Plan to kill thousands of barred owls raises question about removing one species to save another

Oregon wildlife biologist Eric Forsman has been at the forefront of protecting the northern spotted owl for a half-century.

His groundbreaking research on how logging Pacific Northwest forests impacted the raptor turned spotted owls into champions of the environmental movement.

Despite his legacy, Forsman, 77, is among those questioning a plan by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) to save the imperiled birds by sanctioning the potential killing of 450,000 barred owls in Washington, Oregon and California.

Like in much of Western Washington, barred owls have become a predominant predator on the Whatcom County landscape, often seen perched atop trees in  Bellingham parks, neighborhoods or soaring over farm fields. Longtime local birders say they’ve never seen a spotted owl.  

A program designed to control competition from the opportunistic barred owl whose presence could alter the ecosystem has left some animal rights groups, birders and wildlife biologists wrestling with moral judgments about lethally removing one species for the sake of another. 

“It doesn’t give me any satisfaction at all to say this, but trying to control barred owls is largely a waste of time,” Forsman said. “That genie is out of the bottle.”

He and others opposed to the 30-year plan say professional hunters would have to kill barred owls indefinitely to create safe homes for their at-risk relatives.

“As soon as you stop, barred owls will be back, and you will be back to square one,” Forsman said.

The sentiment underscores the complexity of creating long-term management policies for wild plants and animals in an ever-homogenized world.

The Fish and Wildlife Service’s plan announced in August highlights a growing tension between those who want to guarantee the long-term health of an ecosystem and others who believe in the sanctity of every animal.

“Notwithstanding the strong feelings, we know if we don’t act now we will lose the spotted owls,” said Kessina Lee, supervisor of USFWS’ Oregon office. “Science is telling us we have a window to act.”

The dire warnings have not stopped some from trying to derail the effort.

Last month, two East Coast animal rights nonprofits sued Fish and Wildlife in U.S. District Court in Seattle, alleging the agency violated federal law because it failed to analyze all potential impacts the plan might cause and did not seriously consider options other than shooting barred owls.

“Unfortunately for the spotted owl, the Service’s effort is unfunded, uncoordinated, poorly designed and doomed to fail,” Animal Wellness Action and the Center for a Humane Economy alleged in the complaint. 

Spotted owl authority Rocky Gutierrez of California challenged the assertion.

“They are trying to portray the Fish and Wildlife Service as playing God and making decisions about life and death,” he said, adding that humans have manipulated species’ populations for hundreds of thousands of years. 

“Letting nature take its course will have one effect here: a species will go extinct and other species may similarly be impacted,” said Gutierrez, professor emeritus at the University of Minnesota.

Yet, the public has seen well-intentioned wildlife efforts backfire, notably the 2018 translocation of non-native mountain goats from Olympic National Park to their historical range in the Cascades.

A study published in the Journal of Wildlife Management reported that of the translocated goats scientists monitored, 165 out of 217 animals had died by 2022. The study concluded that relocated goats had a poor chance of survival despite the intended goal of reestablishing depleted populations in the Cascades. 

In another publicized project gone awry, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers tried to protect juvenile salmon and steelhead in 2015 by killing double-crested cormorants on an island at the mouth of the Columbia River.

Instead of reducing the population as intended, the intervention resulted in the island colony disappearing, including 17,000 birds fleeing in one day.

Many resettled 8 miles away on the Astoria-Megler Bridge, where Oregon state officials say it appears they have eaten even more of the threatened fish than when living on the island. They also are damaging the span, prompting state officials to recommend repopulating the island a decade after the removal.

Finding the right approach for forest owls has vexed Colorado State University’s Barry Noon for years. The professor emeritus recalled how decades earlier he listed the pros and cons of removing the spotted owls’ most significant competitor. 

“It was basically a tie,” said Noon, an expert on conservation planning for threatened and endangered species. 

He is unconvinced that USFWS biologists are making the right decision now.

“But I say that with not a lot of conviction,” Noon added.

Spotted owl’s dependence on virgin forest

Forsman’s comprehensive studies in the 1960s and ’70s highlighted the dark-eyed spotted owl’s dependence on swaths of virgin coniferous forests. 

The birds, which are a little bigger than a football, nested in the cavities of large old-growth trees and primarily ate rodents that facilitate the health of the forest by transferring nutrients between soil and trees.

Studies show the spotted owls successfully ranged from British Columbia to San Francisco before wholesale logging of their habitat.

The owl became synonymous with the contentious battle between conservationists and lumberjacks in 1990 when USFWS listed it as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.

Eventually, the listing ended almost a century of logging old-growth forests on federal lands.

Yet, the ban did not slow spotted owls’ decline as much as biologists had hoped because megafires and tree harvesting on non-federal lands contributed to continued habitat loss.

But biologists soon realized barred owls were a bigger threat. They are larger, more aggressive and outcompete spotted owls for food and habitat space.

Interspecies competition was first detected in 1980 by Thomas Hamer, a Western Washington University undergraduate student studying biology.

He spent the summers of 1980 and ‘81 surveying spotted owls in the North Cascades for the U.S Forest Service.

