Plan to save owls gets another look

GRANTS PASS, Ore. – The Bush administration’s plan for saving the northern spotted owl from extinction, which flunked a review by independent scientists, will be turned over to an independent contractor and independent experts for fine-tuning.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced Wednesday that it will hire an independent contractor to handle the large volume of public comments about the draft plan and convene three groups of experts to amend it. The team that drew up the plan has been disbanded.

The Society for Conservation Biology and the American Ornithologists’ Union found that the government did not consider all the best available science, a requirement of the Endangered Species Act, before making room for more logging in old-growth forests.

The recovery plan is a linchpin of plans by the U.S. Bureau of Land management to increase logging greatly in Western Oregon.

In addition to logging old growth forests, it identified barred owls, which have been pushing spotted owls out of their territory, and wildfires, which have burned national forests, as threats to the spotted owls’ survival.

Fish and Wildlife spokeswoman Joan Jewett denied the new approach was prompted by the plan flunking peer review but said they wanted to produce the best plan possible.

“This is an attempt to put a Band-Aid on the recovery plan,” said Dominick DellaSala, director of the National Center for Conservation Biology and Policy in Ashland and a member of the team that produced the recovery plan.

“This is a key domino that could topple what is remaining of the old growth protections in the Northwest Forest Plan. That’s why the Bush administration needs a weak recovery plan.”

Chris West, vice president of the timber industry group America Forest Resource Council, welcomed the new approach, saying it would produce a better plan for the owl than the Northwest Forest Plan, which was hastily assembled under political pressure.