by Matt Volz, Associated Press
HELENA — The U.S. Forest Service has asked a judge to lift his block of a logging project near an endangered grizzly population in northwestern Montana, saying a new analysis shows bears don’t frequent that area of the Kootenai National Forest.
U.S. District Judge Donald Molloy blocked the Little Beaver logging project and two others in the Kootenai in June 2010, after the Alliance for the Wild Rockies sued the Forest Service over the potential harm to the estimated 45 grizzlies in the forest’s Cabinet-Yaak area.
Two of the blocked logging projects are inside a designated recovery zone for the fledgling grizzly population, and the Forest Service’s request to lift Molloy’s injunction does not include them.
The third, the Little Beaver project, is two miles outside of the recovery zone, and the Forest Service said its new environmental and biological analyses show no evidence of bears or any pattern of recent bear use there.
That means that project should have no effect on the grizzly population, the federal agency said in a Thursday court filing.
“There was one grizzly bear sighting in the Beaver Creek drainage in 1995, but no sightings or other evidence of grizzly bears (e.g. tracks or scat) in the areas since that time, despite extensive reconnaissance and survey efforts,” the Forest Service’s filing reads.
Alliance executive director Michael Garrity said Friday the area is historic grizzly bear habitat, and if there are no bears there, it’s because the Forest Service’s logging program drove them out.
The Forest Service shouldn’t be allowed to go ahead with the project until the agency ensures a viable population of bears in the area that can still support them, he said.
“The Little Beaver could still, and should still, be a place for a group of bears,” Garrity said “It was historically and it should in the future.”
The logging project west of Thompson Falls would use trucks and helicopters to log over 1,185 acres of forest. The project calls for building more than 10 miles of new, reconstructed and temporary roads.
The goal is to reduce hazardous fuels that could cause high-intensity wildfires by cutting down and hauling out dead and downed trees and reducing the canopy density, according to the Forest Service.
In its original assessment in 2009, the federal agency said hauling may temporarily displace bears from approximately 2,265 acres and logging may temporary displace bears from 3,269 acres. The agency’s conclusion then was that the project “may affect but is not likely to adversely affect the grizzly bear.”
The revised assessment says the project “will have ‘no effect’ on the grizzly bear because the grizzly bear is not present in the Little Beaver Project Area.”
