SACRAMENTO, California — Monday was the first day of Cal Fire’s Wildfire Preparedness Week and firefighters are encouraging property owners to use their extra time at home to prepare for the upcoming fire season. “Wildfire season is already here,” said Tony Scardina, the deputy regional forester for the U.S. Forest Service’s Pacific Southwest Region. State leaders are warning that wildfires will be here regardless of the COVID-19 pandemic. …This year has the potential to see fires as bad as any in the past five years when 10 of the state’s most destructive wildfires have burned. “Last year you’ll remember we had a lot of snow in the mountains, a lot of late-season rain,” said Cal Fire Director Chief Thom Porter. “We had a slow start to our fire season. That’s not going to be the same this year.”

MEDFORD, Oregon — Wildfire season is beginning a month ahead of schedule in Southwest Oregon as drought conditions intensify across the region. The state Department of Forestry declared the beginning of fire season May 1 in the Southwest Oregon District, which includes 1.8 million acres of state-protected lands in Jackson and Josephine counties. It is the earliest start to a fire season in the district since April 18, 1988, and only the third time since 2000 that fire season was called before June 1. Brian Ballou, spokesman for ODF in Medford, said… “We’re used to chasing escaped burns and (slash) fires usually in the latter half of May. That’s just normal,” Ballou said. “Then we’ll start fire season sometime in early June. But this year, we’re just a month off, if not a little more than a month.”

Greg Ettl

EATONVILLE, Pierce County — Neon lines stretch across a forest thick with sword ferns, zigzagging across the landscape at about waist level.  The blue and green tubes, which sometimes flow with liquid, weave around maple trees and traverse the hillside, interconnected, like a tiny highway system. The bright colors contrast with the usual earth tones found in these forested foothills of Mount Rainier.  “It’s either forest graffiti, or it’s an art project,” said Greg Ettl, a University of Washington forest ecologist.  Sap drains through the tubes from clumps of bigleaf maples in Pack Forest, a 4,300-acre experimental forest owned and operated by the UW since the 1920s. Ettl, who oversees Pack Forest, is helping lead UW’s latest experiment to produce maple syrup from these trees.  The sap is destined for a 500-gallon tank, then for transport by pickup truck to a nearby processing facility, a “sugar shack.”

EVERETT, Washington — Take the recent surge in purchases of toilet paper and paper towels. …Will more be available? …The answer now is probably yes, because Washington’s commercial and residential construction industry has gotten the green light from Gov. Jay Inslee to start back to work. …So how do we get from the construction industry to your bathroom? …“Washington’s forest sector is diverse but interconnected. It all starts with the harvesting of timber, which provides jobs for foresters, scientists, loggers, truckers and many others,” said Nick Smith, for the American Forest Resource Council. “Demand for lumber, such as for home construction, is necessary to keep our sawmills open. And pulp and paper manufacturers rely on chips and other residual products from the sawmills to power their own mills and produce our everyday paper, tissue and hygiene products,” he said.

PORTLAND — Environmental groups are suing the Trump administration to protect a rare, weasel-like carnivore found along a narrow strip of coastal forests in Southern Oregon and Northern California.  The Center for Biological Diversity and the Environmental Protection Information Center filed the lawsuit May 4 against Interior Secretary David Bernhardt, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and agency director Aurelia Skipwith for not listing the Humboldt marten under the Endangered Species Act.   Fewer than 400 Humboldt martens exist today in four isolated populations across their historic range, the lawsuit states. The species was once commonly found in the coastal mountains from California’s Sonoma County north to the Columbia River in Oregon, though wildfires and logging have fragmented its habitat.