Congress Taking Steps to Address Costly, Inhumane, and Unworkable Plan to Kill Nearly Half a Million Barred Owls

It’s an arresting image for the modern-day conservation and wildlife protection movements.

Soldiers, clad in army fatigues, eyes alert, and clasping AK-47s tethered to shoulder straps, form a protective circle around a highly endangered white rhino grazing on the savannah in east Africa. They are in the field to defend these especially rare and easy targets from poachers who covet the keratin-rich horns valued in Traditional Chinese Medicine.

The rangers’ job description does not, however, include shooting elephants or giraffes who might compete with them for food or killing lions or leopards or other predators who might attack an elderly or newborn rhino. Nor are they on duty to retrieve water or food for the animals. They stand guard to apprehend poachers, not to intervene in the workings of nature.

On this side of the Atlantic, our U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) is also enlisting armed men in the name of conservation — in this case, for threatened spotted owls in California, Oregon, and Washington. But the agency’s scheme is not about thwarting poachers. Rather, the plan is to unleash thousands of armed men to shoot barred owls, who are lookalike cousins of the spotted owls. The more abundant barred owls are competing for nesting sites with the threatened spotted owls.

The goal is to reduce social competition between the owls and to amass a body count of 450,000 barred owls over the next 30 years. The plan involves shooting about 30 barred owls for every Northern or California spotted owl in existence. The shooters would play recorded sounds of barred owls and draw them in — known in some circles as “the hoot and shoot.”

The FWS failed to include a cost estimate in its 300-page Environmental Impact Statement on the “Barred Owl Management Strategy.” But a recent grant to the Hoopa Valley Tribe funds the shooting of 1,500 owls — $3,000 per owl. Applying that cost estimate per bird to the goal of taking 450,000 of them, that’s a potential outlay of $1.35 billion from taxpayers.

As Dr. Eric Forsman, a longtime U.S. Forest Service biologist, is quoted in this L.A. Times editorial and this NPR piece, “[t]o try to control barred owls across a large region would be incredibly expensive, and you’d have to keep doing it forever because if you ever stopped, they would begin to come back into those areas,” and, “…in the long run, we’re just going to have to let the two species work it out.”

On May 28, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) determined that the Congress may use a law called the Congressional Review Act (CRA) to nullify the September 2024 Biden Administration rulemaking by a simple majority vote in each chamber of Congress.

An Unprecedented Massacre of Native Wildlife

“In the spirit of fiscal responsibility and ethical conservation, we urge you to halt all spending on this plan to kill a native, range-expanding North American owl species,” wrote U.S. Reps. Troy Nehls, R-Texas, and Sydney Kamlager-Dove, D-Calif., along with 17 other members of Congress, in a letter sent in March to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum.

The “Barred Owl Management Strategy” explicitly allows hunting in 17 national forests and 14 National Park Service units, including parks such as Yosemite, Redwoods, Olympic, Mount Rainier, and Crater Lake. This runs contrary to the core mission of the National Park Service, which prohibits hunting in most units to preserve wildlife and visitor experience. Nighttime shoots have the potential to instill fear in wildlife and diminish the wildlife-watching opportunities that draw millions to the parks and boost gateway communities.

At the end of May, U.S. Reps. Andrew Garbarino, R-N.Y., and Adam Gray, D-Calif., released a second opposition letter noting that “this project would be the largest mass killing of birds of prey conducted by any government in the history of the world.” The lawmakers, including U.S. Reps. Val Hoyle, D-Ore., and David Valadao, R-Calif., from the affected area, asked Secretary Burgum to defund the plan and to “suspend the issuance of take permits.”

“The plan fails to explain why barred owls from those surrounding areas would not be attracted to the same nesting sites and simply fly in to replace the culled owls,” wrote the lawmakers.

Nixing This Program Must Be an Animal Protection Priority

When the federal government took action to protect rapidly declining California condors, mainly menaced by spent lead ammunition from sport hunters, it didn’t take aim at foxes or coyotes that might compete with the giant birds on the West Coast. It captured surviving condors and put them in protected outdoor enclosures, fed them an ideal diet, gave them shelter from the wind and weather, had vets treat them for illness or injury, and did what they could to promote reproduction and juvenile survivorship.

Captive breeding produced more condors, and they took to the wild and survived. But when the giant birds soared on wind currents again, the agency didn’t start shooting other wild animals to reduce social competition.

Our government made a terrible error in taking aim at a North American native owl species in the first place. Yes, the two species of owls are competing. That’s nature. It’s not the role of government to conduct the impossible task of managing social relationships between animals.

Barred owls are not like Burmese pythons imported from southeast Asia by the pet trade and now gobbling up meso-predators like bobcats and raccoons in Everglades National Park. Nor are they like nutria from South America degrading levees after their escape from fur farms here. And they are not European wild boars released from hunting ranches and causing havoc for landowners and others.

Paleontologists have documented that barred owls have lived in North American since the Pleistocene. They live only on this continent. This is their home.

Over the years, they have expanded their range and moved into West Coast forests because that’s in their DNA. Barred owls and hundreds of other bird species adapt and seek new suitable habitats. It’s range expansion — the same process allowed humans and other species to spread across this continent and other continents many thousands of years ago.

In fact, the proof of “nativeness” is that the barred owls, like the other 18 species of North American owls, are protected under federal law. Nothing screams “native species” more than being listed as protected under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. They have been protected under federal law since the second term of Woodrow Wilson.

Barred Owl Killing Is a Hail Mary Pass from Some Proponents

The whole plan, as Dr. Forsman and the federal lawmakers said, is unworkable. The FWS plan calls for killing owls across just 28% of the 24-million-acre control area. There will still be plenty of barred owls to claim areas cleansed of their kin, triggering a deadly, ineffective game of Whac-A-Mole and preventing the federal government from dismounting “an owl-killing treadmill,” wrote the lawmakers.

But beyond the practical flaws in the plan, there’s also the underlying ethical concern. Is it the job of the FWS to start picking winners and losers in nature among native species?

I would object just as loudly to a plan from the National Marine Fisheries Service to protect endangered North Atlantic right whales if the agency wanted to kill fin whales competing for krill or orcas who might threaten to predate on the right whales.

Would the FWS support shooting 500,000 bald eagles because the birds occasionally prey on an endangered fish? Would they support killing 500,000 peregrine falcons because they are competing for nest sites with some rare, lookalike hawk?

A friend of mine who leads a major environmental organization in the Pacific Northwest recently called the barred owl “a bully,” and he and his organization came out in support of this mass shooting of the native birds.

A bully?

Are wolves bullies because they kill elk and deer to survive? Are great horned owls bullies because they are bigger and stronger than other owls and can drive them away from their nests?

The truth is, barred owls compete to survive and nothing more. Most environmental organizations, including 25 local Audubon society organizations that have joined our coalition, understand that fact.

Climate change, forest clearing for agriculture or human settlement, and other effects of human economic activity will continue to trigger all sorts of species movements. We should not victimize animals for adapting to human perturbations of the environment, nor punish them for finding new places to live. That instinct is built into their brains.

This is a case of the federal wildlife agency not seeing the forest for the trees.