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When Mark Benedict and his wife, Mary Shaw, moved in 2017 to Salmon Prairie, Montana, a remote enclave about two hours north of Missoula, they felt like they had won the retirement lottery. Their property offered epic views of the Swan and ­Mission Mountain ranges and was bordered by public land. It was almost everything they had dreamt of during their long careers in Washington State. 

There was just one wrinkle: The woods beside their dream home hadn’t been logged since the 1950s and were due for it sooner or later. The U.S. Forest Service (USFS) managed the tract, including to harvest timber for wood products and to prevent deadly wildfires. Having spent a decade as a technician with the USFS, Benedict knew a harvest could significantly alter the character of the landscape they loved so much. “I went in with my eyes open,” he says. 

But when he and Shaw learned that the USFS was planning a timber sale in 2021 on a portion of the Flathead National Forest adjoining their property, they had an extra reason to worry. The couple enjoyed monitoring their many trail cameras for wildlife, including the occasional Great Gray Owl stalking voles in the soggy meadow beyond their front porch. Benedict had shared this footage with Beth ­Mendelsohn, an owl researcher with the nonprofit Owl Research Institute (ORI), who had been scouring the Swan Valley for more than a year looking for nesting Great Grays with little to show for it. These elusive “ghosts of the forest,” as they’re sometimes called, are patterned with gray and white mottling that camouflages them against their conifer perches. Thanks to Benedict’s intel, Mendelsohn was able to track down an active nest in the Flathead cradled by a tall, dying larch tree. Now it was smack-dab in the middle of a unit slated for logging. 

That didn’t necessarily mean the larch with the nest would be cut down. The USFS management approach acknowledges the integral role that snags, a catch-all term for standing dead and dying trees, play in healthy forests. Snags enrich soil, sequester carbon, prevent erosion, and provide habitat for up to one-third of the wildlife in the ecosystem, including several bird species. In some national forests the agency has made a concerted effort to preserve snags, and even create them. 

At the same time, the agency’s guidelines allow contractors to remove ecologically important snags during timber harvests if they could injure workers. Forest advocates say this stipulation has created a loophole large enough for many trees to fall through. In practice, some snags that should be left standing for wildlife are instead cut under the banner of workplace safety, says Andy Stahl, executive director of ­Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics, a nonprofit dedicated to protecting national forests.

The USFS management plan underpinning the Flathead project stated that all dead and dying trees more than 20 inches in diameter—or more than 16 inches for standing dead Douglas fir, ponderosa pine, and western larches—would be spared. Additionally, crews would be required to leave an average of six snags per acre that measured between 12 and 20 inches wide. 

Nevertheless, Benedict decided to audit the loggers. “I wanted to see if they abided by their own criteria,” says the retired environmental scientist.  

In September 2023, after USFS contractors marked the forest for thinning, Benedict, who still carries his bear spray in a canteen pouch stamped USFS, got to work surveying Unit 8, the one with the Great Gray nest. Over four sweaty afternoons, he meticulously inspected the trees on its 33 acres, measuring diameters, inventorying species, and snapping photos. Of the 47 snags Benedict identified as large enough to let stand, only 7 had been marked with fluorescent orange paint as “leave” trees. Even the dead larch with the owl nest was set to be felled.

Benedict and Mendelsohn did the only thing they could do, writing to their regional USFS administrators in the hopes of preserving a small slice of key habitat within the larger logging project. 

The situation in Unit 8 is part of a larger ecological dilemma playing out in national forests across the country, says Jim Rivers, a wildlife biologist in the college of forestry at Oregon State University. Decades of clear-cutting and fire suppression, he says, have created a “snag deficit” in American forests. To address this gap in the woods, a growing contingent of researchers, conservationists, and community members are working to convince land managers and policymakers of a truth that’s obvious to foresters and biologists: There’s a whole lot of life left in a dead tree.

There are many ways for a tree to die: drought or disease, a bolt of lightning or the slow onslaught of old age. How long the decaying tree remains standing depends on factors like its species, its size, and the local climate. Aspen and birch might stay upright for a decade, a large conifer for more than a century. At every stage of decomposition, the snag provides a bounty of benefits to the ecosystem around it. 

In some forests, up to 45 percent of bird species rely on snags for nesting, roosting, foraging, or perching. The USFS’s has found higher bird abundance, species ­richness, and species diversity in plots with dead or dying trees. , conducted in ­Florida’s Ocala National Forest, found there was a 70 percent chance of American Kestrels occupying a plot with 5 snags per hectare versus 30 percent in plots with 1 snag per hectare. Like many other birds, kestrels like habitat with plenty of places to perch and forage. In other words, these birds don’t just want to live in one snag, they want to live in a neighborhood full of them. 

