
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, March 26, 1990                   TAG: 9003262015
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-2   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: TUCSON, ARIZ.                                LENGTH: Medium

RED SQUIRREL ENDANGERING CONSTRUCTION OF TELESCOPE

They're few in number, and their sky-island habitat has long lain undisturbed. But 180 tiny Mount Graham red squirrels could prove a big obstacle to construction of the world's most powerful optical telescope.

The University of Arizona wants nothing more than to coexist with the mountaintop rodents, an endangered subspecies. But the builder of a $200 million observatory atop 10,709-foot Mount Graham is having to tread carefully.

The 8-ounce squirrel, or Tamiasciurus hudsonicus grahamensis, has touched off a two-year ecological controversy that has split the scientific community, pitted one federal agency against another, and drawn environmentalists into a battle against telescope proponents from as far away as the Vatican.

U.S. District Judge Alfredo C. Marquez will hear closing arguments this afternoon on whether a third federal biological study is needed before construction begins this year on two smaller telescopes.

If all goes smoothly, the Columbus Project, a 600-inch-diameter device expected to be six times more powerful than any telescope in use, will be built in the mid-1990s on the 8.6-acre tract in the Pinaleno Mountains 110 miles northeast of Tucson.

Just 180 of the squirrels, which have been traced back 10,000 years or more, are believed to remain, and Mount Graham is their only known habitat.

Opposition groups say perching the telescopes on Emerald Peak, one of Mount Graham's three peaks, can only assure that the squirrels become a biological footnote.

The university, argued its vice president for research, Michael Cusanovich, "is the most likely participant to provide the basis for the Mount Graham red squirrel's recovery." It spent more than $200,000 last year on research and monitoring and will put aside more than $100,000 annually for several years, he said.

A two-mile access road for the Mount Graham International Observatory has been built. But opponents have so far held up construction of the observatory buildings.

The squirrels apparently have some militant supporters. One mailed an anonymous death threat to telescope proponent Conrad Istock, head of the University of Arizona's ecology and evolutionary biology department.

In July 1988, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service concluded in a biological report for the U.S. Forest Service, the site's landlord, that the telescopes could coexist with the squirrel.

Arizona's congressional delegation then pushed through legislation ordering the Forest Service to grant the university a special-use permit allowing construction.

But an environmental coalition intervened with a lawsuit. Naturalists have staged demonstrations outside the Vatican Embassy and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington.

The university says it will advertise soon for construction bids for the two smaller telescopes, one of which is partly financed by the Vatican Observatory. Pope John Paul II is among the Vatican's astronomy buffs.

by CNB