Our Research and Investigation Uncover Collusion by the Fish and Wildlife Service and the Timber Industry to Kill Owls

We’ve learned in recent days that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s billion-dollar “Barred Owl Management Strategy” (BOMS) is not what it seems. It’s a scheme. A con job. A bait-and-switch.

Sold to the public as a rescue mission for the threatened northern spotted owl, the plan does nothing of that kind. Instead, it’s a deceptive plan with designs not only to produce a body count of 450,000-plus barred owls, but also to kill northern spotted owls in untold numbers.

The BOMS is double trouble for owls. It’s worse than a neutron bomb — because the birds die and not even the trees are left standing.

It’s crony capitalism at work, with government and industry conspiring to bilk taxpayers $1.35 billion, undermine animal welfare and conservation values, and bring massive profits to companies already raking in the dough.

Unbeknownst to the public, the plan all along was for the Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) to craft a plan that uses the pretext of “controlling” barred owl populations as a way of “helping” spotted owls.

But it turned out to be a thin cover plot for the timber industry to nearly double the annual cut of timber in the verdant forests of the Pacific Northwest over the next eight years, laying waste to both species of owls in the process.

Undercutting Decades of Protection for Two Species of Owls

The Endangered Species Act (ESA) protects species it classifies as “threatened” or “endangered” and timber companies and other private actors aren’t generally allowed to take their lives by cutting down the trees that are their homes. Nor are they allowed to kill barred owls or any other North American owls protected under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act (MBTA).

And the agency can also issue an “incidental take” permit to destroy the habitat of the owls — “incidentally” harassing or even killing the spotted owls. But in that circumstance, the agency requires timber companies to offset the harm to the spotted owls by taking some corresponding action to help them. It’s a sort of pay-to-slay scheme.

The prohibition on the killing of these protected species has always presented a problem for the timber industry, putting them in a position of having to come pleading to the FWS to issue permits to kill the species under certain circumstances and come up with creative ways to try to mitigate the harm to the species. But until now, it’s been the job of the FWS to safeguard animal populations, not facilitate habitat destruction or the killing of protected species.

All of that is about to change with the BOMS scheme that FWS, the timber industry, and the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) have colluded to engineer.

The government and business interests have spent years working together to smear the reputation of barred owls — falsely labeling the North American owls as “invasive” and exaggerating their level of competition with spotted owls. In fact, as early as 2016, a BLM Resource Management Plan stated that it would not authorize timber sales that would cause the incidental take of northern spotted owl until a barred owl management program had begun. BLM sowed the seeds for this scheme to kill barred owls and spotted owls nearly a decade ago.

But any person involved in spotted owl conservation understood that it was decades of timber cutting that triggered a long-term decline in their populations, not the behavior of look-alike cousins.

In fact, no bird species has ever driven a different bird species into the extinction abyss. Humans have always been the agents of their demise. The whole blame-game focused on barred owls was a public-private bait-and-switch.

In California, Oregon, and Washington, the FWS and the BLM engineered a legal process to allow the timber companies to “incidentally take” spotted owls as long as the companies participated in killing barred owls. In other words, the FWS will issue permits to kill spotted owls and will then give the timber companies license to kill barred owls. The forests are cleansed of both species with taxpayers paying for the lion’s share of it.

Turning the ESA into a Sword to Hurt Wildlife

 It’s an extraordinary perversion of the Endangered Species Act, turning a federal law designed as a shield for wildlife into a sword.

We’ve said all along that the BOMS was a boondoggle — a waste of a billion dollars on an inhumane plan, a deflection away from the timber industry’s own destructive conduct, and an unworkable plan. Shooting barred owls would do little good, since other barred owls would fill in the void in short order, resetting the existing relationships between the two owl species.

But it’s worse than we originally imagined — with the spotted owls also being the targets of this plan. The scheme smacked of industry capture of government. The FWS was charged to protect barred owls under the terms of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act and to protect northern spotted owls under the MBTA and the Endangered Species Act. Instead, the agency has put targets on the backs of the barred owls and it’s putting “do cut” markings on trees slated for felling.

Congress Can Unwind BOMS

But we can turn around this mess and morass if Congress passes the resolutions to nullify BOMS. The resolutions — S.J. Res. 69, led by Sens. John Kennedy, R-La., and Rand Paul, R-Ky., and H.J. Res. 111, promoted by Reps. Troy Nehls, R-Texas, Josh Harder, D-Calif., Scott Perry, R-Pa., and Adam Gray, D-Calif. — will maintain existing protections for barred owls and spotted owls. And they won’t burn your taxpayer dollars in the process.

Last week, Sen. Kennedy turned in 30 signatures from his colleagues, meeting the threshold required to bring his resolution directly to the floor for a simple majority vote of all 100 senators. That vote can happen any day now.

If it goes our way, the action will allow the FWS to get back to conservation basics: protecting habitats, engaging in sound forestry practices, and sensible management of forests to preserve owls who rule the night. Nixing BOMS will prevent shooting of barred owls in 14 national parks and it will prevent a timber-industry assault on threatened spotted owls and their habitats, too.

We’ve built a coalition of 450 groups to fight for the owls. But we need you — and tens of thousands of caring people like you — to raise their collective voices right now against hurting the barred owls and the spotted owls.