living from the ocean, land, and wildlife. First it was the seadogs searching for a Northwest Passage to the Orient, ships swallowed whole at the Columbia River Bar. Then it was the fur traders who found and nearly exterminated the sea otter only to move inland to fall upon the beaver. Later it was the lumbermen and coastal canneries who harvested the tallest trees and fattest fish. And finally, it was the dam builders and irrigators who harnessed swift rivers so that the interior could bloom. The timber wars were simply the next song of this dance.
At its core, the manifest destiny Lavender wrote about in the mid-20th century represented dreams of a people and implied a taming of nature. But the Pacific Northwest is not a place to be tamed. Rather, it is a complex confluence of the people and the animals who share this magnificent spot on the map. Escape its urban centers and you will find it is still as big and wild and rugged as the fir-covered volcanoes and unforgiving coastlines. The Great Northwest needs its orcas, sea otters, Roosevelt elk, Chinook salmon, and clownish tufted puffins. But it also needs its farmers, ranchers, fishermen, loggers, longshoremen, hunters, and Indigenous tribes. This will require thoughtfulness and creativity, not simply the force and fight of preceding generations.
That’s where the researchers, policy experts, and practitioners at PERC come in. PERC, in partnership with Vancouver, Washington-based M.J. Murdock Charitable Trust, has embarked on a regional project that will spotlight many of our and other partners’ innovative approaches. Whether it is conflicts of scarcity, as with orcas and otters, or conflicts of abundance, in the cases of elk and sea urchins, market-based conservation solutions can smooth out the jagged edges by making cooperation rather than conflict the instrument of good wildlife management.
The Pacific Northwest’s grandeur calls out for big ideas. Few regions of the United States present as much muchness. There is power in its scale and scenery. And therein lies the opportunity to go big on how we conserve the species and people living off of this land of giants.
