On the Federal Government’s Plan to Slaughter Barred Owls, We Tell Wildlife Agency We’ll See You in Court

We are not standing aside as the federal government begins to recruit hunters and shooters to execute the largest mass slaughter of raptors anywhere in the world.

Yesterday, the Center for a Humane Economy and Animal Wellness Action filed a legal action in U.S. District Court in Washington state challenging a plan from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) that greenlights the killing of almost half a million barred owls in the Pacific Northwest over the next 30 years.

If we don’t stop the kill plan, whether in the courts, by congressional intervention, or through a leadership change at FWS, a throng of amateur hunters and shooters will flood into national parks, wilderness areas in national forests, and other lands from Marin County, Calif., to the Washington-British Columbia border and conduct a kill-plan targeting a native species on a scale the nation has never seen.

Fish and Wildlife Service Has Not Proved Its Case That Its Plan Can Work

The unprecedented scheme to kill barred owls — native to North America and protected under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act — has been methodically and publicly pushed ahead by an unusual alliance of corporate timber industry interests, field staff in the Pacific Northwest from the FWS, and a small set of environmental advocates. This set of actors fought bitterly over habitat protection issues for spotted owls for decades, but they have found alignment on a kill-plan that aims to reduce social competition between look-alike owls — the barred owls and the spotted owls.

Blaming the range-expanding barred owls has been a convenient but diversionary tactic for timber industry actors, including one industry scientist who hatched the idea that barred owls are the problem and suggested mass killing as a response. But it’s the acceptance of the idea by the FWS and some environmentalists that has breathed life into the kill plan. Indeed, some environmentalists and field biologists seem willing to try just about anything to try to save the spotted owls.

The problem is that, whether motivated by self-interest or species preservation, the proponents of the kill plan are not grappling with its inherent impracticality. The agency’s final Environmental Impact Statement on the project is voluminous but it lacks any practical evidence that it can work. And it badly underestimates the unintended consequences not only to spotted owls, but to other threatened and endangered species in the forest habitats as well.

Killing up to 470,000 barred owls across a vast patchwork of lands in California, Oregon, and Washington is a logistical impossibility.

• There is no way to stop in-migration of surviving barred owls from adjacent areas, or within the kill zone, to the newly vacant nesting sites. The FWS will never get off the killing treadmill, with the barred owls exhibiting compensatory reproduction and juvenile survivorship to fill the void created by the shooters.

• The FWS said it would rely on “volunteers” to conduct the killing. While the agency will undoubtedly be able to mount a force to do a lot of owl killing, there’s no way it will have the vast volunteer labor assets to conduct a kill plan on this physical scale and on a timeline that spans a generation or more? Bird hunters do not hunt owls, since there’s no yield of meat and no recreational appeal. So, what will motivate approved but unlicensed hunters to participate on a scale that can have the impact the FWS hopes to achieve?

• The Pacific Northwest barred owl control area of 24 million acres — from Marin County, Calif. to the U.S.-Canada border — would cover the coastal area from southern Virginia to northern Maine and then sweep inland as far as Ohio. Trying to kill nocturnal owls in such a vast area, including on millions of acres of roadless wilderness areas and a patchwork of federal, state, and private lands, would daunt the U.S. Army.

We certainly do have an imperative, under law and as a matter of fundamental stewardship of the Earth, to protect threatened and endangered species. That imperative is built into the U.S. Endangered Species Act. But we have other values that matter, too. And the FWS has no way to assure us that sacrificing these other vital concerns is worth it for a plan doomed to fail.

• Spotted owls will get killed by mistake. Hunting and shooting at night, or at dawn or dusk, in thick forested habitat is a prescription for mistaken-identity shootings of spotted owls and other protected owls in the forests. The barred owls and spotted owls are look-alike species — more twins than cousins, as they are often described.

• The massive barred owl kill zone of 24 million acres includes 14 units of the National Park Service, and this plan is at odds with the values of that agency. The lush forests of Olympic National Park will see hunters spending thousands of days and nights afield to shoot owls. Visitors to Crater Lake National Park will see hunters hiding behind Ponderosa pines and aiming at birds in flight or perched on the trees. The cathedral forests of Redwood National Park will resound with the echo of gunfire.

• We don’t conduct mass killing of raptors for sport or any other purpose in the United States. There is a law, the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, that specifically protects barred owls and other owl species.

Name-Calling a Native Species and False Framing of the Problem Don’t Amount to a Plan

The FWS is labeling the barred owls as “invasive.” But it’s much more intellectually honest to describe them as a native species that has engaged in a decades-long form of range expansion.

Barred owls weren’t shipped to North America and released into the wild, as were Burmese pythons, by impulsive pet buyers. They weren’t brought to the United States by the feather or fur traders, as were nutria, who got a one-way ticket to North America, escaped their cages on fur farms, and put down and pulled up roots from Delaware to California.

It was some blend of natural migration, climate change, and human effects on forests and grasslands that has prompted barred owls to expand their range.

The truth is, barred owls were here long before humans crossed the Bering Land Bridge. And of course, barred owls have been here much longer than the U.S. Bureau of Biological Survey, the precursor of today’s FWS, formed in 1871.

In fact, the proof of “nativeness” is that the birds are protected under federal law. Nothing screams “native species” more than being listed as protected under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act.

But now, due to the whims of a federal agency, and without any congressional approval, barred owls will be intentionally slaughtered under the pretense that they are an “invasive” species.

But range expansion by species is as natural as the sun rising or the clouds forming. That’s how ecological systems work, and it’s occurring every day, with hundreds of species. Barred owls and spotted owls are already interbreeding and producing hybrid offspring that will be more adaptable to a changing ecosystem. That, again, is nature at work.

Former FWS forest owl biologist Kent Livezey noted, in a peer-reviewed paper, that 111 other native bird species engage in recent range expansion, with 14 of them expanding over an area larger than the area where barred owls are moving. “To say that this plan is unprecedented is an understatement,” said Livezey, who is extensively published on spotted owls, barred owls, and range expansion of native bird species in the United States.

Taking Management of Nature to an Extreme

Our own government permitting broad and innumerable killing projects against a North American species seems like a mighty dangerous path to head down. Do we want agency personnel knee-deep in the business of killing native species to protect other native species in a world where we’ve scrambled the workings of land and ocean ecosystems?

If the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service goes down this road of managing social interactions between animals, where will it end? Will we kill orcas if ocean temperature change sends them deep into the Pacific and they consume endangered Hawaiian monk seals? There are more than 1,300 federally listed threatened and endangered species, and you can be sure that there are thousands of other species competing with them every day in our nation.

We must not punish animals for natural range expansion and adapting to human disturbances of the environment. Smarter, more strategic, less violent uses of the agency’s limited time and resources are what’s needed.

There is a rising tide of opposition to this plan. Our coalition now exceeds 200 organizations, including 20 local Audubon societies from the Pacific Northwest and other parts of the nation familiar with barred owls. So many of these groups are deeply devoted to endangered species protection and to saving spotted owls. But they recognize that this plan cannot work and violates so many other core values.

With the national election looming, and a change coming at the Department of the Interior with the end of the Biden Administration, this matter should be near the top of the docket for the incoming Interior secretary and FWS director. Let’s hope the next Administration will make our federal court proceeding moot by abandoning this owl-killing scheme.

In the end, the nation must devise a better, more humane plan to save spotted owls. Scapegoating a related species is one more hasty, if not foolish, human response to a problem of our own making.