Yellow-billed loons, migratory birds that nest on large lakes dotting Alaska's North Slope, do not need Endangered Species Act protections, federal regulators said on Wednesday.
The loons had been the subject of a 2004 listing petition and a subsequent lawsuit arguing that rapid climate change and encroaching oil development were damaging the birds' Arctic nesting habitat. The coastal areas of the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska, on the western North Slope, make up a key part of the birds' nesting habitat; several government agencies in 2006 struck a conservation agreement to try to prevent impacts to the loons from oil development in the reserve.
Wednesday's decision reversed an earlier U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service finding, made in 2009, that concluded listing was warranted for the yellow-billed loons. At that time, the service found that yellow-billed loons should be protected under the Endangered Species Act, but that listing was "precluded" for the immediate future because other species were in greater need of protection and listing action.
Study since 2009 has convinced officials that numbers of yellow-billed loons on Alaska's Arctic coastal plain are stable or increasing, and that subsistence hunting of the species is very limited and not affecting the population, the service said.
"After careful consideration, we don't believe yellow-billed loons meet the definition of an endangered or threatened species but we will still continue to work with our partners toward their conservation," Geoffrey Haskett, director of the service's Alaska Region, said in a statement.
Yellow-billed loons are the largest of the five loon species, and are known for their large yellow- or ivory-colored bill, according to the service.
Their breeding range extends from the area west of Hudson Bay in Canada to Russia's Taymyr Peninsula, according to the service.
Under a 2011 settlement with the Center for Biological Diversity, one of the organizations that filed the original listing petition, FWS was required to make a decision this year on whether to proceed with the listing for the yellow-billed loon.
That settlement established deadlines for listing decisions and actions for hundreds of candidate species, including those for which, like the yellow-billed loon, listing was considered "warranted but precluded."