Last month in Virginia, a barred owl managed to shimmy down a chimney and perched on the family’s Christmas tree, displacing the star placed at its apex. The good folks at the Animal Welfare League of Arlington deployed, and with the yuletide blessing of the homeowners, they set the bird free.
That same month, from Iowa to Massachusetts, kind-hearted people took in barred owls struck by cars and delivered them to wildlife veterinarians who did their best to put them back together.
Indeed, there are more than a few acts of human kindness to barred owls. But the collective efforts of wildlife rehabilitators and other Good Samaritans all around the nation will collectively pale in comparison to intentional, lethal harm that our federal government plans to deliver to the birds.
In September, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) hatched a plan to massacre 450,000 barred owls over a 30-year time frame (CDN, Nov. 23, 2024). It would be, by a long shot, the largest raptor kill plan any government has ever undertaken. Cost estimates are as high as a staggering $1.35 billion.
If it’s not stopped, we’ll see government-financed shooters taking aim at owls within Olympic and Mount Rainier national parks in Washington to Crater Lake in Oregon to Yosemite and Redwoods national parks in California.
The scheme aims to reduce competition for nesting sites between barred owls and their threatened cousins, spotted owls. But it’s doomed to fail for several reasons, beginning with the lack of a ready labor pool for a kill plan of this scope and scale.
Add to that the immense “control area” spanning 24 million acres from Marin County to the Canadian border; it’s an area encompassing 14 National Park Service units and 17 National Forests, many of which have millions of roadless areas that make them inaccessible for all but the hardiest, most determined owl slayers.
And then there is the nagging tendency for surviving barred owls to colonize nesting areas previously depopulated — a sort of killing treadmill that produces forward motion but no progress.
Wildlife will not ‘stay put’ for anyone
Barred owls are a range-expanding North American native species protected for a century by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act and ranging from Maine to the Dakotas at least since the Pleistocene.
Former Fish and Wildlife biologist Kent Livezey wrote in one peer-reviewed paper that 111 North American bird species have experienced recent range expansion, with 12 species moving even more widely than barred owls. Indeed, range expansion is a naturally occurring ecological phenomenon, a core behavioral characteristic of birds and mammals.
Within the last hundred years, they’ve made it to the Pacific Northwest, with movements perhaps triggered by climate change and human-induced changes to forests and grasslands.
To demand that species “stay put” where they were mapped at an arbitrary moment in time ignores the dynamism of ecological principles, weather patterns, and human impacts on the environment. Colonizing new habitats is what species do. Let’s not forget that Paleolithic hunter-gatherers crossed the Bering land bridge and over time came to occupy nearly the entirety of the New World.
By the government’s own estimates, shooters will slay barred owls on 28% of the land area inhabited by spotted owls. But what’s to stop barred owls on the other 72% of land areas from simply taking wing and reoccupying sites that were recently purged? The barred owl kill plan has an especially high degree of difficulty in Washington, given the unmolested population of barred owls in British Columbia who can easily fly south and fill the vacuum.
Eric Forsman, the premier forest owl biologist in the nation, told The Seattle Times that “once you start” killing barred owls, “you can never stop.” His recommendation: “Let the two species work it out.”
Who’s next on Fish and Wildlife Service ‘Wanted list?’
Indeed, wild animals compete against one another. They breed with one another. They angle for prey and space. It happens within families, within species, between species. That competition animates ecological systems. Is it realistic to think the federal government can micromanage these countless interactions among hundreds or thousands of species?
Our wildlife agency previously documented that the great horned owl may occasionally prey on spotted owls. Will that owl species be next on the hit list?
The whole plan is myopic, looking too narrowly at a single-species response and sidestepping the arduous and more complex task of confronting the decades-long acts of human commerce and settlement that have collectively put spotted owls in peril.
This is a case of the federal wildlife agency not seeing the forest for the trees.
Wayne Pacelle, president of Animal Wellness Action and the Center for a Humane Economy, is a two-time New York Times best-selling author.
