The land sits within the watershed of the San Francisco River. The Forest Service will consider any effects to the loach minnow and spikedace, endangered species for which critical habitat has been listed under the Endangered Species Act, a Forest Service official said in court documents. It also will examine the effects on proposed critical habitat for the Mexican spotted owl, Wally J. Murphy, a Forest Service program manager, said in a declaration filed in U.S. District Court in Tucson. Murphy said his agency will reinitiate consultation on ongoing grazing beginning in December. The consultation cannot begin sooner because many biologists are on assignments now stemming from forest fires this summer across much of the West, Murphy said.
Environmentalists contend that livestock grazing is harmful to the spikedace and loach minnow.
They maintain that cattle grazing on western forest lands has been a primary contributor to damage caused to the riparian habitats of dozens of species of wildlife, fish and plant life, including numerous endangered and threatened species. John Horning, a spokesman for Forest Guardians, an environmental group based in Santa Fe, N.M., said the action came in papers filed last week as part of an ongoing lawsuit brought by his organization and the Center for Biological Diversity in Tucson. Victoria Rosenthal, a Justice Department attorney in Washington handling the case, declined to comment. The environmentalists' lawsuit challenged the scope of a 1999 biological opinion issued by Fish and Wildlife under a consultation agreement between that agency and the Forest Service. That opinion found that livestock grazing was harming endangered fish and wildlife on only 22 allotments on 400,000 acres, out of a total of 962 grazing allotments encompassing about 19 million acres in the two states.