U.S. Designates Owl Habitat but Acreage Is Cut

After months spent studying the economic cost of protecting the threatened northern spotted owl, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on Thursday designated 6.88 million acres of old-growth forest in Washington, Oregon and Northern California as habitat critical to the creature’s survival.

U.S. agency officials have estimated that saving the owl could cost 33,000 jobs in the Northwest, but the timber industry maintains that the toll actually could reach 80,000 to 100,000.

The designation, which in effect will restrict timber-cutting on the land, is still subject to review by the Interior Department and likely will face other challenges.

Although the acreage was a dramatic reduction from the 11.6 million acres the agency first proposed as protected habitat last April, the new designation immediately drew fire from logging companies, which contended that the acreage is too high, and environmentalists, who said that it is too low.

Loggers said that the designation would further harm the already depressed timber industry in the Pacific Northwest.

Barry Polsky, a spokesman for the American Forest Resource Alliance, accused Fish and Wildlife officials of “low-balling” estimated job losses, and Mark Rey, the timber organization’s executive director, called the action “a legal lynching of an entire region by an out-of-control federal agency.”

Environmental organizations, whose 1987 lawsuit forced the government to identify the owl’s critical habitat, charged, however, that reducing the area of protection would result in the death of half the remaining birds. The creature’s population in the three states was estimated at 2,800 in October by the Fish and Wildlife Service.

The area outlined in documents submitted to a judge in U.S. District Court in Seattle and made public Thursday will not ban logging but will sharply restrict it and require timber sales to be approved by Fish and Wildlife officials on a case-by-case basis.

After an outcry from timber and business interests last year, the Fish and Wildlife Service last August dropped 3 million acres of private lands from the 11.6 million acres it first proposed to designate as critical habitat. From the remaining 8.6 million, the new action excluded 1.7 million acres belonging to the U.S. Forest Service and the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management.

Finally designated as critical to the owl’s survival were 2.2 million acres of federal land in Washington, 3.3 million acres in Oregon and 1.4 million acres in 10 counties of Northern California.

Fish and Wildlife Service spokesman David Klinger said that officials assigned to the task had spent much of the last four months identifying areas that should be eliminated because the economic impact of protection outweighed benefits to the bird’s survival.

Critics reacted scornfully to the service’s claim that it had saved jobs. “The agency,” Polsky said, “is pulling out all of the stops to low-ball the numbers to protect the Endangered Species Act.” After a long-running debate, the reclusive owl, which nests in cavities of old-growth Douglas fir trees, was declared a threatened species in 1990, setting in motion the most bitter struggle in the 20-year history of the statute.

While Fish and Wildlife officials were working over their critical habitat maps, the battle sharply escalated on another front.

Acting on a petition from the Bureau of Land Management, Interior Secretary Manuel Lujan Jr. last November convened a Cabinet-level panel to decide whether the Endangered Species Act should be overridden to permit the federal government to sell 44 tracts of timber in western Oregon.

As the habitat designation was made public Thursday, an administrative law judge was beginning two weeks of public hearings in Portland to take testimony on behalf of the seven-member panel, which will make its decision in March.

If the panel permits the timber sales in question in Oregon, environmentalists predict that it will be used regularly to circumvent legal protection of the bird throughout its range.

In making its final plan public, the Fish and Wildlife Service Thursday estimated that reduction of the critical habitat from 8.6 million acres to 6.88 million will have the effect of saving about 1,000 jobs and annually returning 65 million board feet to the region’s timber harvest.

With the critical habitat identified, the Fish and Wildlife Service is now required by the Endangered Species Act to produce a formal plan for recovery of the spotted owl population.

Klinger said Thursday that a draft of the recovery plan should be completed next month, with the final plan to be submitted to the Interior secretary next August. It will detail logging practices and other measures that might contribute to the recovery of the owl’s numbers.