81 



The Chairman. Which reminds me, one of my pet peeves that I 

 use from time to time, the goshawk, where did that come from, the 

 circle for the goshawk? 



Mr. Powell. Again, a lot of these biological concepts have been 

 developed in other parts of the country. The management for gos- 

 hawks, a lot of that has been researched in the Southwest and the 

 Northwest. 



The Chairman. The reason I say, it goes back to my bill, again. 

 If that was under State management, there would be no concept of 

 that hawk, even under the Endangered Species Act, because, if I 

 am not correct, Fish and Wildlife says it never existed. 



Mr. Powell. I am not sure that is accurate, but unless it were 

 a listed species, then the Endangered Species Act would not apply, 

 and then 



The Chairman. How much timber was not offered up for sale be- 

 cause of that so-called goshawk? 



Mr. Powell. I cannot tell you because I do not think we have 

 really offset, at least on the Ketchikan area, many of our sales just 

 for the goshawks. 



The Chairman. As I understand it, it is about 300 miles square, 

 which is an awful lot of timber, each circle. What I am saying is — 

 I am not picking on you. I am just saying this, again, goes back 

 to what I said before. This came from somebody outside. 



Mr. Powell. I think the key thing, and I do not want to get too 

 much in depth on it, but the HCAs are done for more than the gos- 

 hawks. If you look at just the HCAs, that has had more impact on 

 the timber availability. Just the goshawks themselves, in the cur- 

 rent draft of TLMP, only have a hundred acres of habitat set aside. 

 So the goshawks, themselves, set aside much less habitat in the 

 HCA 



The Chairman. I have asked you this before and I am going to 

 ask you again because we are establishing the record. Were any of 

 the other nine million areas studied for HCAs? 



Mr. Powell. Yes, they were. 



The Chairman. To the extent that the remaining 1,400,000 

 were? 



Mr. Powell. Let me answer it to you this way. There are actu- 

 ally in the current plan three million acres that are in HCAs. Two 

 million of those acres are on nonsuitable timber lands; actually, 

 two-and-a-half million of those. 



So we looked at all the lands. The acreage you often hear about 

 is the half-a-million acres that came from the suitable land base, 

 but they are actually established in wilderness and in the LUD lis. 



The Chairman. But it is about a million acres, if I am not mis- 

 taken, of the timber base that Congress allocated under the Reform 

 Act of 1986 to put in HCAs. 



Mr. Powell. About a million acres that is the timber base — 

 about a half million acres of that was suitable lands, lands that 

 were actually available for harvest. So it is about a reduction — if 

 it were in the preferred alternative — a reduction of about half a 

 million acres. 



The Chairman. As a forester — you can go as far as you want on 

 this — what makes any conservationist or any forester say that they 