For decades the USFS has included the retention of snags in its management plans for the approximately 50 million acres of its land that are available for timber harvests. Each national forest sets its own snag retention guidelines that dictate which trees should be retained during a given logging project, says Shaun O’Connor, a deputy district ranger in Lolo National Forest. Managers take into account such factors as the types and size of trees and the presence of snag-dependent wildlife. The agency has also researched snags and promoted their creation through methods like injecting targeted trees with a lethal fungus or lopping their tops off with a chainsaw (and, perhaps most memorably, with dynamite, as a trio of foresters attempted at the Pacific Northwest Research Station in 1981). 

And yet, while snags are ecological gold mines to scientists, the dead and dying trees, weakened by rot and weather, can fall in unpredictable ways, posing a threat to logging or fire crews below. When it comes to logging, it’s up to the timber company harvesting the trees, not the USFS itself, to determine if a snag poses a safety risk, O’Connor says. Once a snag has been deemed a hazard, Occupational Safety and Health Administration crews provide guidance on how to safely bring it down.

When contractors do leave or create snags, they typically cluster them at the far edges of the logging unit to simplify access for heavy machinery, paying little mind to the age, quality, or species of snags they’re leaving behind, Stahl says. Often, no one comes back to evaluate how or if wildlife use them. That approach, Stahl says, disregards part of the agency’s mission. The Multiple-Use Sustained-Yield Act of 1960 declared that the nation’s forests “shall be administered for outdoor recreation, range, timber, watershed, and wildlife and fish purposes.” ­Congress wrote the list in alphabetical order, he says, “to imply no importance of priority.” A forester and former timber lobbyist, Stahl argues that while human safety should of course be paramount, the health of wildlife “should be on the table, too,” noting that the mascots of the USFS aren’t foresters but forest denizens: Smokey Bear and, fittingly, Woodsy Owl. (USFS headquarters did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)

Arbitrarily leaving trees is not an effective strategy, Mendelsohn says. Furthermore, snags are not created equal. A spindly lodgepole pine remnant won’t provide suitable real estate for a bulky bird like a Great Gray Owl, and a tree that does can take centuries to reach an adequate size. Yet relying on scientists like her to find and protect the most valuable snags for wildlife would be “stupid and fruitless,” she says. “I cannot locate every owl nest in the country and put a tag on it that says: Save me.”

Ensuring the right kind of habitat exists, she believes, won’t happen because she or a concerned citizen like Benedict petitions for a single snag. It will require a paradigm shift, one in which more forest managers treat snags as an integral component of a healthy ecosystem. In her effort to bring about that change, Mendelsohn has found willing partners in nearby tribes, who have not only helped facilitate the scientist’s research but also put it to good use managing their own forests for wildlife. 

On a crystalline May morning, I meet ­Mendelsohn at ORI headquarters, an old yellow farmhouse set among the Ninepipe wetlands complex at the base of the ­Mission range. In this vast prairie-pothole landscape, the constant takeoffs and landings of gulls, grebes, and cormorants rival an international airport. She and ORI field interns Gabriela Mendes and Hayley Madden are loading Mendelsohn’s truck with everything they’ll need to locate, capture, and tag a Great Gray Owl fledgling. 

Thirty minutes later, the four of us are bushwhacking through the Mission Mountains Tribal Wilderness. Managed by the ­Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes (CSKT), the nearly 93,000-acre tract was the first tribally designated wilderness area in the country and lies sandwiched between the Flathead and Lolo National Forests. It’s tangled and verdant—and a very big place to track down a small, shy fledgling. 

Great Grays are elusive, but they’re not endangered, and Mendelsohn would like to keep it that way by ensuring the habitat they need remains on the landscape. Yet despite their size and charisma, much remains unknown about the species, especially their nesting habits. Mendelsohn knows the birds may nest only every two to five years, sometimes in broken-top snags, sometimes in the stick nests of other raptors. She knows they often move sites from year to year, sometimes more than a mile away. Beyond that, there are lots of unanswered questions: Why are some nests abandoned? Which types of nest do the owls prefer? Where do the young go when they disperse? 

All this uncertainty has made it difficult for Mendelsohn to move beyond the save-one-snag-at-a-time approach, so her research aims to provide more broadly applicable guidance to land managers and logging crews. So far she’s tagged ­approximately 50 Great Grays across western Montana to better understand their ­habitat needs. 

We meander through the woods, the whine of mosquitoes in our ears. Mendes plays owl calls—they sound like the squeaks of a mangled dog toy—from a handheld speaker in an attempt to solicit a response. Finally, after nearly two hours, she spots the target: a foot-tall, downy-gray fledgling staring down at us from a ponderosa.  

The researchers gently nudge the still-flightless bird from its perch with a long, padded pole and then quickly get to work, placing an ORI baseball cap over its head to keep it calm. They pluck pin feathers for a genetic sample from the young owlet, which Mendelsohn estimates is five weeks old, then clip a silver metal loop with a yellow tag around its leg; researchers and tribal foresters will now know this bird as T6.

