on the cover / By Heidi Walters

The Biocrat

When a guy like this retires, you want to know: What was it like? Are endangered species really being protected? Are Klamath farmers and fishermen really BFF? Oh, and did Dick Cheney ever push you around?

^^^^^

In the beginning, he was just a kid on a tractor, watching hawks. Detrich’s family had a farm in Chapman, Kan., where they grew wheat and raised cattle. His mom was a bird bander and an archeology technician. So perhaps this is how he first learned to study nature, and to appreciate the importance of detail, context and patience. How he eventually became “an endangered species jock,” as he termed it in a recent interview.

In college, first he studied journalism. But he quit. “It was the time,” he said, and left it at that. Then, in the early 1970s, he moved to California and entered the environmental studies program at Sonoma State. He got married, and they moved to Shasta County in 1976 — Detrich to take his first wildlife job, as a fisheries technician trapping adult salmon at the Red Bluff diversion dam for the California Department of Fish and Game.

By 1977, he’d landed a seasonal job searching for bald eagles on Shasta Lake. The Endangered Species Act was five years old. The bald eagle was at the top of the list. Soon he became coordinator of the statewide winter bald eagle survey, “flying drainages and reservoirs all over the state every winter,” he said.

Summers, he’d search for nests on the Shasta-Trinity National Forest, a core bald eagle nesting area. By the 1980s, to research the impact of pesticides, he and other biologists were climbing into bald eagles’ nests to recover broken eggs. “And we were moving juvenile bald eagles from British Columbia and Northern California to reintroduce them into Southern California.”

Bald eagles began to recover in the early 1980s, following President Nixon’s ban on DDT use, and the efforts of Detrich and others. And in retrospect, protecting bald eagles was easy. They didn’t nest in trees people wanted for shingles and fences. Nobody’s jobs were at stake.

When the Northern spotted owl hit the scene, everything changed. Detrich did some of the early studies of the distribution of spotted owls on the Shasta-Trinity, in the early 1980s. It was clear, he said, that old-growth logging was affecting owl populations. In 1990, the year the owl finally got listed, Detrich took his first full-time wildlife job, with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Working from Sacramento, he helped the state fish and game, forestry and fire agencies add spotted owl protections to the Forest Practice Rules. And he helped lay out owl management areas on U.S. Forest Service and other federal lands, under the Northwest Forest Plan. He also began helping private timber companies develop owl protection measures in their timber harvest plans. In 1996, he moved to the FWS’s office in Yreka, from which he supervised staff, including in the Arcata office, working on timber issues all over Northwestern California.

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