A seabird flies into logjam

Published: Thursday, February 02, 2012, 8:55 PM     Updated: Thursday, February 02, 2012, 9:06 PM

By The Oregonian Editorial Board

 

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AP PhotoThe marbled murrelet lives most of its life at sea, returning to coastal areas to lay eggs high up in trees with moss-covered branches.

 

The enduring species-protection dilemma in Northwest forests ratcheted up recently as the American Forest Resource Council, joined by Douglas County, sued the U.S. government over lands identified as critical to the survival of an elusive seabird called the marbled murrelet.

Logging on federal lands all but collapsed following protections assigned to the spotted owl. Yet the marbled murrelet was listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act nearly 20 years ago and requires special consultations when cutting trees within the area known as critical habitat. In forest-rich Douglas County alone, logging is down at least 80 percent over 20 years ago, and so the drive to remove impediments to harvesting trees is particularly intense as the job picture deteriorates.

But the case of the murrelet could prove contentious and lengthy.

The resource council and Douglas County challenge the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's finding that murrelets landing in trees in Oregon, California and Washington are their own variety needing help while murrelets farther north, in Canada and Alaska, are profuse in number and unprotected. They call the federal agency's assignment of 3.7 million acres of habitat in Oregon, California and Washington excessive -- at least 10 times the amount necessary for a bird they estimate accounts for just 2 percent of the larger murrelet population extending to Alaska. And they dispute that forest lands unoccupied by the murrelet but deemed important to the bird's survival could be counted as habitat, a position discouraged under the Bush administration but favored under President Barack Obama.

No one's betting on where this will go. Yet the productive management of Oregon's federal forests by the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management is at stake.

If the murrelet's critical habitat were substantially reduced, fewer time-consuming agency reviews would be required before logging could proceed. Idled timber firms would feel more inclined to propose harvests on federal lands, which make up more than half of Douglas County and in some places feature some very big trees.

But the marbled murrelet, a cool-climate bird, remains a mystery. It spends most of its life at sea and comes to land only to lay eggs and raise its young, high up in old trees with moss-covered branches, rarely more than 30 miles inland. For these and other reasons, they are difficult to survey. And it is hard to know precisely why murrelets are in decline, though the belief, as it was with the spotted owl, is that logging, development and habitat fragmentation are prime culprits, among other factors.

With the declining spotted owl, however, it became clear in recent years that a cousin -- the aggressive barred owl -- was at least another culprit, displacing the spotted owl from its historical nesting grounds.

Congressional representatives Greg Walden, Peter DeFazio and Kurt Schrader are expected to soon release legislation aimed at jumpstarting logging on federal land in Oregon's cash-strapped counties. We have encouraged this effort, as it should put segments of forests back into production while setting aside others in need of protection.

But the murrelet lawsuit now hangs like a cloud over our federal forests, still in need of a reliable map for their best uses. And those uses include not only the rigorous protection of imperiled species but regulated logging practices that renew the resource while bolstering the economies of rural Oregon.