Kaylie Durglo, the CSKT fire division’s reserved treaty rights lands coordinator, says partnering with ORI has been integral to managing tribal forests for habitat, while also using them for timber, recreation, and cultural ceremonies. Tribal crews rely on ­Mendelsohn’s team to spot the most valuable snags, like those with active or former nests. When designing policies for individual logging projects, the CSKT has also incorporated insights that ORI staff have gathered about the birds’ life cycle, such as the perilous weeks flightless owlets spend out of the nest, in nearby branches. 

When ORI’s team identifies trees with nests in an area to be logged, for example, the forestry department sets them aside, along with other similarly sized trees nearby. “Birds don’t always come back to that same snag, and we want to make sure they have more opportunity to nest within their territory,” Durglo says. And during each timber harvest, tribal foresters are required to retain two existing snags, create two new snags, and leave two downed logs per acre.

Mendelsohn would like to foster this kind of collaboration on national forest lands. District staff in the Flathead and Lolo have expressed interest in joining ORI in the field to search for owl nests and learn more about the birds’ habitat needs, she says, but have yet to commit to such an outing. So she continues to hone her dataset, hopeful that more time and more knowledge about the mysterious birds will lead to better forestry management. 

After about five minutes of captivity, during which T6 snaps its beak in indignation, the bird is back in its pine. As the researchers gather their equipment and begin the trudge back to their four-wheelers, Mendelsohn glances over her shoulder for one last look at the owl. “Good luck, buddy,” she says. 

On my last day in Montana, Benedict invites ­Mendelsohn and me to see what’s become of Unit 8.

Through their outreach to the USFS, Benedict and Mendelsohn were able to protect the larch with the Great Gray nest from harvest in the waning days of 2023. Still, as we see after a 30-minute hike, their campaign wasn’t exactly a success. Today the tree stands tall, but the stick nest is empty, and the few other remaining larches stand far apart, like candles on a kid’s birthday cake. The heavily logged tract now lacks a buffer zone of trees that the adult owls use to roost and their chicks need to fledge. “It’s likely useless for the birds,” Mendelsohn says. 

As he takes in the site, trekking poles dangling from his wrists, ­Benedict is clearly dejected. 

Despite the disappointing outcome in the Flathead, elsewhere national forest managers have more actively incorporated snags into management plans. In Missouri’s Mark Twain National Forest, for instance, USFS efforts to restore dead wood paid off in 2020 when a conservation team successfully reintroduced the Brown-headed Nuthatch, a cavity nester that had been absent from the area since the early 1900s. In the Southeast, the agency has restored swaths of native longleaf pine forest in an effort to recover the Red-cockaded Woodpecker. While the once-­endangered species nests in live trees, leaving dead wood on the landscape means less competition from other cavity-dwellers. 

Such successes show that it’s possible to balance the needs of wildlife with other priorities for national forests. At the same time, snags have become more vulnerable to removal. Since January, federal policy has lowered the barriers to cutting them down by promoting domestic timber production and authorizing emergency measures for “the salvage of dead or dying trees,” which have also eased certain environmental review requirements for logging projects.

But there are a lot of woods in the United States not managed by the USFS, which oversees only about 20 percent of the nation’s forests. National parks, state parks and forests, ecological preserves, tribal land, and private land can all help erase our snag deficit “collectively across the landscape,” Rivers says. To this point, he says he’s noticed homeowners in his Corvallis, Oregon, neighborhood leaving or creating snags in their backyards. More than half of the country’s forests are privately owned, so ORI, �ԹϺ���, and other conservation groups are working with willing landowners to create plans for managing larger tracts. The public, Rivers says, may be starting to see dead trees in a new light.

Our afternoon in the Flathead also holds an encouraging sight. In an adjacent, unlogged area, Mendelsohn leads us off trail and deep into the woods to a stately larch snag that held a Great Gray nest two years ago. We stop about 200 feet away as she lifts her binoculars to her face, then lets out a quiet, relieved laugh. “This is exciting,” she whispers. “This is really awesome.” 

Two fuzzy heads bob above the ­cratered crown of the dead larch. They’re a week or maybe 10 days old, Mendelsohn estimates. 

To avoid disturbing the birds, we stay only briefly. But for the sake of Mendelsohn’s growing dataset, someone will need to monitor the nest until she returns in a couple of weeks to tag the fledglings. Would Benedict consider doing that, she asks?

Benedict is quiet on the walk back, and I wonder if he is thinking about the plundered landscape in Unit 8 or the mounting tasks at home now that summer has almost arrived in the Swan Valley. Just before we say goodbye, Benedict has an answer for Mendelsohn. A mix of worry and obligation on his face, he says he’ll keep an eye on the nest.

He knows how hard it is to protect precious things, and how much harder it is to lose them. His eyes, as he says, are open.

This story originally ran in the Winter 2025 issue as “Life After Death.” To receive our print magazine, become a member by .