4 CapitalPress.com Friday, March 18, 2022 9th Circuit rejects third lawsuit against barred owl removal experiment By MATEUSZ PERKOWSKI Capital Press A federal appeals court has again rejected arguments that an experiment aimed at removing barred owls to help threatened spotted owls runs afoul of environmental laws. Lawsuits filed by the Friends of Animals nonprofit have repeatedly tried to stop the barred owl removal exper- iment since the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service approved the project nearly a decade ago. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has now affirmed the dismissal of the group’s third complaint, which claimed that “safe harbor” agreements with landowners participating in the experiment violated the Endangered Spe- cies Act. “We hold that this experi- ment will produce a ‘net con- servation benefit’ under the plain language of the ESA’s implementing regulations because it allows the agency to obtain critical information to craft a policy to protect threat- Mateusz Perkowski/Capital Press Wine climatologist Greg Jones, left, and geologist Kevin Pogue spoke at the Ore- gon Wine Symposium March 9 about climate change implications. Climate change means adapting, expanding for Oregon vineyards LEGAL PURSUANT TO ORS CHAPTER 87  Notice is hereby given that the following vehicle will be  sold, for  cash to the highest bidder, on 03/21/2022.  The sale will be held at 10:00am by  COPART OF WASHINGTON INC  2885 NATIONAL WAY WOODBURN, OR  2018 JEEP CHEROKEE UT VIN = 1C4RJFBG2JC299105 Amount due on lien $1395.00  Reputed owner(s) PENNY & ERIC GUNDERSON UNITED TRADES FCU LEGAL PURSUANT TO ORS CHAPTER 87  Notice is hereby given that the following vehicle will be  sold, for cash to the highest bidder, on 03/21/2022.  The sale will be held at 10:00am by  COPART OF WASHINGTON INC  2885 NATIONAL WAY WOODBURN, OR  2003 BANTM 23’ CT VIN = 4WY200L2031024065 Amount due on lien $1795.00  Reputed owner(s) MICHAEL EPHREM LEGAL PURSUANT TO ORS CHAPTER 87  Notice is hereby given that the following vehicle will be  sold, for cash to the highest bidder, on 03/21/2022.  The sale will be held at 10:00am by  COPART OF WASHINGTON INC  2885 NATIONAL WAY WOODBURN, OR  2013 HD TKA MC VIN = 1HD1KEM21DB653887 Amount due on lien $1455.00  Reputed owner(s) ALLEN L & AMPARO MENDENHALL S285213-1 LEGAL PURSUANT TO ORS CHAPTER 87  Notice is hereby given that the following vehicle will be  sold, for  cash to the highest bidder, on 03/21/2022.  The sale will be held at 10:00am by  COPART OF WASHINGTON INC  2885 NATIONAL WAY WOODBURN, OR  2016 JEEP PATRIOT 4DR VIN = 1C4NJPBB6GD603709 Amount due on lien $1455.00  Reputed owner(s) SYRIE A & ANDREW M MC GUIRE wheat can become suscep- tible. That’s the main reason he identifies races and tracks their distribution. Collaborators outside the Pacific Northwest also col- lect and send rust samples to Chen. Rust in the eastern U.S. is generally uniform, with just a few races, Chen said. In the western U.S., he said, many different races show up. While stripe rust hasn’t appeared in Eastern Wash- ington, it has in Western Oregon. Stripe rust was spotted in October-planted fields of the soft white winter wheat Rosalyn in Oregon’s Willa- mette Valley, near the town of Independence, said Ryan Graebner, Oregon State Uni- versity cereal extension sci- entist, in an email to growers. Chen said that’s to be expected, because Western Oregon and Western Wash- ington are wetter than East- ern Oregon and Eastern Washington. Stripe rust is always present on the western side of the region, he said. “The control strategy is basically the same every year: grow resistant varieties and always spray fungicides in the fields planted with mod- erately susceptible and sus- ceptible varieties in the early spring with herbicide and also in the late season,” he said. Chen will release his next report in April. LEGAL PURSUANT TO ORS CHAPTER 87 Notice is hereby given that the following vehicle will be sold, for cash to the highest bidder, on 03/21/2022. The sale will be held at 10:00am by COPART OF WASHINGTON INC 2885 NATIONAL WAY WOODBURN, OR 2018 CHEV COLORADO PK VIN = 1GCGTCEN1J1204278 Amount due on lien $1435.00 Reputed owner(s) DESIREE M & ZOILA MATA GM FINANCIAL S285220-1 Notice