Conservationists Worried by Decision on Gnatcatcher : Environment: After court’s ruling, they fear that builders will destroy the bird’s habitat. It is unclear when it takes, or took, effect.

Conservation officials scrambled Tuesday to sort out the effects of a court ruling that removes the California gnatcatcher from the list of threatened species and appears to expose its fragile habitat to the developer’s bulldozer.

It was unclear when Monday’s ruling takes effect, and the greatest fear was that landowners eager to build might seize on the confusion and grade or bulldoze the tiny songbird’s habitat--mostly coastal sage scrub in Orange and San Diego counties--before conservationists can regroup.

“Yes, that area is wide open if the judge’s ruling is effective immediately,” said Connie Babb of the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Carlsbad. “But we don’t know if it is effective now, or at noon tomorrow, or in 30 days. We’re trying to get an answer.”

But Andy McLeod, assistant secretary for resources of the state Resources Agency, held that the habitat will be protected by a separate preservation program to take effect at the end of the year and warned there was no percentage in developers “stepping out of line” and taking immediate action to alter the gnatcatcher’s native environment.

Lawyers from the Department of the Interior were conferring to formulate a strategy in light U. S. District Judge Stanley Sporkin’s ruling that the government had erred in listing the gnatcatcher as threatened without providing its raw scientific data to builders who challenged that classification.

Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt had no comment Tuesday as government officials at virtually every level awaited some signal on how to combat a decision that environmentalists described as a crushing blow to the protection of endangered and threatened species.

“We know Secretary Babbitt is committed to taking the necessary steps to guarantee the protection of the gnatcatcher,” Babb said, although what those steps might be remained unclear.

There are several possible courses of action for the Interior Department, officials said. One is to appeal the decision to a higher court, and another is to seek an injunction to stay the ruling. The period for public comment regarding listing the gnatcatcher as an endangered species could be reopened, or the disputed data could be made available to the builders. Finally, an attempt could be made to classify as endangered one of the nearly 100 other plants or animals in that habitat that are already considered imperiled.

Such major Orange County landowners as the Irvine Co. and the Santa Margarita Co. have indicated they will take no drastic steps to alter the land until the contested issue is settled. And some officials speculated that Southern California’s economic slump might work in the conservationists’ favor because developers are less eager to build in a downturn.

Meanwhile, state officials looked to a separate conservation plan that seeks to protect not only the gnatcatcher but also its sage scrub habitat as a whole--a scattering of land concentrated primarily in Orange, San Diego and Riverside counties, but some of which dots parts of San Bernardino and Los Angeles counties.

The Natural Communities Conservation Planning rogram, created by Gov. Pete Wilson in 1991 and adopted in December by the federal government, encourages landowners to voluntarily set aside habitat for the gnatcatcher and other rare plants and animals.

As an incentive, cooperating property owners will be able to get speedier approval to develop portions of their land, avoiding the lengthy, often litigious endangered-species process.

The program, which is set to take effect at the end of this year, “would preserve the habitat in perpetuity” regardless of the gnatcatcher’s status, said McLeod of the state Resources Agency.

“It’s of no benefit for anyone to step out of line” and immediately start to develop the land, McLeod said, because the state’s long-term goal is to see that the habitat is preserved.

But other officials worried that the gnatcatcher’s change of status has weakened the state plan as well, or at least temporarily removed the incentive for landowners to comply.

The state plan will not be legally enforceable until the end of 1994, leaving a dangerous window of opportunity for developers, environmentalists warned.

While most of the Orange County property at issue is held by landowners already enrolled in the program, the majority of the developers in Riverside County have made no such promise, officials said.

“We are very concerned because we have never felt that these programs would be successful in the absence of a threatened-species listing,” said Dan Silver, coordinator for the Endangered Habitats League, a Los Angeles-based coalition of environmental groups. “We always believed you needed the listing in order to get the developers and the local governments to do the right thing in this regard.”

Nonetheless, Silver said he expected most property owners, particularly the large developers, to take no immediate action in the wake of the ruling. But he expressed concern that some smaller landholders might seek to take advantage of the current confusion.

“They have to realize that if they do start destroying habitat, they might create an emergency situation that could lead to an emergency endangered-species listing for the gnatcatcher,” he said. “I think they would want to avoid that.”

Judge Sporkin’s ruling stems from a suit filed in 1992 by the Southern California Building Industry Assn. and Orange County’s tollway agencies, which argued that environmentalists were using the Endangered Species Act to block development in general and to halt construction of the San Joaquin Hills tollway in the coastal hills of Orange County.