Endangered Species

. -- A federal judge in Montana has rejected a request by the government to delay a lawsuit seeking to place the gray wolf back on the endangered species list, saying he's "unwilling to risk more deaths." At least 39 of the Northern Rockies' 1,500 gray wolves have been killed since they lost federal protection in March. That action placed wolves under the authority of state wildlife agencies in Wyoming, Idaho and Montana.

The Bush administration released a final recovery plan for the northern spotted owl that officials say could lead to recovery of the threatened bird in 30 years. The plan, released in Portland, identifies the primary threats as habitat loss due to logging and catastrophic wildfires. Conservation groups called the plan flawed and said it fails to restrict old-growth logging enough to ensure recovery.

The photos of the South China tiger taken by a farmer seemed too good to be true. After all, no member of the endangered big cat family had been seen in the wild since the 1960s. This weekend, local authorities revealed after months of delay that the pictures had been staged using a poster cutout. Police also produced a paw made of wood they said had been used to make prints in the snow.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced that it would remove the Preble's meadow jumping mouse from the threatened-species list in Wyoming but keep the mouse on the list in Colorado. Officials said in Cheyenne, Wyo., that the creature's habitat was at risk in Colorado. Environmentalists said they would sue to restore its status in Wyoming.

The California Supreme Court gave new protection to the state's endangered species Thursday, ruling unanimously that developers, loggers and other commercial interests may be required to compensate for unforeseen wildlife losses. The ruling, which affects both public works and private development, threw out a long-term logging plan approved by the state for 200,000 acres in Humboldt County, a plan that lower courts put on hold several years ago.

Gray wolves in the northern Rockies regained endangered-species protections Friday when a federal judge in Montana granted a preliminary injunction to environmentalists, who had challenged the wolves' delisting. U.S. Fish and Wildlife officials announced in February that gray wolves would be removed from the endangered species list after what they termed a successful 20-year effort to reestablish the wolves in Idaho, Montana and Wyoming. Environmentalists sued.

Tigers have not fared well in Iraq. Under Saddam Hussein, they languished in zoo cages, hungry and haggard. During the 1991 Persian Gulf War, they survived on scraps provided by sympathetic zookeepers. And after Hussein's ouster in 2003, one of the two tigers in the Baghdad Zoo was shot and killed by a U.S. soldier. With the arrival of two Bengal tigers from a North Carolina sanctuary for endangered animals, Iraqi and U.S. officials are hoping the future is brighter for tigers here.

THEY were the kind of browsers that no store wants: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service agents, armed with a search warrant and intent on seizing computers and questioning employees. The object of their inquiry: the skull of a small monkey, possibly an endangered species, that had been bought on EBay from a seller in Indonesia and sent to a high-end retailer on La Cienega Boulevard.

The California condor, rescued from extinction in an elaborate and expensive recovery effort, has become tantamount to a zoo animal in the wild and can't survive on its own without a ban on lead ammunition across its vast Western ranges, a scientific study has concluded. The majestic scavengers, bred in captivity and released to nature in recent decades, require "constant and costly human assistance," a blue-ribbon panel of the American Ornithologists' Union reported this week.

The Bush administration Monday proposed a regulatory overhaul of the Endangered Species Act to allow federal agencies to decide whether protected species would be imperiled by agency projects, eliminating the independent scientific reviews that have been required for more than three decades. The new rules, which will be subject to a 30-day comment period, would use administrative powers to make broad changes in the law that Congress has resisted for years.