Earlier this month, while bald eagle chicks
were testing their wings in the Arizona desert, the fight to
protect them took an ugly turn. Environmentalists accused
government bureaucrats of suppressing science to avoid protecting
the Arizona bald eagle as a separate population under the
Endangered Species Act, but officials say they were following the
law. The controversy is putting a damper on the Fish and Wildlife
Service’s excitement over its upcoming decision to remove the
bald eagle from the threatened species list. The agency says the
delisting celebrates the species’ recovery — from 400
breeding pairs nationwide in 1963 to nearly 10,000 pairs today.
But with only 43 pairs, Arizona’s eagles
aren’t a success story, says Robin Silver, chairman of the
Center for Biological Diversity. “No other population of bald
eagle on Earth nests in the arid desert,” he says, and that
unique ecological setting, combined with its reproductive
isolation, make the Arizona population significant to the species.
In October 2004, the center petitioned the Fish and Wildlife
Service to list the Arizona eagles as a separate, endangered
population.
Last August, the Service issued a 90-day
finding that the petition didn’t warrant the more detailed
12-month review that could lead to a listing. The Center for
Biodiversity filed suit in January to overturn that decision. Now,
in documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, the
center says it has proof that high-ranking bureaucrats in the
Department of Interior told Fish and Wildlife biologists to
manipulate science. The biologists, the center says, were forced to
support a predetermined decision not to list the Arizona eagles as
a separate population. The center has sent the documents to the
Justice Department and requested an investigation.
The
dispute hinges on the level of analysis required for a 90-day
decision, as opposed to a 12-month finding, says Jeff Humphrey, a
spokesman for the Arizona office of the Fish and Wildlife Service.
Under what’s known as the “four corners rule,”
for a 90-day finding officials only have to consider information
provided in the “four corners” of a petition. If the
90-day review finds that the petition itself contains enough
evidence to warrant a 12-month analysis, then the agency may look
at supporting data from its own files.
The four corners
rule has been agency policy since before the current
administration, says Sean Skaggs, an endangered species lawyer who
worked for the Interior Department for 10 years and now practices
at Ebbin Moser + Skaggs in San Diego. So when a service
biologist’s notes from a conference call about the petition
say “Can use info from files that refutes petition but not
anything that supports,” it’s not the smoking gun
proving bureaucratic interference that the center claims it is.
Rather than a political conspiracy, to Skaggs the documents show
serious scientists grappling with complex biological and legal
issues.
Even so, the decision not to protect the eagles
may not stand up in court, because a February 2006 analysis by
biologists at the agency’s Arizona office indicates that the
petition did contain “significant information” that
would warrant a 12-month review. Officials will have to show a good
written record of their reasons for departing from that analysis.
If they can’t, “the court’s likely to find that
they were arbitrary and capricious” when they decided to
reject the petition, Skaggs says.
If the eagles are
delisted, they will be managed under the Bald and Golden Eagle
Protection Act. Although that law safeguards individual nests, it
won’t preserve the broad swaths of habitat required under the
Endangered Species Act, which protects three-quarters of the bald
eagle breeding territories in Arizona. The best of these lie along
the Salt and Verde Rivers, which are under stress from the
region’s burgeoning growth. Silver calls the Arizona bald
eagle “the bellwether species that protects our major
riparian areas.”
The FWS will issue its decision on
the nationwide delisting by June 29.
Related
sites:
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Bald Eagle Document
Library (to access, click here:
http://www.fws.gov/southwest/es/arizona/BaldEagle.htm)
Center
for Biological Diversity Desert Nesting Bald Eagle
Site
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
