Owl habitat cuts by Trump appointees used ‘faulty’ science, US wildlife officials say

PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — Political appointees in the Trump administration relied on faulty science to justify stripping habitat protections for the imperiled northern spotted owl, U.S. wildlife officials said Tuesday as they struck down a rule that would have opened millions of acres of forest in Oregon, Washington and California to potential logging.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service reversed a decision made five days before Trump left office to drastically shrink so-called critical habitat for the spotted owl. The small, reclusive bird has been in decline for decades as old-growth forests disappear.

The Associated Press obtained details on Tuesday’s action prior to it being made public.

Government biologists objected to the changes under Trump and warned they would put the spotted owl on a path to extinction, documents show.

But Trump’s Interior Secretary David Bernhardt and former Fish and Wildlife Service Director Aurelia Skipwith dismissed those concerns — instead adopting a plan to lift restrictions on more land than even the timber industry had sought.

Officials said in documents provided to AP that Bernhardt and Skipwith underestimated the threat of extinction and relied on a “faulty interpretation of the science” to reach their decision.

Bernhardt defended his handling of the matter, telling AP in an email that Congress gave the interior secretary authority to exclude areas from protection.

Bernhardt said the agency’s “reasonable certainty” the owl would go extinct did not match the law’s requirement that habitat be protected lest a species “will” go extinct.

If wildlife officials want to change that standard, Bernhardt added, “they should seek a change from Congress.”

“Any future Secretary can weigh the benefit factors differently, but they can not change the law or the legal standard,” Bernhardt wrote.

Officials twice delayed the changes after President Joe Biden took office and they never went into effect. That puts them among numerous Trump-era policies reversed or struck down by the Interior Department in recent months on issues ranging from oil and gas drilling on some public lands to protections for birds from wind farms.

Democratic lawmakers from Oregon, Washington and California in February called for an investigation into the removal of spotted owl protections, citing “potential scientific meddling” by Trump appointees.

Wildlife advocates, government agencies and the timber industry have sparred for decades over the northern spotted owl, which is now in precipitous decline and getting closer to disappearing from Washington and parts of Oregon, according to a rule published Tuesday that replaces the one under Trump.

Federal habitat protections imposed in 2012 were meant to avert the bird’s extinction. They’ve also been blamed for a logging slowdown that’s devastated some rural communities.

Of 9.6 million protected acres, federal officials proposed in August 2020 to remove protections for about 2%.

The timber industry said the plan didn’t go far enough and called for removal of more than 28%. In January, Skipwith abruptly changed her agency’s recommendation and went even further, telling Bernhardt more than one-third of the protected land, or almost 3.5 million acres, should be excluded from protection.

Read more at: https://apnews.com/article/science-business-california-forests-oregon-48c1dc3a59bda47c178437d6b1e538bd