is hereby given that a public hearing will be held pursuant to ORS 576.416 (5), on Thursday, April 14, 2022 at 10:00 a.m., at the White Buffalo Bistro, 4040 Westcliff Drive, Hood River, Oregon, upon a proposed budget for operation of the Mint Commission during the fiscal year July 1, 2022 through June 30, 2023. At this hearing any producer of Oregon Mint oil has a right to be heard with respect to the proposed budget, a copy of which is available for public inspection, under reasonable circumstances, in the office of each County Extension Agent in Oregon. For further information, contact the Oregon Mint Commission business office, P.O. Box 3366, Salem, Oregon 97302, telephone 503-364-2944. The meeting is accessible to persons with disabilities. Please make any requests for an interpreter for the hearing impaired or for other accommodation for persons with disabilities at least 48 hours before the meeting by contacting the Commission office at 503-364-2944. S285878-1 Stripe rust is getting a late start in Eastern Washington, a plant pathologist says. So far, stripe rust has not been found in the region’s wheat fields, USDA Agricul- tural Research Service plant pathologist Xianming Chen said in his report. Chen and his team checked fields in Whitman, Adams, Lincoln, Grant and Douglas counties in Novem- ber and Whitman, Garfield, Columbia, Walla Walla, Benton, Franklin and Adams counties March 1 but did not find rust. Chen predicts stripe rust will be in the “moderate” range of 20-40% yield loss for the 2022 growing season. Computer models pre- dict highly susceptible wheat varieties will have 33% yield loss and susceptible and moderately susceptible vari- eties will likely have 10-24% yield losses, Chen said. Last year’s drought meant few rust spores were in East- ern Washington, Chen told the Capital Press. Cold spells the last week of December and the week of Feb. 27 also reduced rust inoculum. Early fun- gicide appli- cations are not recom- mended, Chen said. “If we Xianming apply too Chen early, that’s just a waste of chemicals,” Chen said. An application at the wheat’s flag-leaf stage may be necessary for susceptible and moderately susceptible varieties. Chen’s team didn’t iden- tify any new races of stripe rust in 2021, though the fre- quency of some of them increased from the previous year, he said. “Not seeing new races is a good sign,” Chen said. “In the last several years, we usu- ally see one or two or three. Some years we see a lot. But in recent years, we’ve seen fewer new races.” New races occur mostly through mutations. A new race isn’t necessar- ily a threat. Some new races can become dominant, but others show up briefly and disappear. If new races show up more often, then a previ- ously resistant variety of By MATTHEW WEAVER Capital Press LEGAL PURSUANT TO ORS CHAPTER 87  Notice is hereby given that the following vehicle will be  sold, for  cash to the highest bidder, on 03/28/2022.  The sale will be held at 10:00am by  COPART OF WASHINGTON INC  2885 NATIONAL WAY WOODBURN, OR  2021 SUBARU CRO 4D VIN = JF2GTHNC8M8235178 Amount due on lien $1435.00  Reputed owner(s) ROYAL MOORE SUBARU S285222-1 NOTICE OF OREGON MINT COMMISSION BUDGET HEARING - TO: ALL OREGON MINT GROWERS ernment can harvest timber in areas where spotted owls have newly settled due to the removal of barred owls. The plaintiff argued these agreements didn’t meet the ESA’s requirement that “safe harbor” only be provided for a “net conservation benefit” to the protected species. However, the 9th Circuit has now agreed with an ear- lier court ruling that collect- ing research data qualifies as a “net conservation benefit,” even if it doesn’t directly cause spotted owls to recover. The 9th Circuit said the federal government prop- erly identified “baseline sites” that were inhabited by spot- ted owls before the experi- ment began. These “baseline” areas cannot be logged under the “safe harbor” deals. Logging can occur if spot- ted owl sites are unoccupied for three to five years under the “safe harbor” agreements — there’s no legal require- ment for them to be perma- nently “abandoned,” the 9th Circuit said. Stripe rust likely to get a late start, researcher says S285215-1 S285210-1 LEGAL PURSUANT TO ORS CHAPTER 87  Notice is hereby given that the following vehicle will be  sold, for  cash to the highest bidder, on 03/21/2022.  