Appeals Court Backs Seabirds Over Loggers

In a defeat for the timber industry, a U.S. appeals court Friday backed the Clinton administration’s move to block timber sales where the marbled murrelet, a threatened seabird, lives in the Pacific Northwest.

The industry had filed suit against the U.S. Forest Service, saying that Congress cleared the way for cutting trees where the bird lived when it mandated timber sales in old-growth forests in Oregon and Washington last year as part of a logging provision attached to a disaster relief bill.

In the so-called salvage logging rider, Congress mandated the cutting of dead and dying trees and old-growth timber sales that were suspended in 1990 to protect wildlife habitat. But Congress said trees should not be chopped where threatened or endangered birds are “known to be nesting.”

Timber companies had challenged the scientific standard used to prove murrelets were nesting.

Reversing a lower court’s decision, a three-judge panel on the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the evidence the Forest Service used was good enough.

The ruling is expected to save about 4,000 acres of ancient Douglas firs and Western hemlocks in coastal Oregon and Washington, the Justice Department said.

“If these trees had been logged, the bird would have gone extinct in Oregon and Washington,” said Kristen Boyles of the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund.