by The survival of one species of owl depends on the disappearance of another.
That’s what the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service argues in its proposal to allow you to hunt hundreds of thousands of barred owls over the next 30 years in West Coast forests. The service says the barred owl, which is not native to the region, is displacing the spotted owl, a close genetic relative.
If action is not taken against barred owls, service biologists say the spotted owl could disappear from parts of Washington and Oregon within a few years and eventually become extinct.
The proposal is the latest in a series of efforts to save the spotted owl, whose decline became a rallying point for environmentalists opposed to logging in the Pacific Northwest in the 1980s.
Human influence, as European settlers spread westward, likely caused the barred owl to colonize the Pacific Northwest. Now, the proposal raises questions about how far people should go to save a species and the costs of righting a historic ecological wrong.
“It’s not the barred owls’ fault. It’s our fault for bringing them here. It’s not the spotted owls’ fault either,” said Robin Brown, a Fish and Wildlife Service biologist who leads the agency’s spotted owl strategy. “The future of the species is extinction if we do not manage the barred owl. The writing is on the wall.”
The agency’s proposal, which calls for a total of more than 470,000 banned owls to be “lethally removed” (killed with shotguns) remains in draft form and is open to public comment until Jan. 16.
Tainted vs. banned
An indiscriminate eye might have difficulty distinguishing between spotted and barred owls. Both have pale faces and mottled brown and white coats. They are the same gender. Before the 20th century, an important differentiating factor was where they lived: the barred owl in the eastern US and the spotted owl in the forests of the western US.
But the barred owl is slightly larger, breeds faster, is more aggressive, and is less discriminating about where it makes its home and what it eats.
Spotted owl populations have declined about 75% over the past two decades and continue to decline about 5% each year, largely due to barred owls, according to an environmental impact statement outlining the USFWS proposal. The proposal says there are more than 100,000 barred owls in West Coast forests.
“They come to these areas. They reach high densities. They basically eat everything and compete with spotted owls for food,” said David Wiens, supervising wildlife research biologist with the U.S. Geological Survey.
The USFWS’s proposed management plan calls for killing barred owls in about one-third of the spotted owl’s range in Washington, Oregon and California over three decades. The plan would eliminate the barred owl from 1% to 2% of its current range.
Teams of trained marksmen would emit an owl call, attracting those nearby. Then, equipped with spotlights and shotguns, they killed the birds.
The USFWS funded an experimental study, led by Wiens, to see how well the strategy worked in five areas of Pacific Northwest forests over five years. The results, published in 2021, showed that about 2,485 barred owls were killed and that spotted owls had a 10% higher survival rate in areas where they were removed.
The removal stabilized the spotted owl population, but did not increase it substantially. Brown said the agency believes it would take more than five years to see spotted owl populations change because the birds don’t reproduce very quickly.
Given the dominance of the barred owl, its populations are likely to recover over time, which is why the USFWS would likely have to “perpetually manage the species,” Brown added.
Kessina Lee, USFWS state supervisor in Oregon, said wildlife biologists consulted an ethicist about killing the animals. Lethal removal is justified when the alternative is the extinction of a species, Lee said.
“Sometimes it is necessary for humans to intervene to correct an unnatural situation,” he said.
Some animal rights groups disagree.
Friends of Animals, a Connecticut-based animal advocacy nonprofit, unsuccessfully challenged the USFWS’s permission to conduct the 2021 study.
“We don’t think it’s ethical to go out and look for barred owls and shoot them with a shotgun because they currently do better in the existing environment and are outperforming other species,” said Jennifer Best, who directs the organization’s wildlife law program. .
Best said species perpetually adapt to different pressures and move to new environments due to threats such as climate change.
“There is a need to address and consider how to address this. Killing species that are thriving is not a good solution,” she stated.
Decades of work to protect spotted owls
Barred owls arrived in the forests of the Pacific Northwest during a time of upheaval.
In the late 1980s and 1990s, environmentalists and loggers fought over logging in remaining old-growth forests, a conflict known as the Timber War. The spotted owl, which prefers to live in the huge old trees that were dwindling, was at the center of the intense debate.
The fight ultimately led to protections for the bird and its habitat, as well as a plan to conserve old-growth forests on federal lands. In 1990, the owl became a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act.
Those measures helped, until the barred owls began to take over.
Biologists believe that climate changes in Canada or human-caused changes in the Great Plains, such as an increase in wooded habitat as people eradicated beavers and buffalo that hindered tree growth, helped barred owls to spread.
“Over a period of about 100 years, they moved slowly through that area. Once they got to the west coast and the forest there, they really started to explode,” Wiens said.
But Best sees the barred owl as a scapegoat and believes killing it is a distraction from taking bolder steps to conserve spotted owl habitat.
“I think the most important thing is to protect old-growth forests in areas where spotted owls live and can live, and work to restore habitat that has been destroyed. It is not an easy or quick solution, but it is a possible long-term solution,” Best said.
Once the public comment period for the USFWS proposal ends, a final proposal is expected in the spring or summer.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