The sale will be held at 10:00am by  COPART OF WASHINGTON INC  2885 NATIONAL WAY WOODBURN, OR  2010 CHEV CAMARO CP VIN = 2G1FE1EV1A9113140 Amount due on lien $1795.00  Reputed owner(s) RODOLFO SANTOYO SILVA CREDIT ACCEPTANCE said Kevin Pogue, a geolo- gist at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Wash. By 2040, new areas in Eastern Oregon are expected to surpass the necessary 180 frost- free days per year to plant vineyards, Pogue said. For example, only about 100 vineyard acres are planted on the Oregon side of the Snake River Valley, but it’s likely to see further viticulture expan- sion, he said. Peaches are already grown near the north fork of the John Day River, which means the area is hospitable to grapes, Pogue said. Due to temperature inversions, valley floors are often colder in Eastern Oregon than on hillsides, within a “thermal belt” that’s capable of produc- ing grapes, he said. Areas above or below those thermal belts would remain too susceptible to freezes, meanwhile. “We need to look for these thermal belt areas,” Pogue said. Water rights in the region tend to be avail- able along valley floors, so they’d need to be trans- ferred for irrigation, he said. However, grapes are less thirsty than alfalfa and other crops commonly grown there. “The upside is if we replace corn with grapes, we don’t need as much water,” Pogue said. S285217-1 PORTLAND — Ore- gon’s wine industry is heading into uncharted ter- ritory as temperatures rise in coming decades, but the impact is more likely to be manageable than disas- trous, experts say. “We are not at the prec- ipice of failure. Winemak- ing and viticulture are not going away here. We’re going to make the changes we need,” said Greg Jones, a wine climatologist, at the Oregon Wine Symposium in Portland on March 9. Oregon’s climate has already changed markedly since the 1950s and 1960s, when people would have been “nuts” to plant vine- yards in the state, he said. “The weather and cli- mate weren’t very condu- cive to what we’re doing today,” said Jones, CEO of Abacela Winery near Rose- burg, Ore. On average, Oregon’s temperature has risen by 2.2 degrees Fahrenheit since 1895, while mod- els predict an increase of another 2 to 6 degrees by mid-century if current trends continue, he said. “We’re moving away from anything we’ve known historically into something very different,” Jones said. Grape growers will lack experience in growing cur- rently popular varieties in those higher temperature ranges, he said. To an extent, they can cope with changes in man- agement, such as planting on cooler northern slopes or growing more expan- sive leaf canopies to pro- tect grapes, he said. After a certain “tipping point,” though, the indus- try may have to examine switching to more heat-re- sistant grape cultivars, Jones said. There are about 5,000 varieties with which the wine industry has little to no experience, he said. The industry will likely encounter differ- ences in the timing and severity of pest threats, as well as compressed harvest periods, he said. Parts of Oregon will actually be able to intro- duce or expand grape production where it’s currently limited by a short growing season, S285219-1 By MATEUSZ PERKOWSKI Capital Press ened or endangered species,” the 9th Circuit said. Northern spotted owls were listed as a threatened spe- cies more than three decades ago, resulting in strict fed- eral logging restrictions, but their population has contin- ued to fall due to competi- tion from barred owls. Friends of Animals opposed killing barred owls but that portion of the study is now largely con- cluded after more than 3,000 of them were shot in several areas along the West Coast. Populations of spotted owls stabilized in areas where barred owls were removed but decreased by 12% a year where the competing species remained, according to a study published last year by federal agencies, universities and oth- ers. However, Friends of Ani- mals remains concerned about the “safe harbor” agreements that shield landowners from liability under the Endangered Species Act. Under those deals, sev- eral private forestland own- ers and Oregon’s state gov- S283042-1