Spotted owl habitat reduced

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service cut critical habitat for the northern spotted owl by 23 percent Tuesday, following the May release of its new recovery plan for stemming its population decline.

Critical habitat for the northern spotted owl was cut by more than1 million acres in Oregon on Tuesday, with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service reporting the revision is the result of a better understanding of where the bird lives and improved mapping technologies.

Across Oregon, Washington and Northern California, the threatened bird will lose 23 percent of the habitat set aside for it in 1992, which was two years after it was listed under the Endangered Species Act. The designation now gives the overall spotted owl population — in decline by 4 percent annually across the Northwest — 5.3 million acres of habitat, rather than 6.9 million acres.

The revision follows Fish and Wildlife’s five-year review of the species’ status, completed in 2004, which established that the owl continues to require protection under the Endangered Species Act.

In May, the Fish and Wildlife Service released a new recovery plan for the northern spotted owl which calls for setting aside a patchwork of static conservation areas — known as Managed Owl Conservation Areas — across 6.4 million acres of federally owned lands on the three states.

The plan was initiated by a lawsuit filed by the timber industry but settled out of court, calling for the Fish and Wildlife Service to review the owl’s status.

The recovery plan, which the Fish and Wildlife Service contends was one of the most thoroughly peer-reviewed recovery plans the agency has ever written, supplants the 1994 Northwest Forest Plan as a guiding tool for improving owl populations.

Earlier this month, three leading professional organizations of wildlife scientists — the Society for Conservation Biology, the Wildlife Society and the American Ornithologists Union — said the final recovery plan is better than the draft that flunked a year ago, but it still fails to scientifically prove that owl habitat should be opened to potential logging.

The critical habitat revision is based on the draft and final recovery plans for the spotted owl.

The Fish and Wildlife draft proposed two options for recovering owl populations: Set aside static conservation areas or allow public land managers of the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management to designate conservation areas.

The final plan designated Managed Owl Conservation Areas on the west side of the Cascades range but called for a “landscape management” approach to owl areas in fire prone areas on the east side.

The critical habitat designation, however, relies on the MOCAs on the west side and on static conservation areas on the east side.

“In developing the recovery plan and the critical habitat designation, we worked closely with the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management to identify areas on lands they manage that are best suited for owl conservation and recovery,” said Ren Lohoefener, director of Fish and Wildlife’s Pacific Region, in an issued statement.

Fish and Wildlife spokeswoman Joan Jewett said the east-side approach to owl conservation in the recovery plan was abandoned for critical habitat designation because of its need to have clearly defined boundaries.

Though the recovery plan sets aside more Managed Owl Conservation Areas than designated critical habitat — 6.3 million acres to 5.3 million acres — the acreage stays relatively the same, Jewett said, because “in the recovery plan, those MOCAs include wilderness areas and national parks,” which the critical habitat doesn’t.

Though MOCAs must be maintained in the highest possible condition for owls, a critical habitat designation does not shun logging. However, it does call for a more thorough species’ consultation with Fish and Wildlife by the Forest Service and BLM before planning a project on federal lands.

Jewett said the critical habitat designation on the east side of the Cascades will allow for forestry management to thin forests and reduce their susceptibility to wildfire.

But timber industry spokesmen say the critical habitat designation is too stringent for a successful owl population recovery.

“We don’t believe that’s the best way for the owls and for the forests, either,” Tom Partin, president of the American Forest Resources Council, said from Portland. He added that over 300,000 acres of forest have burned in eastern Oregon within the past decade and much more of it could burn over the next few decades — taking owl habitat with it — if they aren’t managed more aggressively.

But conservationists, such as Dominick DellaSala, contend the habitat designation is too aggressive and will free up more than 40 percent of critical habitat set aside in 1992 over BLM lands in Western Oregon. The chief scientist at the National Center for Conservation Science & Policy in Ashland said that conveniently provides the BLM leeway to ramp up logging in old-growth forests with its Western Oregon Plan Revisions, an agency re-write of forestry management expected to be finalized this year.

“It’s clear that the Fish and Wildlife Service is setting this up as a free pass to BLM,” DellaSala said.