The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Monday (Jan. 22) that it will jump into the long-standing legal dispute over 1,544 acres of St. Tammany Parish timberland that the federal government has called critical habitat for the dusky gopher frog, an endangered species found only in Mississippi.
The Supreme Court justices agreed to review a June 2016 ruling from a three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals that upheld a federal agency's designation of the Louisiana tract owned by the Poitevent family companies and the Weyerhaeuser Co. as the only potential breeding ground outside Mississippi for the gopher frogs.
The Poitevent family and Weyerhaeuser Co. filed a total of three lawsuits against Fish & Wildlife after the agency in 2012 placed the critical habitat label on the forest land along Louisiana 36 west of Pearl River. Weyerhaeuser owns 140 acres of the land and has a timber lease on all 1,544 acres.
The plaintiffs have argued that the government action amounts to a federal land grab that illegally takes the property out of commerce and could cost them tens of millions of dollars.
Attorney Collette Adkins of the Center for Biological Diversity said she thinks the Supreme Court will ultimately uphold the designation. The Center for Biological Diversity, which is dedicated to conserving amphibians and reptiles, and the Gulf Restoration Network were allowed to intervene in the case.
"We're disappointed that the Supreme Court has taken up the case but confident that the justices will ultimately uphold the frog's habitat protections," Adkins said. "The Fish and Wildlife Service followed the unanimous advice of frog experts in deciding to protect essential habitat of these critically endangered frogs."
Cynthia Sarthou, executive director of the Gulf Restoration Network, said the suits against the fish and wildlife agency amount to an attempt to gut essential habitat protections for the frog. "The Supreme Court's ruling is bad news for these endangered frogs," she said. "For too long the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has had to focus its limited resources on defending this decision rather than recovering the frogs and restoring their habitat."
In its 2016 ruling, the Fifth Circuit held that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service concluded that the St. Tammany Parish land is essential for recovery of the frogs, which are now confined to just three sites in southern Mississippi -- with only one site regularly showing frog reproduction.
Although the frogs haven't lived on the St. Tammany Parish lands in over five decades, the panel agreed with the fish and wildlife service that those lands are essential because they contain five ephemeral ponds, each within hopping distance of the next. Dusky gopher frogs lay their eggs only in such temporary ponds -- which are free of fish that would devour their eggs -- and the St. Tammany Parish land was the frogs' last known Louisiana breeding ground.
The Pacific Legal Foundation represents the timber company and has called the designation an "unprecedented abuse of the Endangered Species Act."
The medium-sized frog with warts covering its back and dusky spots on its belly spends most of its life underground and travels to above-ground ponds only to breed. It hasn't been seen in Louisiana since 1965, and the only frogs known to exist today are in Harrison County, Miss., north of Gulfport.
In addition to the land in St. Tammany, Fish & Wildlife put the critical habitat label on about 5,000 acres of public and private property in Mississippi as well. The frog species, placed on the endangered species list in 2001, has only about 100 adults still living in the wild in Harrison County, Miss., north of Gulfport.
The frog once lived throughout the area between the Mississippi River in Louisiana and the Mobile River in Alabama.