GRANTS PASS, Ore. — A conservation group is challenging a national forest timber sale because it may be too close to the den where Oregon’s famous wandering wolf, OR-7, is raising pups.
Oregon Wild filed the lawsuit Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Medford against the U.S. Forest Service over the Bybee timber sale on the Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forest in the Cascade Range of southwestern Oregon.
It asks a judge to order a closer examination of the harm logging may do not only to potential wilderness and spotted owls, but to wolf habitat as well.
“We don’t know the location” of the wolf den, said Doug Heiken of Oregon Wild. “We are concerned this timber sale is in the area that the new wolf den is described as being in. We need the Forest Service to step back and double-check to make sure this timber sale won’t put the first wolf family in Western Oregon in 70 years at risk.”