Weyerhaeuser ordered not to log owl habitat
Injunction forbids work at four sites until Audubon suit is concluded
A
Seattle federal judge Wednesday ordered the Weyerhaeuser Co. not to log
four sections of spotted owl habitat in southwest Washington.”This
proves owls have a federal right to live,” said Peter Goldman, a lawyer
for the Seattle Audubon Society who filed the motion.
U.S.
District Judge Marsha Pechman issued the injunction granting Audubon’s
request to stop logging near the sites until the conclusion of its
lawsuit against the state and Weyerhaeuser. The trial is set to begin
in April.The judge denied the advocacy group’s second request to stop
the state from granting logging permits for more than 200 other sites
on private land that have been identified as possible spotted owl
habit.Pechman ruled against the scientific testimony presented by the
state and Weyerhaeuser that habitat requirements established in the
mid-1990s were unnecessarily large and Weyerhaeuser’s more recent and
smaller estimates were sufficient to protect the species.
Weyerhaeuser
spokesman Frank Mendizabal said his company already has stopped
harvests at three of the sites as part of a research agreement with the
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. He also said that barred owls have been
found at all of the sites and are known to compete with spotted owls
for habitat. He said they are a likely cause of the threatened birds’
continual decline, not the logging of relatively young, 50- to
80-year-old, forests.Spotted owls were declared a threatened species in
1990 because of logging in old-growth forest, the primary habitat for
the owls. Despite increased protection of the remaining old-growth
forests and a protection plan, the owl’s population has continued to
decline, and they now are being found in younger forests.The judge said
she denied Audubon’s request to stop the state from issuing logging
permits in spotted owl habitat because the group did not identify the
amount of suitable habitat at those sites.Alex Morgan, conservation
director for Seattle Audubon, said his group would try to figure out
how to document what is at those sites to prove to the state and court
which ones have spotted owls and therefore cannot be logged.”What this
means is a little non-profit is left to enforce the Endangered Species
Act,” he said.