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Date: Wed, 07 May 1997 21:15:10 -0700
>From: Andrew Gach <UncleWolf@worldnet.att.net>
To: ar-news@envirolink.org
Subject: Government trashes bird protection: another sell-out
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Bird-protection law ducked by U.S. agencies
The Associated Press
WASHINGTON (May 7, 1997 3:55 p.m. EDT) -- A new administration policy on
protecting birds is ruffling the feathers of environmentalists.
Bird lovers are grousing about a government directive exempting federal
agencies from an 80-year-old law -- and four international treaties --
that protect more than 800 species of migratory birds. Many are
considered in serious decline.
Passed by Congress in 1918, the Migratory Bird Treaty Act is one of the
country's oldest wildlife protection laws and forbids the indiscriminate
killing of migratory birds. In some cases the law allows exceptions, but
a permit has to be obtained from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service,
which closely monitors the activity.
But, according to the new administration view, federal agencies such as
the Forest Service, Federal Aviation Administration, the Marine
Fisheries Service or Defense Department, need no longer worry about the
law.
At the behest of the Justice Department, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife
Service told its field offices recently that they should consider
federal agencies exempt from the law that Congress passed to implement a
1917 bird protection treaty with Canada.
"This represents a sweeping reversal ... overturning a policy that has
been the cornerstone of the government's management of migratory birds
for 80 years," complained John Ficker, president of the National Audubon
Society.
Ficker, in a letter this week to Vice President Al Gore, called the
administration's position "a disservice to all those concerned" about
protecting migratory birds and urged the new policy be overturned.
"It makes a mockery of the government's duty to protect migratory
birds," added William H. Meadows, president of the Wilderness Society.
"It reads like something from 'Saturday Night Live."'
Officials at the Fish and Wildlife Service acknowledged that for years
it had been taken for granted that federal agencies were subject to the
law. It has given permits, for example, to the FAA and the Defense
Department, to kill birds near airports and at military training sites,
to avoid violating the law.
Conservationists said these procedures have allowed for closer
monitoring of incidental killing of birds.
Paul Schmidt, chief of the Fish and Wildlife's migratory bird office,
issued the new guidance with clear reluctance. "I have stalled this as
long as I could," he wrote in the March 19 memo to field offices,
lamenting about "the potential for this government position to harm
migratory bird populations."
In an interview, Schmidt said the memo was written "at a point of
frustration" and that he now believes that migratory birds will continue
to be protected by federal agencies. "I feel it's going to be positive
in the end. ... They (the agencies) are going to do the right thing,"
said Schmidt.
But conservationists' anger over the policy change is not aimed as much
at Schmidt's office as it is at the Justice Department and the Forest
Service, which started the whole thing in response to a lawsuit filed
more than a year ago.
In what appeared to be a major victory for environmentalists, a federal
judge in Georgia last spring ordered the Forest Service to halt a timber
sale in the Chattahoochee National Forest, agreeing with a suit brought
by seven environmental groups that logging in the spring would kill
9,000 nesting songbirds.
"The Forest Service had ... a nervous breakdown," says Kathleen Rogers,
a migratory bird specialist at the Audubon Society. Other government and
private sources said the Forest Service was concerned the Georgia ruling
would lead to severe constraints on government's entire logging program.
Reversing decades of government policy, the Justice Department, at the
request of the Forest Service, appealed the court ruling, arguing
formally for the first time that the bird law never was intended to
apply to government agencies. That left Fish and Wildlife Service
officials in a quandary for months -- until the March guidance memo.
"It should be an embarrassment to them," says Rogers. "It sends a
terrible message."
Last week, a federal appeals court in Atlanta agreed that the law does
not apply to federal agencies, siding with the Justice Department
argument. Environmentalists say they're awaiting the outcome of two
other cases and eventually may take the issue to the Supreme Court.
