The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service officially threw in the towel today on earlier efforts to scale back habitat protections for the endangered northern spotted owl.
The federal agency primarily responsible for administering the Endangered Species Act designated 9.6 million acres in northern California, Oregon, and Washington as critical habitat under the law.
"We applied the best available science to identify the remaining habitat essential to the spotted owl’s recovery – and to ensure that our recovery partners have the clarity and flexibility they need to make effective land management decisions,” Robyn Thorson, FWS' Pacific Region Director, said in a statement.
The designation includes 9.29 million acres administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management, an agency of the U.S. Department of Interior.
An addition 291,570 acres of state-owned land is also included.
Environmental organizations applauded the new designation, but expressed concern that it did not include any privately-owned land within its reach.
"In restoring extensive protections on federal lands, today’s decision, protecting millions of acres of habitat for the spotted owl, marks the end of a dark chapter in the Endangered Species Act’s implementation when politics were allowed to blot out science,” Noah Greenwald, endangered species director at the Center for Biological Diversity, said in a statement. “It is, however, deeply disappointing that the Obama administration has elected to exclude all private and most state lands, which are absolutely essential to the recovery of the spotted owl and dozens of other wildlife species.”
The George W. Bush administration had attempted to scale back critical habitat protections for the northern spotted owl (Strix occidentalis caurina). It sought to eliminate about 1.5 million acres of the species' original 1992 critical habitat designation of about 7 million acres.
A 2008 report by the Interior department's inspector general concluded that the the agency's then-deputy assistant secretary in charge of wildlife management had unlawfully intervened in the process leading to that decision.
In 2010 a federal court rejected the Bush administration's changes to the northern spotted owl's critical habitat designation.
The northern spotted owl is a noctural avian species. It depends on old-growth forests of the Pacific Northwest for habitat and is threatened primarily by timber extraction from those lands.
The new critical habitat designation continues to permit logging in the species' habitat, a situation that drew criticism from a leading owl expert.
"Independent scientific peer reviews have been crystal clear on owl recovery being tied to protection of old forest habitat especially as competition with the more aggressive barred owl increases and climate change further stresses spotted owl populations,” Dominick DellaSala, a biologist at Geos Institute in Ashland, Ore., and a member of FWS' 2006-2008 northern spotted owl recovery team, said.
The species was listed as threatened in 1990 after a long and contentious court battle and one of the few successful efforts to invoke the ESA's "God squad" provision allowing a panel of federal officials to override the law's protections.
Photo courtesy Wikimedia.
