Green Diamond's puzzle-piece forests, with blocks of tightly packed small trees up to 20 years old separated by slivers of older trees in the 150-foot buffer zones around fish-bearing streams, will ultimately provide good wildlife habitat, says Neal Ewald, the company's vice president and general manager. "Fifty years from now 20 per­cent of this landscape will stick up like veins on a maple leaf, with a network of old trees around the streams," he explains. "We're on target to create the same kind of trees you see in Redwood National Park in a hundred years," to the benefit, he says, of salmon and northern spotted owls.

In the early 1990s Green Diamond's senior biologist, Lowell Diller, was among the first to find high densities of spotted owls in second-growth forests. His research indicated that the owls can survive in the smaller forests as long as they have enough old snags and large trees with cavities and platforms for nesting. And the mix of young forest blocks of various ages created by clear-cuts provides good habitat for dusky-footed wood rats—the owls' favorite prey in California.

Diller's findings helped Green Diamond secure the first Habitat Conservation Plan (HCP) for spotted owls from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in 1992, which allowed the company to con­tinue logging in spotted owl territory as long as they had a plan to maintain a minimum amount of owl habitat. Yet owls have been declin­ing by about 3 percent a year on Green Diamond lands since 2001, Diller says, as they have over much of their range.

Part of the problem is a mysterious drop in the wood rat population, as well as increased competition from the more aggressive and adaptable barred owl, which has muscled into the spotted owls' territory from the east.

Young forests have shown other unintended wildlife consequences. In spring, before berries and acorns come in, black bears depend in part on the sap just under the bark of redwoods and other conifers. They prefer the young, fastest growing trees and have done so much damage to commercial stands that some foresters call them the biggest "pest" in the redwoods. But bears became a problem only when companies began growing trees like a crop.

After walking through every kind of managed forest and talking to foresters on all sides of the issue, Mike Fay is convinced there's a better way: Grow bigger trees, which can maximize wood production while providing good habitat. "You've got to start thinking about this as an ecosystem," he says. "All these plantations might as well be growing corn. But if you want clean water, salmon, wildlife, and high-quality lumber, you've got to have a forest."