Tiny Owl Frustrates Arizona Developers
12/29/97
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Headline: Tiny Owl Frustrates Arizona Developers
Source: The Environment News Service
Date: 12/29/97
Author: Tony Davis
Copyright 1997: ENS, Inc.
TUCSON, Arizona, December 29, 1997 (ENS) - An endangered owl barely a
half-foot long has sparked development wars that could change the face of
growth in this metropolitan area of 800,000 people.
Federally listed as endangered last March, the cactus ferruginous pygmy owl
is a symbol to environmentalists of the disappearing Sonoran desert that
lies in the path of this city's development. But it's also a symbol to
developers of a threat to future growth from an increasingly vocal band of
activists.
State researchers spotted only 12 of the tiny birds in Arizona this year
and 16 the year before. Most have been found in lush, picture-postcard
desert scrubland containing saguaro cacti, ironwoods, palo verde and
mesquite trees. Recently, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS)
classified the vast majority of the Sonoran desert surrounding fast-growing
Tucson as suitable pygmy owl habitat.
A century ago, according to the USFWS, the owl was common throughout
southern Arizona and lived as far north as the state capitol of Phoenix in
central Arizona. The service and environmentalists blame the bird's decline
on devastation of its riverfront cottonwood-willow habitat by grazing,
farming and groundwater pumping and on destruction of its desert scrub
habitat by development.
But since listing the bird, the service has taken a cautious, contradictory
approach to protecting the bird that has alternately infuriated developers
and environmentalists alike.
The USFWS has delayed approval of a proposed new high school adjacent to a
known owl site until it could determine the effects of building the school,
in a biological opinion scheduled for release this week. It has also urged
landowners to survey their property for the bird before clearing their
vegetation for development, and warned that clearing that jeopardized the
life of an owl could cause the landowner to be prosecuted or lead to
environmentalist lawsuits against landowners and local officials who
approved the developments.
Angry developers contend that the Arizona owl doesn't deserve protection
because Mexico, and to a much lesser extent Texas, already has significant
numbers of these birds, which belong to a subspecies of the ferruginous
pygmy owl.
"I think the listing of the pygmy owl is a cheap shot for purely the intent
of some groups of power and control over urban form and development," said
Don Laidlaw, a veteran Tucson-area private development consultant.
"However, the Fish and Wildlife Service has to take it seriously, or they
will get sued."
Environmentalists, however, find fault with the service and local officials
because they won't halt residential development until it can draw up a
long-term recovery plan. The local county government in November briefly
froze development in a fast-growing, 16-square-mile (662 square kilometer)
area that is rich in cacti and ironwoods, but backed off two weeks later
after deciding it lacked authority to do that.
The USFWS has taken a soft approach to law enforcement to protect the owl.
It says it will prosecute land-clearing developers only when a bird lives
within 1,500 feet (460 meters) of an owner's property line or project
boundary.
"We need to find evidence that an owl has been there," said Steve
Middletown, a Fish and Wildlife Service law enforcement agent. "I just
can't go out here and say, go around a lake, mark an area of 200 acres (80
hectares), draw a circle and say, 'that's owl habitat.'"
Environmentalists say that stance will protect just a dozen or so isolated
pockets of desert, leaving nothing for owl offspring to move to when they
leave the nest. Local activists talk of becoming owl watchdogs, driving
around the desert, looking for egregious examples of land-clearing, and
suing or trying to prosecute landowners if necessary.
"We'll have to find an example of someone who flagrantly flubs the law and
make a case of that developer," said Peter Galvin, a conservation biologist
for the Tucson-based Southwest Center for Biological Diversity, whose
lawsuits forced the Fish and Wildlife Service to list the bird. "Hopefully,
the agencies will get off their duffs and do their jobs. But in the absence
of that, we'll set an example."