Deal to preserve habitat for bird

TAHOLAH, Wash. — The Quinault Indian Nation and U.S. Department of the Interior signed a deal Monday that will preserve more than 4,200 acres of forest on the Washington coast for the threatened marbled murrelet.

The settlement, stemming from a lawsuit the Quinault filed several years ago, will give the tribe $32.2 million for conservation easements protecting two blocks of land deemed valuable to recovery efforts for the protected bird.

“Everyone benefits,” Interior Secretary Gale Norton said. “The public gets conservation of sensitive forest habitat for a threatened species. The Quinault retain sovereignty over the land and gain support for their economic development. And Interior fulfills its responsibilities for tribal development and conservation of threatened species.”

The Quinaults sued the government in 2001, alleging the tribe’s treaty rights were violated when the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service blocked a proposed timber harvest, saying it would harm marbled murrelet habitat.

Monday’s settlement, announced in Washington, D.C., dismissed that lawsuit.

“This is certainly a historic day for old growth and for cooperative agreements to protect habitat,” said Alan Front, senior vice president of the Trust for Public Land, a national conservation group and a party to the settlement.

Most of the money for the conservation easements is coming from congressional appropriations. The Trust for Public Land is chipping in $1.2 million.

The protected forests fall within the 12,000-acre North Boundary Area of the Quinault Reservation. Some logging will be allowed on land outside the 4,207-acre protected area, Front said, noting that the tribe has agreed to work with the trust on an ecological management plan for the whole reservation.

“It means so much to the Quinault Indian Nation to restore the land and make it manageable,” said the tribe’s president, Pearl Capoeman-Baller. “This will be one of the greatest gifts we can give to the Quinault children.”

The marbled murrelet is a robin-sized seabird that spends most of its life at sea, but flies as much as 50 miles inland to lay a single egg on the branch of an old-growth conifer.