Proposal to Protect Bird Fuels Battle Over Forests

The federal government presented fresh evidence Monday that the remaining old-growth forests of the Pacific Coast are wild lands in distress--adding kindling to what may be the most inflammatory environmental fight of the decade.

The Fish and Wildlife Service proposed listing the marbled murrelet, a robin-sized sea bird, as a species threated with extinction, joining the northern spotted owl as a creature that the government says is dying out for lack of nesting habitat in the dwindling ancient forests.

The proposal, made under the threat of court order, was more than two years behind schedule. It comes at a time when Congress is caught in a turbulent contest between loggers, who want continued access to harvest public timber in the Pacific Northwest, and environmentalists who say the entire old-growth ecosystem teeters on collapse due to over-logging.

Adding another threatened species to the debate would appear to undermine long-standing efforts of the logging industry to paint the stakes as one of simply owls vs. jobs.

“This confirms what we’ve been saying all along: This is an ecosystem stretched beyond its limits and that it can no longer support the species that depend on it. We’re down to the last 10% of these forests in the Northwest,” said Vic Sher of the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund, which represented the Audubon Society in the matter.

At the same time, however, the industry indicated that it hopes the proposal will be a signal to Congress that it had better act now or expect the issue to become “even more chaotic.”

“Based on our latest count, we now have two listing decisions (the owl and murrelet), three management plans, three federal agencies, three state governments, three major court rulings, five legislative measures (before Congress) and literally a cast of thousands, all complicating the timber supply crisis,” said Kevin Brett of the American Forest Resource Alliance.

The alliance recently disputed the government’s long-standing findings that the spotted owl is threatened, saying there were plenty of owls for those willing to go out and count them. Brett said the industry has doubts whether Monday’s proposal on the murrelet was any more convincingly documented.

The Fish and Wildlife proposal, which sets off a year of hearings and additional study before a final listing, is based on estimates that only 2,000 murrelets survive in California, 2,000 in Oregon and 5,000 in Washington. The nocturnal coastal fishing bird is about nine inches long and a mottled dark brown in color. It is found in bays and near-shore waters, but breeds up to 20 miles inland, according to the Audubon Society.

Like the owl, it is said by environmental biologists to be an “indicator species” of the health of old-growth forests, those in which standing trees are mature, typically 200 years or older, and which contain decomposing fallen trees, all-size smaller trees and a wide diversity of plant species--significantly different from tree-farm forests that typically contain a single lumber species of uniform size.

The Fish and Wildlife Service also noted that the murrelet survives in greater numbers in British Columbia and Alaska and was not proposed for listing as threatened outside the lower 48 states.

Environmentalists argue that at least 34 species of vertebrates depend for their survival on the ancient forests. They also contend that America’s international leadership in the quest to prevent deforestation of the world’s remaining rain forests is at stake: if the United States cannot prevent the logging of its old-growth timber, their reasoning goes, how can it argue that Third World nations should stop their over-cutting?

The Northwest timber industry, and in particular those thousands of blue-collar families that depend on logging for their livelihoods, argue that it is they who are being reduced to the sorry state of a Third World economy. They call the worries about logging overblown and contend that preserving jobs and rural communities should be a higher priority in national policy.

At stake before Congress are the level of timber harvesting from public lands, the right of environmentalists to sue to seek enforcement of environmental laws (a tactic with which they have scored repeated successes), and the very terms of the Endangered Species Act.

Two other species have been denied threatened status recently by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Officials ruled that the Pacific yew tree, which produces a chemical compound with promise in cancer treatment, was too abundant to be offered protection. A petition to list the rarely seen fisher, a small fur-bearing mammal like a weasel, was rejected on grounds that supporting data was too scant to support a petition.

In California, meanwhile, the state Board of Forestry proposed an emergency rule this month to offer the murrelet extra protection, particularly in the much-watched Headwaters Forest owned by Pacific Lumber Co. The board said it wanted to add the bird to its list of “species of special concern,” along with the bald eagle.