San Diego Zoo, manager of Desert Tortoise Conservation Center, and U.S. wildlife agency dispute report that threatened desert tortoises will die because of lowered federal funding

Both the private agency that manages a Nevada facility dedicated to conservation of the threatened desert tortoise and the federal agency responsible for assuring the recovery of the species have denied an Associated Press report that hundreds of the animals that are housed there may be euthanized in coming months as a result of reduced financial support from the federal government.

According to the AP report, which was published Sunday, the Desert Tortoise Conservation Center will be closed and the individual desert tortoises in its care will be killed.

The San Diego Zoo, which is the principal manager of the DTCC, denies that either of those outcomes is in the cards.

"Although we understand that, at any point, it's possible to lose federal funds, we manage the center and we don't have plans to do those things," Christine Simmons, a zoo spokesperson, said. "We remain committed to working with the desert tortoise."

Simmons explained that some tortoises - for example, those who are suffering from such severe medical  problems that they cannot be rehabilitated or released back into the wild - may need to be euthanized.

"That's a small percentage of the overall population" served by DTCC, she said. 

A Monday press release from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's Pacific Southwest Region also denied that any healthy tortoise now at the DTCC would be euthanized.

"Sometimes euthanasia of unhealthy pet tortoises is necessary, but only as last resort, and only after we evaluate other options," the statement said. "All healthy tortoises at the DTCC will be relocated to sites that will support the recovery of the species."

The italics are in the original text of FWS' press release.

Gopherus agassizii are native to the deserts of western Arizona, eastern California, southern Nevada, and southwestern Utah. The reptile, which can grow to more than a foot in length, was added to the federal list of threatened and endangered species in 1990.

The desert tortoise is a member of a family of animals that has survived since the time of the dinosaurs. However, its desert habitat has been increasingly lost to development, especially in the Las Vegas valley. According to a website maintained by Conservation Centers for Species Survival, 90 percent of individuals in the species have been lost in the last three decades.

Only about 150,000 individuals of the species remain in the wild, according to the San Diego Zoo.

The DTCC is partially financed by funds provided by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, which manages a large proportion of the public land within the desert tortoise's range. 

BLM is allocating less money to the DTCC because it is receiving fewer dollars from habitat mitigation fees paid by developers under section 7 of the Endangered Species Act.

"The funds go up and down, depending on what’s happening with the economy," agency spokesperson Erica Haspiel-Szlosek said. She explained that housing development in the Las Vegas valley, a principal source of the money that flows into the habitat mitigation fund, has taken a hit during the recent recession.

BLM ordinarily spends about one million dollars per year to operate the DTCC, Haspiel-Szlosek said.

"It will be about 1.5 million this year because we are preparing to trans-locate all the tortoises that are healthy from the center," she said.

Tortoises are currently being relocated from the DTCC to an undisclosed location near Trout Canyon, Nev. and others will be moved in the future to a site near Coyote Springs, Nev., according to the FWS statement released Monday.

Haspiel-Szlosek explained that BLM wants to stop caring for "former pet tortoises" and would cease support for the DTCC when the available section 7 funds run out sometime in 2014.

"Although we’ve been in that position for awhile, we don’t feel that’s part of what we do," she said.

About one thousand individuals are brought to the Desert Tortoise Conservation Center each year, according to the CCSS website. About 98 percent of those had been kept as pets.

A Washington Post article based on Sunday's AP report is here.

Photo courtesy Wikimedia.

NOTE: This story also appears at Examiner.com. 

NOTE: This story was edited on Monday, Aug. 26 to reflect additional information obtained during an interview with a BLM spokesperson and a San Diego Zoo spokesperson and from a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service press statement. 

CORRECTION: This post originally stated that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's Southwest Region office issued a press release about the controversy over the DTCC on Monday. It was FWS' Pacific Southwest regional office that did so.

112th Congress might be first since 1966 to shun wilderness bills

The 112th Congress could become the first since 1966 to designate no acres anywhere in the United States for protection under the Wilderness Act.

There are currently 27 pending bills that would designate wilderness in 13 states, including five measures that would protect public land in California as wilderness, four that would designate additional wilderness in Colorado, four that would protect additional wilderness in New Mexico, and three that would add more acres in Oregon to the National Wilderness Preservation System.

“Some of the bills that are being held up are wilderness-only bills," David Moulton, the senior director for legislative affairs at the Wilderness Society, said. "Most of them are bills that combine wilderness with the protection of other uses."

Moulton explained that bills designating new wilderness are bottled up in the House Natural Resources Committee.

"Right now, the sitting chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee, Rep. Doc Hastings of Washington, is so ideologically opposed to adding any wilderness to the preservation system that he refuses to allow bills through his committee," Moulton said. "So bills that have been proposed to protect wild areas in states represented by Republicans, where there’s broad support and [the bill is] introduced by a Republican, are going to the House Natural Resources Committee and dying there."

Hastings, 71, issued a statement in Nov. 2011 that indicated skepticism about additional wilderness legislation, arguing that enough has already been set aside.

"The federal government already owns more lands than it can afford to properly manage," Hastings said. "We must make thoughtful and careful land-use decisions that reflect our country’s current economic situation, keep our lands healthy, and exemplify the importance of ensuring public access to public lands for multi-use purposes.”

The prospects for wilderness designations by means of a large bill that wraps many smaller proposals into one probably aren't any greater than they are for the individual wilderness bills, at least if Hastings' views carry the day in the GOP-controlled House of Representatives.

In Jan. 2011 Hastings told the Seattle Times that the House Republican majority would not pass so-called omnibus land conservation bills.

Even if there were a reasonable chance for an omnibus bill to move through the House of Representatives before adjournment near the end of December, the Senate may find it difficult to find the time to take up such expansive legislation.

