Plum Creek Timber Co. proposes to piggy-back grizzly bears onto a
conservation plan for native fish on its corporate lands in northwest
Montana.

The gap between threatened bull trout and threatened grizzly bears may
not be as wide as it seems, said Tim Bodurtha, the U.S. Fish and
Wildlife Service's habitat conservation plan coordinator in Montana.

Federal agencies estimate that efforts to restore fish passage through a
maze of some 122,000 miles of roads on federal lands in Oregon and
Washington "may ultimately cost over $375 million and take decades,"
according to a General Accounting Office report issued Monday.

Instead of appealing a federal court order that tossed out the Oregon
coastal coho Endangered Species Act listing, the National Marine
Fisheries Service has opted to use that decision as a springboard toward
the re-evaluation of as many as 23 other West Coast listings and its own
artificial production strategy.

A shower of petitions asking the National Marine Fisheries Service to
drop numerous Pacific fish species from the federal endangered species
list has been followed by flurry of letters to the agency calling the
requests "spurious," "facially deficient" and "frivolous."