Barred owls in the crosshairs: A costly proposition doomed to fail
Government's myopic U.S. raptor-kill plan comes with a price estimate of more than $1 billion
Last month in Virginia, a barred owl managed to shimmy down a chimney and perched on the family’s Christmas tree, displacing the star placed at its apex. The good folks at the Animal Welfare League of Arlington deployed, and with the yuletide blessing of the homeowners, they set the bird free.
That same month, from Iowa to Massachusetts, kind-hearted people took in barred owls struck by cars and delivered them to wildlife veterinarians who did their best to put them back together.
Indeed, there are more than a few acts of human kindness to barred owls. But the collective efforts of wildlife rehabilitators and other Good Samaritans all around the nation will collectively pale in comparison to intentional, lethal harm that our federal government plans to deliver to the birds.
In September, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) hatched a plan to massacre 450,000 barred owls over a 30-year time frame (CDN, Nov. 23, 2024). It would be, by a long shot, the largest raptor kill plan any government has ever undertaken. Cost estimates are as high as a staggering $1.35 billion.
If it’s not stopped, we’ll see government-financed shooters taking aim at owls within Olympic and Mount Rainier national parks in Washington to Crater Lake in Oregon to Yosemite and Redwoods national parks in California.
The scheme aims to reduce competition for nesting sites between barred owls and their threatened cousins, spotted owls. But it’s doomed to fail for several reasons, beginning with the lack of a ready labor pool for a kill plan of this scope and scale.
Add to that the immense “control area” spanning 24 million acres from Marin County to the Canadian border; it’s an area encompassing 14 National Park Service units and 17 National Forests, many of which have millions of roadless areas that make them inaccessible for all but the hardiest, most determined owl slayers.
And then there is the nagging tendency for surviving barred owls to colonize nesting areas previously depopulated — a sort of killing treadmill that produces forward motion but no progress.
Wildlife will not ‘stay put’ for anyone
Barred owls are a range-expanding North American native species protected for a century by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act and ranging from Maine to the Dakotas at least since the Pleistocene.
Former Fish and Wildlife biologist Kent Livezey wrote in one peer-reviewed paper that 111 North American bird species have experienced recent range expansion, with 12 species moving even more widely than barred owls. Indeed, range expansion is a naturally occurring ecological phenomenon, a core behavioral characteristic of birds and mammals.
Within the last hundred years, they’ve made it to the Pacific Northwest, with movements perhaps triggered by climate change and human-induced changes to forests and grasslands.
To demand that species “stay put” where they were mapped at an arbitrary moment in time ignores the dynamism of ecological principles, weather patterns, and human impacts on the environment. Colonizing new habitats is what species do. Let’s not forget that Paleolithic hunter-gatherers crossed the Bering land bridge and over time came to occupy nearly the entirety of the New World.
By the government’s own estimates, shooters will slay barred owls on 28% of the land area inhabited by spotted owls. But what’s to stop barred owls on the other 72% of land areas from simply taking wing and reoccupying sites that were recently purged? The barred owl kill plan has an especially high degree of difficulty in Washington, given the unmolested population of barred owls in British Columbia who can easily fly south and fill the vacuum.
Eric Forsman, the premier forest owl biologist in the nation, told The Seattle Times that “once you start” killing barred owls, “you can never stop.” His recommendation: “Let the two species work it out.”
Who’s next on Fish and Wildlife Service ‘Wanted list?’
Indeed, wild animals compete against one another. They breed with one another. They angle for prey and space. It happens within families, within species, between species. That competition animates ecological systems. Is it realistic to think the federal government can micromanage these countless interactions among hundreds or thousands of species?
Our wildlife agency previously documented that the great horned owl may occasionally prey on spotted owls. Will that owl species be next on the hit list?
The whole plan is myopic, looking too narrowly at a single-species response and sidestepping the arduous and more complex task of confronting the decades-long acts of human commerce and settlement that have collectively put spotted owls in peril.
This is a case of the federal wildlife agency not seeing the forest for the trees.
Wayne Pacelle, president of Animal Wellness Action and the Center for a Humane Economy, is a two-time New York Times best-selling author.
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