The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has announced a controversial plan to save the imperiled spotted owl from potential extinction by deploying trained shooters into West Coast forests to kill up to 470,000 barred owls over three decades. The barred owls, which are originally from the eastern U.S., have encroached into the territory of two West Coast owls: northern spotted owls and California spotted owls. The smaller spotted owls have been unable to compete for food and habitat with the invading barred owls.
The plan aims to prop up declining spotted owl populations in Oregon, Washington state, and California. Past efforts to save spotted owls focused on protecting their forest habitats, but the proliferation of barred owls in recent years has undermined this earlier work.
The notion of killing one bird species to save another has divided wildlife advocates and conservationists. Some have grudgingly accepted the proposal, while others denounce it as reckless and a diversion from needed forest preservation. Barred owls are already being killed in spotted owl habitats for research purposes, with about 4,500 removed since 2009.
The plan follows decades of conflict between conservationists and timber companies that cut down vast areas of older forests where spotted owls reside. Early efforts to save the birds culminated in logging bans in the 1990s that roiled the timber industry and its political supporters in Congress.
Opponents of the plan argue that mass killing of barred owls would cause severe disruption to forest ecosystems and could 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 say barred owls moved westward by one of two routes: across the Great Plains, where trees planted by settlers gave them a foothold in new areas; or via Canada’s boreal forests, which have become more hospitable as temperatures rise due to climate change.
Supporters of killing barred owls to save spotted owls include the American Bird Conservancy and other conservation groups. Northern spotted owls are federally protected as a threatened species, while California spotted owls were proposed for federal protections last year, with a decision pending. Under former President Donald Trump, government officials stripped habitat protections for spotted owls at the behest of the timber industry. Those 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.
