Superintendents in Washington state should not allow barred owl killing plan that is unworkable, inhumane, and at odds with values of the National Park Service
Seattle, WA — Today Animal Wellness Action and the Center for a Humane Economy called on superintendents from Olympic National Park, Mount Rainier, and North Cascades national parks to resist a plan by a sister agency, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS), to participate in a scheme to kill almost half a million barred owls in the Pacific Northwest over the next 30 years.
The USFWS filed a Record of Decision on barred owl management in late August, and last week, AWA and the Center filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Seattle to block the overreaching and unworkable plan targeting a species protected for a century by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act.
The unprecedented scheme to kill barred owls — a species native to North America — has been initiated to reduce social competition between that species and its look-alike cousins, the Northern Spotted owl and the California Spotted owl. Spotted owls have experienced significant population decline over decades because of habitat destruction, particularly the harvesting of old growth forest. The groups claim in their filing that the plan, originally proposed by a timber industry forest scientist, is not only ill-conceived and inhumane, but is also impractical as a strategy to save the spotted owl.
Today, the organizations that filed the federal legal action highlighted a deeply disturbing element of the plan: opening up 14 units of the National Park Service to owl hunting, which will persist for at least 30 years if the scheme is implemented as proposed.
“This inhumane, unworkable barred-owl kill-plan is the largest-ever scheme to slaughter raptors in any nation,” said Wayne Pacelle, president of Animal Wellness Action and the Center for a Humane Economy. “By opening up 14 units of the National Park Service to owl hunting — including Olympic, Mount Rainier, and North Cascades national parks — the whole plan becomes surreal. It has a zero percent chance of success, but it will produce an unheard-of body count of a long-protected owl species in our national parks and compromise the standard of forbidding hunting in these magical forests and landscapes.”
Barred owls have engaged in range expansion, which is a naturally occurring ecological phenomenon and a common adaptive behavior of many species of birds and mammals. Former U.S. Fish and Wildlife wildlife biologist Kent Livezey noted in a peer-reviewed paper that 111 other native bird species engaged 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, an expert who has written extensively about spotted owls, barred owls, and range expansion of native bird species in the United States.
The agency’s plan calls for granting of “take” permits that allow volunteer hunters with little training in identifying barred owls to take to the forests, including national parks and wilderness areas on national forests, to kill barred owls. The plan will inevitably result in mistaken identity kills of spotted owls and vast numbers of other nocturnal owl species living dozens of feet above the forest floor and in dense evergreen forests. The disturbance alone would have adverse effects on a wide range of species, along with the direct killing of so many other species. Night hunting of the owls is planned, increasing the risk of mistaken-identity kills.
The 14 units to be opened to owl hunting are Olympic National Park, Mount Rainier National Park, and North Cascades National Park in Washington state. Other units include Crater Lake National Park and Oregon Caves National Monument in Oregon, and nine additional units in California. The affected units in California are Redwood National, Whiskeytown National Recreation, Muir Woods National Monument, Golden Gate National Recreation Area, Point Reyes National Seashore, Lassen Volcanic National Park, Sequoia & Kings Canyon National Park, Yosemite National Park, and Devil’s Postpile National Monument.
“This careless plan is designed around a contrived foundation of timber industry-funded, short-term pilot studies,” stated The Center for a Humane Economy’s Senior Vice President Jennifer McCausland. “It will be impossible to scale this up to 24 million acres and to recruit enough volunteer hunters to trample and invade a host of lands, including Washington’s world-renowned national parks, and start shooting these owls that look just like spotted owls.”
Two-term Public Lands Commissioner of Washington state Hilary Franz came out in opposition to the plan in a June letter. “I don’t believe that a decades-long plan to kill nearly half-a-million barred owls across millions of acres of land represents a solution that is absolutely viable, affordable or capable — in fact it raises an enormous amount of questions,” she stated on a June 20 webinar for Animal Wellness Action. “How can we prevent the surviving barred owls from simply recolonizing and repopulating the very areas we are trying to preserve? I think we can do better, and we have too many questions that need to be answered.”
The Center for a Humane Economy and Animal Wellness Action have built a coalition of more than 210 organizations opposing the USFWS barred owl kill-plan. That coalition includes more than 20 local Audubon organizations, including a set of Audubon organizations across Washington state. The coalition also includes owl protection and raptor rehabilitation centers across the West.
Letters to superintendents may be read here:
North Cascades National Park
Mount Rainer National Park
Olympic National Park