By Jeff Barnard
The Associated Press
GRANTS PASS, Ore. — A federal appeals court has rejected a lawsuit by the timber industry seeking to strip Endangered Species Act protection from a threatened seabird that nests in old-growth forests.
Environmentalists said the ruling Friday by the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., should mark the end of a 15-year legal battle over logging trees used by marbled murrelets along the coasts of Oregon, Washington and northern California.
The American Forest Resources Council had argued that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service acted arbitrarily and capriciously in designating the U.S. population of marbled murrelets distinct from birds in Canada, despite a line in the law saying political boundaries are a valid reason.
The appeals court found the decision did not depart from standard practice, and it let stand a district court ruling.
Carol Johnson, executive director of the North Olympic Timber Action Committee, based in Port Angeles, said that the ruling has limited impact on private and U.S. Forest Service lands because of protections already in place.
But, she added, state Department of Natural Resource trust lands “will potentially suffer the greatest reduction in timber harvest as a result of this ruling.
“This could result in the loss of family wage jobs and loss of revenue from DNR trust lands to trust beneficiaries such as county governments and school construction,” Johnson said.
Ann Forest Burns, vice president of the American Forest Resource Council in Portland, said: “The big picture is that we are disappointed in our continued inability to get the judicial branch of our government to exert some control over the administrative branch’s overzealous interpretation in favor of the marbled murrelet.
“It’s not about the bird. It’s about logging. It’s the bird du jour.”
Kristen Boyles, an attorney for the environmental group Earthjustice, said she felt the reason the timber industry has been willing to fight so hard to remove protections for the murrelet is that it is not as charismatic as the northern spotted owl, which was the focus of lawsuits that cut logging by 90 percent on national forests in the Northwest.
The marbled murrelet is a robin-sized bird that feeds and lives on the ocean, but it flies as much as 50 miles inland to lay a single egg in a mossy depression on a large tree branch.
While much of the battle over logging in the Northwest has gone on over habitat for spotted owls and salmon on national forests, the marbled murrelet was the reason the Oregon Department of Forestry withdrew two dozen timber sales on the Elliott State Forest outside Coos Bay last year.
Under a federal court order, the marbled murrelet was listed as a threatened species in 1992 in Oregon, Washington and California because of the loss of nesting habitat to commercial logging, the loss of fish to eat to gillnetting and oil spills.