Hamer recalled how he and a colleague started hearing calls from barred owls, which have eight-note territorial defense songs to spotted owls’ trademark four hoots.

“We were seeing some of the first pairs establishing themselves in Northwest Washington,” said Hamer, who divides time between Mount Vernon and Baja, California.

Hamer predicted that spotted owls were in trouble in his master’s thesis at WWU on the expanding home range of barred owls. 

While USFWS does not have a comprehensive population estimate for northern spotted owls, researchers reported the species in many experimental study areas declined as much as 80% since 1995.  

On the other hand, the estimated barred owl population in the USFWS’s tri-state management sites is more than 100,000 birds.

The Fish and Wildlife Service had to act as a regulatory agency charged with enforcing the Endangered Species Act of 1973, which was diminished under the previous Trump administration. President Joe Biden in March restored some of the protections that were rolled back, but conservationists worry the president-elect will once again target the act in his upcoming term.

The current Fish and Wildlife Service plan involves limiting barred owl expansion into the range of California spotted owls, a subspecies waiting for listing under the act.

Biologists researched the issue for two decades before Fish and Wildlife officials approved a strategy to create what is described as “defensible refugia” where spotted owls could repopulate their habitat.

The program would deploy trained hunters — called “removal specialists” in government parlance — to shoot the owls at dusk and nighttime with 20-gauge or larger bore shotguns using lead-free shells.

Robin Bown, Fish and Wildlife’s project lead, said the plan has built-in safety zones around human habitation.

USFWS biologists considered nonlethal methods, including translocation, permanent captivity and reproductive disruption. They determined such options would not save the spotted owls.

The plan estimates a maximum of 452,583 barred owls would be killed if fully implemented, a prospect USFWS officials say is unlikely. 

Bown said the removal won’t significantly affect the interloping species because its population increases by 1% annually, much more than the possible yearly culling of 15,600 birds. 

Still, the scale of the project seems to have struck a chord with those who oppose it. The plaintiffs in the federal case allege it “is a federal effort to determine the evolutionary paths of species to a degree never seen before in American wildlife management.”

Hamer said biologists should know well before three decades if their strategy works.

“It is probably worth a try for five to 10 years,” he said. “In removing the barred owls, they will quickly find out whether anyone is moving in.”

The project would begin in the spring at the earliest. Fish and Wildlife Service officials are not ready to specify where removal might occur in Washington’s four designated provinces that have few spotted owls left. The first step is to increase surveys around the state to figure out which habitats to protect, said Katherine Fitzgerald, USFWS’ northern spotted owl recovery lead. 

Paul Bannick, a Seattle author and wildlife photographer, does not like the proposed solution but sees value in limited removal in specific habitat sites that host reproducing spotted owls.

“I don’t like doing nothing,” said Bannick, author of “Owl: A Year in the Lives of North American Owls” (Mountaineers Books). “We can’t do nothing because we’re toward the end of the game.”

Barred owls’ migration patterns grew

Support for shooting barred owls gained traction with the idea they migrated from eastern North America because of human-caused changes to the landscape.

The theory says barred owls hopscotched across the continent through the Great Plains where settlers planted trees to give them new habitats, or along Canada’s boreal forests that became invitingly warm because of climate change.

The raptors reached the northern spotted owl’s territory in British Columbia about 1959 and were first documented in Washington in the 1970s, the management strategy says.

Forsman and other scientists cannot definitively say whether human impact led to migration.

“We will never know,” said Forsman, adding the barred owls might have reached the Pacific Coast regardless of human settlement. “If it is our fault, maybe you can justify the control more easily in your mind.” 

Not according to Bown: “We did not label them as invasive so we could go after them,” she said. 

Whatever led to their arrival, barred owls are now found almost everywhere in Western Washington. Their habitats include old forests, which wildlife biologist Gutierrez finds troubling for reasons beyond losing a rival species.

He said scientists don’t know what direct and indirect ecological consequences might occur from the presence of barred owls in Pacific Northwest old-growth forests.

The raptors are not the ecological equivalent of spotted owls, whose diets consist of flying squirrels, red voles and wood rats. Barred owls eat wide-ranging prey, including the same small rodents as spotted owls, but at much higher rates. 

“The barred owl is not only affecting the spotted owl, it is affecting a whole suite of other species,” Gutierrez said. 

He worries that barred owls will negatively change the food-web dynamic of the entire ecosystem by triggering an ecological phenomenon known as a trophic cascade. 

That happens when predators change the behavior or abundance of their prey, which in turn affects the next level of the food chain for better — or potentially with the barred owl — for worse.

The overall outlook has left Paul Woodcock, past president of Whatcom County’s North Cascades Audubon Society, in a quandary.

“What’s our morality here? What’s the right thing?” asked Woodcock, who conducts monthly bird-watching tours around the county. 

Whatcom’s chapter of the Audubon Society hasn’t taken a stand, but the Skagit group supports the USFWS plan with reservations.

After all of the debate, Woodcock has come to a heartbreaking conclusion shared by many nature lovers.

“On the whole, I think this is going to be a slaughter that won’t bring us any positive results,” he said.

Elliott Almond's outdoor column appears monthly. Email: elliottalmond4@gmail.com.