New Plan Ordered to Protect Spotted Owl : Environment: Judge rules that Forest Service statement omits new evidence about the threatened birds’ rate of decline.

The U.S. Forest Service must rework its plan for protecting the threatened northern spotted owl, a federal judge ruled Thursday, saying the agency’s environmental impact statement omits new scientific evidence that indicates the threatened birds are declining faster than previously thought.

U.S. District Judge William Dwyer did not rule on whether to continue a ban on nearly all logging in Northwest national forests while the additional work is done. He said a separate hearing on that issue will be scheduled later.

In ordering a new environmental report, the judge also cited a May 14 decision by the special Cabinet-level Endangered Species Committee to sidestep the endangered species law and allow the Interior Department to sell timber on 13 tracts covering 1,700 acres in Oregon.

The impact statement repeatedly says that if such a decision is made, the Forest Service’s assessment of how well the owl might survive would need to be re-examined, Dwyer said.

“That being so, there is no choice but to remand the matter to the agency,” the judge said.

Eleven conservation groups had challenged the Forest Service plan, saying it wouldn’t work, doesn’t include new scientific information and would allow logging on tens of thousands of acres of old-growth forests in which the owls live. About 3,000 pairs of the birds live in Northwest forests.

In March, the Forest Service said it would adopt a plan first offered in April, 1990, by a panel of government scientists headed by Forest Service biologist Jack Ward Thomas.

That decision was in response to an order Dwyer issued last year that had shut down logging on all Northwest national forests having spotted owls. Dwyer had ruled the agency violated federal laws by not having an owl protection plan accompanied by an environmental impact statement.

The Thomas plan would ban logging on about 5.9 million acres of national forests in Washington, Oregon and Northern California, and would reduce the region’s annual timber harvests to about half the traditional level.

Plaintiffs in the lawsuit said that wasn’t enough, noting that half of that land had been previously logged and that much old growth remained outside the protected areas.