Fish and Wildlife Service strategy to preserve spotted owl populations doomed to fail on practical grounds given that the control area covers 24 million acres, including 14 units of the National Park Service
Seattle —Animal Wellness Action and the Center for a Humane Economy filed a legal action in U.S. District Court in Washington State challenging a plan crafted by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Agency (FWS) that greenlights the killing of almost half a million barred owls in the Pacific Northwest over the next 30 years. The FWS filed a Record of Decision on barred owl management in late August. The complaint will be filed today and is available on request.
The unprecedented scheme to kill barred owls — a species native to North America and protected under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act — has been approved to reduce 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. This decline began and continues due to habitat loss, particularly the timber harvest of old growth forest. The groups claim in their filing that the plan is not only ill-conceived and inhumane, but also destined to fail as a strategy to save the spotted owl.
“This inhumane, unworkable barred owl kill-plan is the largest-ever scheme to slaughter raptors in any nation by a country mile,” said Wayne Pacelle, president of Animal Wellness Action and the Center for a Humane Economy. “It calls for unidentified, unspecified individuals to be allowed to kill barred owls over 24 million acres of federal, state, and private lands — including invading national parks such as Olympic, Crater Lake, and Redwoods National Parks at night to shoot owls that look like spotted owls. It has a zero percent chance of success, but it will produce an unheard-of body count of a long-protected owl species native only to North America.”
Barred owls have engaged in range expansion, which is a naturally occurring ecological phenomenon and is a core behavioral and adaptive characteristic of many species of birds and mammals, including barred owls. Former FWS forest owl 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, who is extensively published on spotted owls, barred owls, and range expansion of native bird species in the United States.
In their complaint, the plaintiffs allege that FWS has violated the National Environmental Policy Act by failing to properly analyze the impacts of their strategy and improperly rejecting reasonable alternatives to the mass killing of barred owls, such as nonlethal population control approaches, spotted owl rehabilitation efforts, and better protections for owl habitat. The plaintiffs also argue that the FWS’s plan is so reckless and its implementation is so imprecise and poorly conceived that it is highly unlikely to achieve its goal to stabilize or increase spotted owl populations.
Even worse, the plaintiffs further allege, the plan will result in mistaken-identity kills of spotted owls and other owl species, who are generally nocturnal and 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 other wildlife, including threatened species such as the marbled murrelet. Night hunting of the owls is planned, increasing the risk of mistaken-identity kills.
“This shoddy plan is erected on a questionable foundation of short-term pilot studies,” said Jennifer McCausland, senior vice president for corporate policy for the Center for a Humane Economy. “And even those studies undermine the approach being taken today — any short-time beneficial effects for spotted owls will be vitiated by recolonization of surviving barred owls unless the killings continue in an ‘endless management’ paradigm.”
“FWS’s plan is completely voluntary,” said Kate Schultz, the Center for a Humane Economy’s senior attorney. “So even if the agency believed that shooting nearly 500,000 barred owls is required to save the spotted owl from extinction, this scheme will not accomplish that anyway because it is unfunded, haphazard, and relies on cooperation from unwilling actors. We’re going to end up with thousands of barred owls buried in shallow graves in the forests of the Northwest, even more deforestation, and still no solution for the spotted owl.”
That sentiment was also shared by two-term Public Lands Commissioner of Washington State Hilary Franz, who came out against the plan in a June letter of opposition. “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 said 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 200 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.
Animal Wellness Action and the Center for a Humane Economy are represented by lawyers with the Center for a Humane Economy, Animal and Earth Advocates, PLCC, and Greenfire Law, PC.