Southwest Center Director Kieran Suckling said the center will seek to oust cattle from streams on those allotments. Forest Guardians' lawsuit Forest Guardians filed a lawsuit in December seeking Forest Service action on 102 forest grazing allotments to protect the loach minnow, spikedace and Southwestern willow flycatcher, a migratory songbird. Those 102 allotments are in the Apache-Sitgreaves, Prescott and Gila forests, and Cibola, Carson and Santa Fe forests in New Mexico. No timetable has been set. Requires the Forest Service to promptly begin trapping and moving cowbirds from river areas of 44 allotments.
Cowbirds eat insects associated with cattle.
They push the endangered flycatchers' eggs from nests and lay their own. Pat Jackson, appeals and litigation officer in the Albuquerque Forest Service office, said the agency already was moving cattle off sensitive stream areas and trying to keep them off. The Forest Service's initial argument against the injunction was that it already was protecting stream segments from cattle. But Horning and Southwest Center's David Hogan recently photographed cattle on several stream segments where the agency said it had banned them. On the day the injunction hearing was to begin last week, the two environmental groups and the Forest Service reached an agreement and sought Roll's signature on it.