Judges Rebuff Government on Endangered Species

By FELICITY BARRINGER

WASHINGTON, Aug. 19 - Federal judges on opposite sides of the country ruled Friday that the Fish and Wildlife Service had acted arbitrarily and violated the Endangered Species Act when it reversed its own decisions and cut back on protections for two disparate species.

The judges - one in San Francisco and one in Brattleboro, Vt. - overturned separate regulations involving California tiger salamanders and gray wolves in New England.

In both cases, the Bush administration had combined sparser, distinct populations of a species with larger, robust populations, and then said protections could be reduced.

In his ruling striking down the agency's 2003 regulation on gray wolves, Judge J. Garvan Murtha wrote that the agency, after making the scientific determination that a species was endangered, could not change its mind "because it lumps together a core population with a low to nonexistent population."