Court Requires Action on 73 Foreign Bird Species

WASHINGTON, DC, May 19, 2004 (ENS) - A legal settlement approved Monday by a federal judge forces the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to act on Endangered Species Act (ESA) listing petitions for 73 rare bird species found outside the United States.

The agreement between the federal agency and the Center for Biological Diversity comes in response to a lawsuit filed in Federal District Court in Washington D.C. in December of 2003 by the environmental group, which is based in Tucson, Arizona.

The suit asserted that the Fish and Wildlife Service violated the law by failing to take action on petitions submitted in 1980 and 1991 to list the imperiled bird species under the Endangered Species Act.

The statue gives the federal agency one year from the date of submission of a petition to either propose to add a species to the list of protected species or determine the species does not warrant listing under the Endangered Species Act.

The settlement calls for the Fish and Wildlife Service to publish a plan for processing the petitions and bringing the agency into compliance with the Act in the Federal Register by the end of May 2004.

"We are pleased that with this settlement, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service will finally be moving forward to add these rare gems of nature to the list of endangered species," said Peter Galvin, Pacific director of the Center for Biological Diversity.

Listing of foreign species under the Endangered Species Act restricts buying and selling of endangered species and increases conservation funding and attention.

Projects proposed by U.S. government agencies, the World Bank and other multilateral lending agencies that would impact an endangered species receive a higher level of scrutiny.

Among the bird species covered by the settlement is the Okinawa woodpecker, one of the world's rarest bird species.

It lives only in undisturbed, subtropical, evergreen forests of Yanbaru, the northern mountainous region of the island of Okinawa, Japan.

Among other threats, its habitat is at risk from a U.S. military proposal to construct new roads and helicopter landing pads and associated military infrastructure in prime woodpecker habitat in the Yanbaru forest.

In addition to the woodpecker, 72 other types of imperiled birds ranging from New Zealand to South America, from Taiwan to the Galapagos are covered under the settlement, including the Lanyu Scops Owl of Taiwan, the Colombian Grebe, the giant ibis of Laos and Cambodia and the blue throated macaw of Bolivia.