FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

ONDA asks judge to protect steelhead habitat

Beaver Dam Creek, 2007.

Fish advocates may see further protections for steelhead in the John Day River basin if conservation groups’ plea for action is answered. On Friday, a coalition led by the Oregon Natural Desert Association (ONDA) asked a federal judge to temporarily halt cattle grazing within important native trout streams in eastern Oregon’s Malheur National Forest. This latest round of the decade-long litigation targets continuing damage from Forest Service authorized grazing. The steelhead, an iconic Pacific Northwest native trout, is listed under the Endangered Species Act as a “threatened” species in danger of extinction.

According to evidence gathered by ONDA, as well as the agency’s own surveys, grazing permitted by the Forest Service along more than 230 miles of streams has resulted in significant failures to meet ecological standards to conserve steelhead. The standards, established by the Forest Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), are meant to protect the key elements of healthy fish habitat. They include protection of stable stream banks and overhanging vegetation that keep streams clear and cold for steelhead and other native trout. According to field surveys conducted by a team of experts for ONDA, the Forest Service’s grazing program has resulted in damaged stream banks many times worse than the amount allowed under the federal standards.

“We want to see steelhead recover in the John Day so they can once again be a central social, cultural and economic asset to people in the basin and to all Oregonians,” said Brent Fenty, ONDA’s executive director.  “Sadly, Forest Service negligence and mismanagement is driving the steelhead toward extinction and exacerbating an already suffering local economy.”

After several years of monitoring chronic overgrazing on the Malheur National Forest, ONDA filed the first of several cases against the Forest Service in 2003. In 2006, a federal judge in Portland ruled that NMFS’s biological opinion for the Forest’s proposed grazing violated the Endangered Species Act. According to the court, the opinion failed to evaluate whether short-term habitat damage caused by each season’s grazing will reduce the steelhead’s ability to survive and recover. The court cited the “overwhelming evidence of habitat degradation” from livestock grazing on critical habitat, including the agencies’ own documentation of that damage.

In 2007, the agencies issued a new grazing plan to guide five years’ worth of grazing throughout the forest. Because the plan actually increased grazing levels and weakened the Forest Service’s ability to enforce its own ecological health standards, ONDA challenged it in December 2007. In May 2008, another federal judge agreed that ONDA was likely to win its case and preliminarily banned grazing on parts of the forest. That order protected more than 120,000 acres of public land and more than 90 miles of important steelhead streams from another year of cattle damage. Because the agency has delayed the litigation in the year since then, ONDA has now asked the court to protect other areas still being most seriously damaged by cattle.

“Recognizing that endangered fish like steelhead trout can’t survive if the places where they live are destroyed, the Endangered Species Act includes strong provisions to protect habitat,” said Noah Greenwald, conservation biologist with the Center for Biological Diversity. “The court’s decision upholding the protections of the Act was good both for steelhead and for the streams they live in.”

Even following a number of rebukes from the court over the last five years, the federal agencies continue to allow the grazing damage to continue. Both ONDA and the federal agencies studied the impacts of the Forest’s 2008 grazing on the six allotments at issue in the latest motion before the court. Those data show the Forest Service’s grazing continues to result in violations of its own bank alteration standard, in some cases by destroying more than five times the amount of stream banks allowed under the five-year grazing plan. By contrast, in the places where the court barred grazing last year, just a single year of rest already has allowed for significant initial recovery of riparian plant communities, stream channels, and fish habitat to begin. ONDA and its experts caution, however, that additional protection from grazing in subsequent years will be needed to achieve long term recovery.

The Malheur National Forest is located in eastern Oregon’s Blue Mountains. It includes portions of the Upper John Day, Middle Fork John Day, North Fork John Day, and Malheur Rivers. The 281-mile long John Day River is one of the longest undammed rivers in the continental United States. The river and its hundreds of miles of tributary streams on the Malheur National Forest provide spawning, rearing and migratory habitat for the largest naturally spawning, native stock of wild steelhead remaining in the Columbia River basin.

ONDA is joined in the litigation by the Center for Biological Diversity and Western Watersheds Project.

###