Red Lodge Clearinghouse

The status review of the marbeled murrelet in California, Oregon and Washington comes in response to a petition from timber groups that asked the agency to remove the bird from the endangered species list.

After completing the yearlong status review, the service will decide whether to keep the bird on the list or remove its protection. The agency is also reviewing the murrelet's status across its range in the Pacific Northwest, Canada and Alaska.

The status review shifts the battle over whether the murrelet should remain on the endangered species list into the agency review process, rather than the court system, where it has played out for several years. Some of the same timber groups that petitioned for the bird's delisting -- the American Forest Resource Council, for one -- had previously sued the agency in an attempt to have the courts strike its protections.

"Before, they sued us for not delisting," said Joan Jewett of the Fish and Wildlife Service. "This is probably the more appropriate way to go, a petition to delist."

The seabirds depend on old-growth forests to survive, and their protection has placed broad swaths of West Coast timber off-limits to logging.

Separate rulings over the summer from the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia denied the lawsuit-driven attempts to delist the bird (Land Letter, July 3). The courts ruled that the agency's previous status review did not provide a basis for delisting.

The agency's last five-year review, issued in 2004, had its own controversies. In the review, the regional office claimed that the West Coast birds were a distinct population segment -- one with significant reproductive, geographic, biological and behavioral differences -- from the more robust murrelet population in Canada. Its position was overturned by Interior Department officials, who said all of the murrelets should be considered as members of the same population.

The service included that review as one of many cases in which Julie MacDonald, a high-ranking Interior Department official, exerted political pressure on Fish and Wildlife Service biologists to alter their scientific findings. The review was not included in the final list of decisions tainted by MacDonald because the questions on that listing revolved more around policy decisions than around science (E&ENews PM, July 20).

Another review last year from the U.S. Geological Survey found that the birds are declining throughout their range, including in the Canadian habitat that has been the population's stronghold. The birds have declined by about 70 percent in Alaska and British Columbia over the last 25 years, according to USGS.

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