Murrelet’s status will be re-evaluated

GRANTS PASS, Ore. – The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service confirmed Thursday that it will propose taking the marbled murrelet, a small seabird at the center of political battles over logging in the Northwest, off the threatened species list.

The proposal, to be formally made by the end of the year, will start a yearlong evaluation of the status of the bird. The marbled murrelet lives its life at sea, but demands big old trees near the coast for nesting, laying a single egg in a mossy depression on a large branch.

The proposal is based on the idea that the 17,000 to 20,000 birds living off Washington, Oregon and California – now protected as a threatened species – are not distinct from the nearly 1 million other birds living off the coasts of British Columbia and Alaska, said Fish and Wildlife spokeswoman Joan Jewett.

The decision is the latest step in a process that began with a lawsuit filed by the timber industry group American Forest Resource Council, demanding that a five-year review of the bird’s status be done, as required by the Endangered Species Act. The Bush administration agreed to the review.

Court battles over needs of the marbled murrelet, northern spotted owl and salmon led U.S. Forest Service and U.S. Bureau of Land Management to adopt the Northwest Forest Plan in 1994, which cut logging on federal lands in Washington, Oregon and Northern California by 80 percent to protect fish and wildlife habitat. Even those diminished logging levels have never been met, due to legal battles and lack of funding for federal agencies.

In that five-year status review, 16 international scientists assembled under contract to Fish and Wildlife last year found the marbled murrelet was still declining through North America and remained particularly vulnerable in the Northwest. They warned that the bird was likely to disappear from Washington, Oregon and Northern California by the end of this century, particularly if more nesting trees were cut down.

Jewett said the marbled murrelet was listed because of the international border separating Northwest birds from populations in Canada. Now that Canada has a species protection law, the Northwest birds are no longer distinct.

Kieran Suckling, policy director of the Center for Biological Diversity, said the Bush administration was increasingly using a loophole in the Endangered Species Act that allowed it to take animals off the endangered species list based on the argument that they were not a distinct population segment. The same strategy was used with killer whales and the gray wolf, but judges struck down those decisions.