The Biden administration has ruled the northern spotted owl will have its critical habitat expanded, after the Trump administration tried to cut back millions of acres of habitat designations.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) released a final rule on Nov. 9 to revise the designation of critical habitat for the northern spotted owl. The rule withdraws the Trump administration’s Jan. 15 rule that would have excluded 3.4 million acres of designated critical habitat for the species. The rule was set to go into effect Dec. 15 and would have excluded over one-third of owl habitat designated in 2012.
The agency’s new rule excludes 204,294 acres, including 184,133 acres of Bureau of Land Management allotments for timber harvest in 15 Oregon counties and about 20,000 acres of Native American lands. The rule will go into effect on Dec. 10.
“This action will help conserve and recover spotted owls by identifying habitat needed for recovery of northern spotted owls in the long-term,” USFWS said in a press release.
“Additionally, active management of forests and invasive barred owl populations to make forest ecosystems healthier and more resilient to disease, insect outbreaks and the effects of climate change, such as increased frequency of droughts and catastrophic wildfires, will be vital.”
The Service said excluding 3.4 million acres would have left too little habitat to conserve the species, resulting in the northern spotted owl’s extinction. In addition, the agency explained that critical habitat designations do not provide additional protections for a species on nonfederal lands unless proposed activities involve federal funding or permitting. The designations also do not affect land ownership or establish a refuge, reserve, preserve or other conservation area, nor do they allow the government or public to access private lands, USFWS said.
In response to the ruling, conservationists celebrated, while House of Representatives Republicans criticized the measure.
“We’re glad the Biden administration repealed the ridiculous and politically driven decision to strip 3 million acres from the spotted owl’s critical habitat. But 204,000 acres should not have been excluded from that protection,” said Noah Greenwald, endangered species director at the Center for Biological Diversity.
“In another tone-deaf move, the Biden administration is backing an anti-science proposal that will hinder the recovery of the species, stifle job creation and lead to more catastrophic wildfires,” said House Committee on Natural Resources Ranking Member Bruce Westerman (R-AR-04).
“This administration’s hypocrisy extends so far as to suggest active forest management as a part of their recovery plan while they simultaneously make it increasingly difficult for land managers to implement forest thinning and other critical fire mitigation activities.”
In April, the Biden administration announced it would delay implementation of the Trump administration rule. USFWS then announced its intent to revise the critical habitat designation back in July. At the time, the agency said, “The large additional exclusions made in the January exclusions rule were premised on inaccurate assumptions about the status of the owl and its habitat needs particularly in relation to barred owls.”
The agency added that the rule “undermined the biological redundancy of the critical habitat network by excluding large areas of critical habitat across the designation and did not address the ability of the remaining units and subunits to function in that network.”
A public commenting period was held until Sept. 20, and a little less than 50 comments were submitted, mostly by conservation groups or environmentalists. The USFWS originally proposed to revise the critical habitat in August 2020 and received over 570 comments, which were also included in the review of the new rule. — Anna Miller, WLJ managing editor
