The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has proposed a contentious plan to save the imperiled spotted owl from potential extinction by deploying trained shooters into West Coast forests to kill nearly half a million barred owls. This strategy, released on Wednesday, aims to support declining spotted owl populations in Oregon, Washington state, and California. The barred owls, which are from the eastern U.S., have encroached into the West Coast territory of the northern and California spotted owls, outcompeting them due to their larger broods and requiring less space to survive.
The plan has divided wildlife advocates and conservationists, with some grudgingly accepting the barred owl removal strategy while others view it as a reckless diversion from needed forest preservation. Critics argue that the program may fail due to the inability of the agency to prevent more barred owls from migrating into areas where others have been killed.
The shootings, expected to begin next spring, would involve luring barred owls using megaphones and shotguns, with carcasses being buried on site. Researchers have been killing barred owls in some spotted owl habitats since 2009, with about 4,500 removed. The killings would reduce North American barred owl numbers by less than 1% annually, while potentially preventing the extinction of spotted owls.
Supporters of the plan include the American Bird Conservancy and other conservation groups, who argue that barred owls don’t belong in the West. They believe that reducing their numbers could allow them to coexist with spotted owls over the long term. The killings would also help other West Coast species that barred owls have been preying on, such as salamanders and crayfish.
The final environmental study on the proposal will be published in the coming days, opening a 30-day comment period before a final decision is made. The plan follows decades of conflict between conservationists and timber companies, with logging bans in the 1990s causing controversy in the timber industry and its political supporters in Congress.
Opponents of the plan argue that the mass killing of barred owls could cause severe disruption to forest ecosystems and potentially lead to other species, including spotted owls, being mistakenly shot. They also challenge the notion that barred owls don’t belong on the West Coast, characterizing their expanding range as a natural ecological phenomenon. Researchers suggest that barred owls moved westward by either crossing the Great Plains or via Canada’s boreal forests, which have become more hospitable due to climate change.
Northern spotted owls are federally protected as a threatened species, and California spotted owls were proposed for federal protections last year. A decision is pending. Under former President Donald Trump, government officials stripped habitat protections for spotted owls at the behest of the timber industry. These protections were reinstated under President Joe Biden after the Interior Department said political appointees under Trump relied on faulty science to justify their weakening of protections.
