Breaking News: Federal Government Racing Ahead with Plan to Start Shooting Thousands of Owls in September

We’ve been working as fast and as hard as we can to stop the federal government’s plan to kill barred owls in California, Oregon, and Washington. But this week, we’ve learned two things: 1) as our legal team just discovered, two more federal grants have been made, totaling $350,000, for shooters from the University of Wisconsin to kill barred owls in Marin County, Calif., and 2) far more ominously, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is planning on starting to shoot barred owls en masse “no sooner than September 10” and that the agency is tapping the notorious Wildlife Services’ program run by the U.S. Department of Agriculture to do the killing.

It’s exactly as we said. Taxpayers are going to foot a billion-dollar multi-agency plan to shoot half a million barred owls in an unworkable and inhumane assault on North American forest owls.

The government knows we sued them in federal court in Seattle to stop their scheme. And they know we are working with lawmakers in the House and Senate to introduce resolutions to shut down these kill plans. Government authorities initially told us that they’d hold off on the scheme while the legal proceedings play out. But they’re nervous that we have momentum, and the arguments and ability to stop them, so they are trying to unleash shooters to start killing owls right away.

Last month, I reported to you that we sniffed out three other grants related to the so-called “Barred Owl Management Strategy”—two of them involving the shooting of barred owls in Mendocino and Sonoma counties in California. We appealed to senior officials at the Department of the Interior that this is a waste of taxpayer dollars, and in response, they cancelled the $1.5 million set aside for these shooting projects.

That was good news.

But now other actors in government are racing ahead with killing plans. They appear to be funding the two grants in Marin County, but more diabolically, they are working with USDA to get people into the fields and forests to start shooting owls.

We may see hunting start in Olympic National Park, Crater Lake National Park, and Yosemite National Park before the calendar turns to fall on September 22.

Barred Owls Are a Native, Long-Protected, Range-Expanding Species

The handful of federal wildlife managers who proposed killing long-protected forest owls, year after year and for decades to come, cannot be surprised to learn that more than 400 animal welfare, bird rehabilitation, and birding groups are opposed to their plan to kill upwards of 450,000 North American forest owls. The “hoot and shoot,” as it’s known—where the federal government would pay people to play recorded calls of owls and then blast away at the duped birds—has been unpopular from the start and does not deserve liftoff.

Now they are trying to start the killing and get it in motion before Congress and the federal courts can act to stop it.

Last week, in a letter to Congress, Kent Livezey, a retired U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist with 14 peer-reviewed publications on barred and spotted owls, urged Congress to stop the killing. “If barred owls were shot in one area, other barred owls would move in and replace them,” Livezey argued, pointing out the futility of the program.

He affirmed what Dr. Eric Forsman, whom Livezey notes is the dean of forest owl biologists, told the press last year: “Control 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.” Livezey calls the plan a “never-ending, bloody game of Whac-a-Mole.”

This week, yet one more scientist got into the act. “Aside from being very costly (estimates start at $3,000/killed owl), the plan simply won’t work,” wrote Dr. Daniel Blumstein, a bird expert and professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of California Los Angeles. “It is likely impossible to eliminate competition across a wide swath of spotted owl range by killing barred owls. The area is too vast, and there are no barriers to entry to dispersing barred owls.”

Unscalable Economics

As stated in the government’s diabolical plan, “barred owls would remain unmanaged on approximately 72 percent of the northern spotted owl range, and barred owl populations would continue to remain stable or increase in these areas” (p. 77). Livezey notes that barred owls typically leave their natal range at about four months of age and routinely disperse about 30 miles. “Virtually all occupied spotted owl territories include and are surrounded by many pairs of barred owls,” he wrote.

For very good reason, the plan approved in the waning months of the Biden administration has attracted the ire of lawmakers from both parties. Reps. Troy Nehls, R-Texas, Josh Harder, D-Calif., Scott Perry, R-Pa., and Adam Gray, D-Calif., have introduced H.J. Res. 111 to nullify the barred owl kill plan, while Sens. John Kennedy, R-La., and Rand Paul, R-Ky., have introduced the companion measure, S.J. Res. 69.

We need you right now to reach out to your two U.S. senators in support of SJR 69 and to your U.S. representative in support of HJR 111 to stop this madness. 

The lawmakers who introduced these resolutions understand that this plan is radical and unprecedented at its core. It calls for killing long-protected owls across 14 National Park Service units, 17 national forests, and other lands. With no American cultural tradition of owl hunting, there is no built-in volunteer labor pool. That’s why the Fish and Wildlife Service is calling in the practiced killers at Wildlife Services.

Killing as many as 450,000 owls will cause extensive suffering, including for the spotted owls who’d be killed in mistaken-identity killings. These are moral concerns, added to the practical and fiscal concerns, that cannot be sidestepped, especially in a nation that loves owls and long ago established legal protection for all 19 species under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act.

As Livezey puts it, “spending more than $1 billion to kill almost one half a million barred owls is not worth the carnage, expense, precedents, and distraction from what is the more important issue: protection of biodiverse old-growth forests.”

Killing barred owls is happening right now. It is our federal government running wild. It is inhumane and unworkable. And it is a diversion—neither economically nor politically sustainable, and morally indefensible.