The chamber, like the House of Representatives, is intensely engaged in efforts to resolve the federal government's fiscal crisis.

"All I can say is that the Senate is an infinitely flexible place, so anything can happen," Bill Wicker, a spokesperson for the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, said. "But, at the same time, lame duck is a very challenging environment for all legislation."

Wicker was using the phrase commonly applied to the period in which the members of the Senate and House of Representatives meet that occurs between an election and the start of the next Congress.

The outlook is not uniformly bad for public lands legislation. A measure that would re-designate Pinnacles National Monument in California as a national park passed the House unanimously.

The House version of the bill does not designate any new wilderness. Instead, it would re-name the existing Pinnacles wilderness to honor a pioneer family from the area.

"Since all the land is already under the control of the National Park Service, it doesn’t add any costs," Adam Russell, a spokesperson for the bill's sponsor, U.S. Rep. Sam Farr, D-Calif., said.

A companion bill introduced by Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., that remains pending in the Senate would add an additional 3,000 acres of wilderness within the new national park.

Photo of Pinnacles National Monument courtesy Wikimedia.

Note: A version of this story also appears at Examiner.com.

Salazar orders trigger of wilderness protection at Point Reyes National Seashore

A scenic estuary within California's Point Reyes National Seashore that is thought to be the site of 16th century explorer Francis Drake's landing in North America, and the locus for a long controversy over commercial oyster harvesting operations within the preserve, is set to become part of a designated wilderness area.

Interior secretary Ken Salazar announced Thursday that he has directed the National Park Service to decline  a renewal of Drakes Bay Oyster Company's long-term operating lease. The company, which has been harvesting oysters since 1972, will no longer be authorized to do so.

The decision triggers 1976 legislation that designates Drakes Estero as protected wilderness and ends commercial activities on about 1,000 acres of federal land and waters.

I believe it is the right decision for Point Reyes National Seashore and for future generations who will enjoy this treasured landscape," Salazar said.

Drakes Estero is known for its large seal population, as well as its status as California's most plentiful source of oysters. Environmentalists and supporters of the oyster farm have engaged in a long-running battle about the commercial harvesting of that resource within the preserve.

In 2009 Congress enacted legislation granting Salazar discretion to decide whether to renew permission to operate there for another ten years or to terminate the existing authorization.

The oyster harvesting operation began in 1938, according to a recent NPS environmental impact statement that examined the potential consequences of allowing it to continue. In 1972, ten years after Point Reyes National Seashore was established, NPS entered into a forty-year lease with Drakes Bay Oyster Company's corporate predecessor. That lease, called a "reservation of use and occupancy," expires today along with a required permit.

Salazar's memorandum to NPS director Jon Jarvis noted that continued commercial use of resources within the national seashore violates agency policy and would be inconsistent with Congress' decision to restore wilderness qualities to Drakes Estero. 

Drakes Bay Oyster Company will have 90 days in which to remove its property from the preserve. The government will provide employees with job re-training and relocation assistance.

Drakes Estero Wilderness is the only marine wilderness on the nation's west coast outside of Alaska. The designation of the area as part of the federal wilderness preservation system applies to about 8 square miles of the 31 square mile-size watershed.

Revised critical habitat designation for northern spotted owl released

 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.

 

 

Roadless rule fight ends

The long fight over a far-reaching federal regulation aimed at preserving roadless areas of the national forests ended Monday when the U.S. Supreme Court decided it would not review an appeals court decision upholding it.

The court's decision means that the rule can go into effect more than ten years after it was finalized by the Clinton administration.

"The Roadless Rule is now indisputably the law of the land," Jamie Williams, the president of the Wilderness Society, said in a statement.

Getting to that point required battles in two federal courts of appeal and the hostility of the George W. Bush administration, which declined to defend it in one appeals court, tried to replace it with a rule that would establish protections on the basis of state preferences, and exempted the nation's largest temperate forest - Alaska's Tongass National Forest - entirely from the rule.

The Bush administration also managed to secure exemptions from the rule for Idaho and Colorado.

Roadless areas are considered to be biologically important because they allow for the preservation of cold-water fish habitat and the sustained connection between a variety of habitats for native wildlife populations.

Areas of forest not sliced up by roads are also more resistant to wildfire and provide refuge for species impacted by human activities elsewhere and by global climate change.

The Forest Service first initiated efforts to protect them during the 1920s, when it set aside "primitive areas", and by the 1960s federal law recognized their ecological significance when Congress enacted the Wilderness Act.

That landmark law required the Forest Service to protect roadless areas pending Congressional decisions about which of the areas to designate as wilderness, and in the 1970s the agency completed an evaluation of its acreage that qualified.

The Clinton administration imposed a moratorium on additional road-building in the national forest roadless areas in 1999 and then, just before leaving office in Jan. 2011 and after a lengthy process that involved the most extensive public involvement process in U.S. history, finalized the regulation to protect them.

Two federal appeals courts later upheld the validity of the Roadless Rule against attacks from motorized recreation advocates, grazing, mining, and timber interests, and a small number of municipalities, counties, and states.

Critics argued that the regulation intruded on Congress' exclusive authority to designate wilderness areas.

The Roadless Rule affects 58.5 million acres of the 193 million-acre national forest system.
There are more than 380,000 miles of roads, mostly built to support timber extraction activities, in the national forests.

The regulation does not require closure of existing roads, does not prevent off-road vehicle use in the national forests, and does not affect opportunities to conduct mining operations in the national forests. It also does not prevent holders of grazing permits from allowing their livestock to roam on federal government-owned forests.

The Supreme Court's orders denying review came in Colorado Mining Association v. U.S. 
 Department of Agriculture, No. 11-1384 and Wyoming v. U.S. Department of Agriculture, No. 11-1378.