Agency would cut murrelet from list

GRANTS PASS, Ore. — The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service confirmed yesterday that it will propose removing threatened-species protection from the marbled murrelet, a small seabird at the center of battles over logging in the Northwest.

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 uses 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.

Court battles over needs of the marbled murrelet, northern spotted owl and salmon led the 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 because of legal battles and lack of funds for federal agencies, leading the timber industry to press the Bush administration to ease restrictions.

In that five-year 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 the three states by the end of this century, particularly if more nesting trees were cut down.

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.

"The reason why we are seeing the administration drift toward increased use of this distinct-population policy is because they think that it is more of an issue of policy and less science; therefore, they shield themselves against science," Suckling said.

Chris West, vice president of the timber-industry group, said he had not been told the proposal was coming. He welcomed a process he said could lead to reducing bureaucratic hurdles for logging.