Federal Plan to Massacre Native Barred Owls Impractical, Costly, and Cruel

Last week, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service formally approved its unprecedented plan to deputize hunters to kill nearly half a million barred owls to reduce social competition with threatened spotted owls.

It is a diabolical wildlife-killing scheme. Impractical and almost certainly doomed to fail. Costly in the extreme, with a price tag approaching a quarter of a billion dollars. And unprecedented in putting a species long-protected under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act into gun sights.

The plan also marks something of a full-blown morphing of the wildlife protection agency into a wildlife-killing entity. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, by unleashing people to kill up to 20,000 owls a year for 30 years, is turning into a look-alike of USDA’s notorious and lethal Wildlife Services agency, which every year kills more than 4 million animals as a de facto service agency for ranchers and other resource users, mainly in the West.

You can count on one thing: we’ll be fighting this plan to kill 450,000 or so forest owls in the courts, in the Congress, and in every other suitable setting.

I am particularly aggrieved at the agency’s false framing of North American barred owls as “invasive.” Like the spotted owls the agency wants to protect, barred owls are native to North America, along with 17 other owl species.

Barred owls weren’t shipped to North America and released into the wild, as were Burmese pythons, by impulsive pet buyers. They weren’t brought to the United States by the feather or fur traders, as were nutria, who got a one-way ticket to North America, escaped their cages on fur farms, and put down and pulled up roots from Delaware to California.

No, barred owls were here long before humans crossed the Bering Land Bridge. And, of course, barred owls have been here way longer than the U.S. Bureau of Biological Survey, the precursor of today’s USFWS, formed in 1871.

In fact, the proof of “nativeness” is that the birds are protected under federal law. Nothing screams “native species” more than being listed as protected under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act.

But now, due to the whims of federal bureaucrats, and without any congressional approval, they’ll be intentionally slaughtered under the pretense that they are an “invasive” species.

Dozens of Organizations, Including Some Audubon Groups, Oppose Kill Plan 

Animal Wellness Action and the Center for a Humane Economy detailed our opposition to forest-owl killing in a detailed letter to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. That letter continues to attract support, with 143 organizations signing it, including 20 local Audubon societies. For the urgent goal of protecting threatened spotted owls, the agency should reverse course and expend federal dollars that can be used effectively and not undermine our values about protecting all owl species.

It’s a deeply unpopular plan. “Maybe the government should consider what one biologist who has long studied spotted owls has suggested: Let nature take its course and leave it to the owls,” wrote the Los Angeles Times in an editorial opposing the plan. “Three decades of dedicated federal policy has not prevented further decline in spotted owl populations,” noted The Columbian, in southeast Washington state, in its editorial opposing the plan. “Nor has it reversed the impact from a century of thinning old-growth forests or a recent increase in the threat of wildfires — factors that have diminished spotted owl habitat. It seems unlikely that shooting hundreds of thousands of barred owls will slow the evolutionary process that is taking place in the forests of the Northwest.”

On so many levels, the plan is deeply flawed.

• The kill plan may cost a quarter of a billion dollars. If the average cost to kill each barred owl (including training, vehicles, gas, staff time, etc.) were only $500, the total cost would be $235,450,000 over the life of this project. The entire USFWS endangered species recovery budget is $82 million per year for a program that is supposed to protect 1,600 species and subspecies.
• The plan is doomed to fail because barred owls from nearby areas will continue migrating, requiring continuous killing of more owls. The USFWS says it will kill just 1 percent of barred owls, meaning that surviving animals will continue to stream into the Pacific Northwest. With the “control area” covering 24 million acres from Marin County, Calif., to the Canadian border, the USFWS is undertaking a program over three decades on a scale that is unprecedented in scale and time frame. The agency can provide no example in the history of American wildlife management where a kill plan covering such a vast area has ever succeeded.
• Range expansion is a naturally occurring ecological phenomenon, and it is a core characteristic of many species of birds and mammals, including barred owls. Especially in an era of climate change, we cannot punish species who adapt to changes in the environment caused by humans. Former USFWS 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.

Not a Capital Crime for a Native Species to Find Suitable Habitat

We cannot victimize animals for adapting to human perturbations of the environment. 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.

If this terrible plan takes flight, the agency will jump on a killing treadmill it will never be able to jump off. But it won’t be burning calories—just hundreds of millions of your tax dollars into the second half of the 21st century.

Animals compete against one another. They kill one another. They breed with one another. They angle for prey and space. That’s nature. It happens every minute of every day among thousands of species. It happens within families, it happens within species, it happens between species. Wolves kill wolves or wolverines kill wolverines. Is it realistic to think the federal government can efficiently manage these countless interactions among native species?

The Fish and Wildlife Service previously documented that the great horned owl preys on spotted owls. Will that owl species be next on the hit list? Would USFWS sign off on a plan to conduct mass shootings of North American owls if they were predating on a highly endangered salamander? Will we start killing orcas in the Northwest because they eat endangered salmon, as they’ve done for countless thousands of years?

The whole plan is myopic, looking too narrowly at a single-species response, choosing a quick-fix to address a panoply of human-caused actions that have driven down spotted owl populations over decades. Unleashing government-authorized hunters to target barred owls, who are nearly a dead ringer for spotted owls, will produce untold numbers of mistaken-identity kills.

Smarter, more strategic uses of the agency’s finite funds for endangered species protections must be made. And with this massive price tag for a program that will not protect an acre of habitat, one might ask, is the agency doing more harm than good by wasting hundreds of millions of dollars it could otherwise use to help save other species?

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