Red Tail Hawk (Dark Morph), Deschutes National Forest. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

Using the fear of wildfires, the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) are spending billions of taxpayer dollars to intentionally burn millions of acres of National Forests and BLM lands. Their plans are to continue to do so for the next 20-30 years.

The smoke from burning mostly green and often wet trees and brush heavily and frequently fills Western valleys, impacting sizable populations in nearby cities and towns and is particularly dangerous for those with existing respiratory illnesses.

Using dubious loopholes such as “categorical exclusions,” which allows agencies to skip environmental analysis such as the human impacts from breathing smoke for hours or days, they completely ignore the grim reality that baby birds die from the smoke.

Yet the government provides no estimates whatsoever of how many birds will die, including goshawks, the largest and most scarce of forest raptors.

Birds are even more sensitive to air pollution than are humans.

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