The Government Plans to Save Spotted Owls By Shooting Barred Owls

Sometimes to save some owls, you’ve got to shoot some owls. Or so goes the logic of the US Fish and Wildlife Service’s plan to save the Northern spotted owl in the Pacific Northwest. The agency is going to dispatch hunters to kill thousands of invasive barred owls to preserve their more endangered relatives.

Barred owls moved west over the last several decades, into the spotted owl’s traditional territory. In some places barred owls out-number spotted owls by five to one. The newly arrived barred owls are larger, more aggressive and eat a wider variety of food than the spotted owls and, in a misty forest version of gentrification, they may be contributing to the spotted owl’s decline. According the stated from the Fish and Wildlife Service:

"Researchers have seen strong evidence that spotted owl population declines are more pronounced in areas where barred owls have moved into the spotted owl’s range.  Declines are greatest where barred owls have been present the longest.  The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is concerned that without barred owl population management, the spotted owl is likely to go extinct in some parts of its range.”

The agency's preferred course of action calls for killing 3,603 barred owls in four study areas in Oregon, Washington and Northern California over the next four years, according the Seattle Times. If this works, and spotted owl numbers rise in the 1,207 total square miles covered by the cull, the government agency may consider removing hearty barred owls from more territory.

Spotted owls typically nest in the cavities of old trees or in the broken-limbed canopies of old-growth forests, where they live on the forest rodents. Logging of the Pacific Northwest's conifers picked up after World War II. Biologists in the area noticed the destruction, saw the impact it was having on the forest dwellers and began urging the government to protect the old growth forest in the mid 1970s.

The owl population crash finally began in the 1980s, and the fight between environmentalists and loggers over preserving the forest and owl at the expense of logging jobs was a bitter one. In 1990, the Northern subspecies of spotted owl became recognized as “Threatened” under the Endangered Species Act, and the next year a sweeping federal court ruling closed much of the Northwest woods to logging. But even after logging was cut by 90 percent, the spotted owl’s population kept declining. Something else was holding the owls back.

The statement from the US Fish and Wildlife Service opens by saying they’ve “identified competition from barred owls as one of two main threats to the northern spotted owl’s continued survival,” the other still being habitat destruction.

Wildlife culls, like the one of badgers in Great Britain, are never popular. In British Columbia, a plan to shoot fewer than 40 barred owls was met with petitions and stern words from environmentalists.  The proposed American barred owl cull has been in consideration since 2005, and the environmental impact report included seven pages of ethical considerations and noted that they had consulted an outside ethicist to weigh in on “lethal removal.”

“To move forward with killing barred owls without addressing the fundamental cause of spotted owl declines, from our perspective, is not acceptable," Bob Sallinger, conservation director for the Audubon Society of Portland, told the Seattle Times.

One problem is that even if the spotted owls come back in the absence of barred owls, the barred owls will be back. “Assuming you find removal is working — spotted owls move back into their territories — are you prepared to do that for the next 10,000 years? Because as soon as you stop you’re right back where you started,” said Eric Forsman, a spotted owl biologist for the U.S. Forest Service, in 2005.

To ensure that the similar-looking owls aren't mistaken, hunters will likely play recordings of barred owls to draw the territorial owls out, and unwittingly, to their demise. It's a negative-feeling solution to a lousy problem, for sure. But just as the fight for spotted owls in the 1980s was hard fought and came at the expense of logging jobs, and revenue, saving the spotted owl from an invasive species isn't going to be pretty. One wonders, though, if it has to be bloody too.