Federal biologists have agreed to consider changing Endangered Species Act protections for the northern spotted owl from threatened to endangered.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service will announce Wednesday there is enough new scientific information in a conservation group's petition to warrant a hard look, which will take about two years. A notice will be published Friday in the Federal Register.
After the northern spotted owl was listed as a threatened species in 1990, it became a symbol for Endangered Species Act protections that harm local economies. Conservation groups won court-ordered logging cutbacks to protect owl habitat that put many Northwest timber towns into an economic tailspin from which they have yet to fully recover. Political efforts to ramp up logging in the ensuing years have largely failed.
Paul Henson, supervisor for Fish and Wildlife in Oregon, says a lot has changed since the original listing. Back in 1990, the biggest threat to the owl was cutting down the old growth forests where the owls live. Now it is the barred owl, an aggressive cousin from the East Coast that migrated across the Great Plains and invaded spotted owl territory. Those two areas will be the focus of the review, he said.
"The bad news is that the spotted owl population has continued to decline," despite logging cutbacks of about 90 percent on federal lands in Washington, Oregon and Northern California, Henson said...more
There were still a few folks and some rural communities left standing after the threatened listing. They will pick them off if its changed to endangered.
Issues of concern to people who live in the west: property rights, water rights, endangered species, livestock grazing, energy production, wilderness and western agriculture. Plus a few items on western history, western literature and the sport of rodeo... Frank DuBois served as the NM Secretary of Agriculture from 1988 to 2003. DuBois is a former legislative assistant to a U.S. Senator, a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Interior, and is the founder of the DuBois Rodeo Scholarship.
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