Small Bird Threatens Forest Plan Marbled Murrelet Focus Of Possible Future Problem

Legal wrangling over a small, shy water bird nesting high in old-growth fir trees could unravel President Clinton’s plan for Northwest forests, the administration’s top forestry official says.

“We’re running the risk of shutting down the entire timber program in the Pacific Northwest again,” Jim Lyons, assistant secretary of agriculture for natural resources and the environment, said during a visit here Friday.

“We fear it could bring down the forest plan.”

At issue is more than half a billion board feet of timber, much of it in old-growth forests where the threatened marbled murrelet nest. The area also includes sensitive watersheds that the forest plan says should be off-limits to most logging.

“This is prime old growth - the stuff that’s at the heart of the emotion behind the issue,” Lyons said.

Congress passed a bill last month that was meant to speed up salvage logging of burned and diseased forests, mainly east of the Cascade Mountains.

Tucked into the bill is an oldgrowth logging provision which the timber industry says allows it to cut down the 500 million board feet of timber - even though much of it is old growth where the marbled murrelet nests.

But if those areas are logged, the forest plan would be vulnerable to future legal challenges by environmentalists, Lyons said. The result could be another court injunction that would halt timber operations in the region’s federal forests.

“We’ve been telling the administration that this thing could strike a dagger in the heart of their forest plan,” said Bill Arthur, Northwest representative of The Sierra Club.

“It could literally bring us back to ground zero,” he said.

Clinton reluctantly signed the salvage logging bill and ordered the Forest Service and other agencies to continue following all environmental laws - although the bill allows them to be ignored.

The timber industry filed a lawsuit last week in Oregon, arguing that the provision must be broadly applied to forests where logging had previously been shut down to protect the murrelet’s habitat and other sensitive ecosystems.

The industry lawsuit argues that only documented murrelet nest sites can be protected from logging.

Environmentalists countersued, saying the provision should be more narrowly interpreted, with fewer areas opened to logging. Murrelets are so elusive it took decades for biologists to find the first nest.

If the forest plan is derailed, timber communities will be thrown back into limbo, Lyons said.

“The irony is that we worked hard when we first came into office to get this litigation behind us,” he said.

The Forest Service recently surveyed disputed timber sales areas and is deciding which of them could be opened to logging, Lyons said.

In the Mount Baker-Snoqualmie Forest, at least two-thirds of the timber sales will be cleared for sale because no murrelets have been found there, said forest supervisor Dennis Bschor.

In coastal areas, especially in Oregon, murrelet populations will likely be higher.

The amount of old growth logged in the region has dropped over the past several years.

During the 1980s, more than 4 billion board feet of timber were logged from the region’s federal forests each year. This year, only about 500 million board feet of timber were offered for sale.

But by the end of next year, Lyons predicted, timber sales will climb to about 1.1 billion board feet a year.