New rules in place for owls
OLYMPIA – Three days after a new lawsuit was filed pressing the federal government to come up with a plan to protect dwindling populations of the spotted owl, the State Forest Practices Board approved two emergency rules and three resolutions concerning the bird.
In announcing the moves Wednesday, Public Lands Commissioner Doug Sutherland, the board’s chairman, said the decisions “recognize recent scientific evidence that the owl population has declined due to several major factors, as opposed to any one single cause. These factors include barred owls, current and past timber harvest, severe weather, decline in forest health, and fire.”
Wildlife conservationists blame decades of clearcutting in old growth forests, the owls’ primary habitat, for the birds’ decline. Some embittered timber towns blame the beleaguered bird for the demise of the industry.
On Monday, the Seattle and Kittitas chapters of the American Audubon Society sued the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service over its failure to come up with a recovery plan for the bird, which has been considered “threatened” since 1990 under the Endangered Species Act.
The agency replied that it hopes to come up with such a plan within a year and a half.
It’s the second federal lawsuit in five years pressing Fish and Wildlife to protect the deep-woods owl.
In the early 1990s, U.S. District Judge William Dwyer in Seattle barred logging on millions of acres of federal land, saying the government had failed to protect the owl as required.
A news release from the Department of Natural Resources, overseen by Sutherland, said the state board’s new emergency rules will “strengthen spotted owl protection.”
One rule imposes a temporary moratorium on the practice of “decertifying” spotted owl sites until June 30, 2007 – anticipating release of a federal recovery plan for the owl. The state has opened thousands of acres of forest lands to logging by decertifying so-called “owl circles,” a radius of 1.8 miles around sites where owls have been found.
The other rule eliminates the potential for landowners without habitat conservation plans – or similar agreements to manage land with minimal habitat damage – to benefit from actions on adjacent lands covered by such pacts.
The state Department of Natural Resources, also overseen by Sutherland, said it will file a rule-making order with the state for those emergency rules.
The board rejected a proposal for vigorous environmental reviews of timber harvesting on about 115,000 acres of remaining owl habitat. The state’s 7.8 million acres of private timberland includes about 600,000 acres of owl habitat.