It’s the Moment of Truth for Barred Owls in the U.S. Senate
The fate of these raptors hangs not just on the actions of 100 U.S. senators, but the constituents who make their voices heard
- Wayne Pacelle
If Congress does not put the kibosh on the scheme to kill nearly half a million North American barred owls — purportedly to ease competition between them and spotted owls, who are look-alike cousins — it will set a cancerous precedent.
The deadly idea will spread. Our U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) will start down the path of targeting and killing native species because they compete with threatened and endangered species.
This will turn the very essence of the Endangered Species Act on its head. The law, enacted in 1973, was designed to limit “taking” of rare species by humans. It is unlawful for people to “harass, harm, pursue, hunt, shoot, wound, kill, trap, capture, or collect, or to attempt to engage in any such conduct” targeting a threatened or endangered species.
The law was not designed to stop animals from competing with other animals, or even from chasing or harming other animals. It was not designed to stop competition for food or nesting sites, or impede other normal behaviors between dozens of native species in complex ecosystems. Competition is precisely the point of natural systems.
If the barred owl plan is allowed to proceed, the next step for the FWS might be to start killing great horned owls, since — unlike barred owls — they actually predate on spotted owls.
Perhaps next, the agency will start targeting sandhill cranes because they compete with highly endangered whooping cranes.
And maybe it won’t be limited to birds. If a mountain lion encroaches on the habitat of an endangered wolf, will the agency start killing mountain lions in an attempt to control such natural behavior?
Make no mistake, what the FWS is proposing to do with this barred owl kill is a novel misuse of the Endangered Species Act. And its proposal to kill barred owls, in this instance, is 1,000 times bigger than any prior effort by any government in the world to kill birds of prey.
The Plan Is Unprecedented in Other Ways
The “Barred Owl Management Strategy,” in the text of its plan, describes opening 14 units of the National Park Service for people to shoot North American barred owls. Crater Lake National Park, Olympic National Park, Yosemite National Park, and 11 other iconic sites will be turned into nighttime shooting galleries to hunt down the nocturnal owls.
The plan is a prescription for the accidental shooting of spotted owls. Why and how? Because barred owls and spotted owls are just about the same size, they have the same silhouette, and they have very similar coloring. Heather King, an extraordinary owl photographer and videographer, told me in an interview recently that she’s been “studying owls for 15 years, and owl lovers as well as nature enthusiasts constantly tell me of an owl they saw, and when I question them, they almost always misidentify the species.”
This Kill Plan Is Patently Unworkable
In a letter to Congress, Kent Livezey, a former U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist and author of 14 peer-reviewed papers on owls, wrote that he does not believe that “spending more than 1 billion dollars to kill almost one-half million barred owls is worth the carnage, expense, precedents, and distraction from what is the more-important issue: protection of biodiverse old-growth forests.” Livezey calls the plan a “never-ending, bloody game of Whack-a-Mole.”
Dr. Bill Lynn of Clark University, an ethicist hired by the FWS to design the Barred Owl Stakeholder Group, noted that “[b]arred owls will experience tremendous loss of life indefinitely, but this will do nothing to stop the decline of the spotted owl.”
Prof. Daniel Blumstein, from the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at UCLA, observed that “[i]t 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.”
And Dr. Mark Davis, DeWitt Wallace Professor of Biology at Macalester College, said “[i]t is impossible to exterminate all the barred owls in a region, and even if it were possible, they would be rapidly replaced by owls immigrating from the eastern and northern populations.”
Dr. Eric Forsman, who Livezey notes is the dean of forest owl biologists, told the Seattle Times: “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.”
Unconscionable Cruelty, Unscalable Economics
Livezey observes that “a $4.5 million grant from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation to the Hoopa Valley Tribe to kill 1,500 barred owls places the cost at $3,000 per owl,” translating into an overall project cost of $1.35 billion to kill the 450,000 owls as proposed. And that figure assumes costs don’t rise as owls become warier over time. “Costs would increase due to artificial selection because some barred owls may witness the shooting of their mate, escape, learn to stay away, and teach their young to do so,” he notes.
“Virtually all occupied spotted owl territories include and are surrounded by many pairs of barred owls,” he adds. “If barred owls were shot in one area, other barred owls would move in and replace them.”
Owls Need Your Help Right Now. Today.
Killing owls to save owls makes no sense. It is not progress. It is a diversion, cooked up by a small set of players within the timber industry to distract from the more serious threat to spotted owl habitats posed by some timber harvesting practices. It’s a bait and switch.
I pose a simple question to anyone at the FWS, whether the one run by the Biden team last year or the Trump team now: what bird species in the world have ever been put at risk by a different native bird species?
The answer is none. Nada. It just doesn’t happen.
The designs of nature are seamless. In the industrial age, it’s only the hand of man that has put species on the precipice of extinction or pushed them over the edge.
Any day now, the U.S. Senate is expected to take up S.J. Res. 69, a resolution that would nullify the FWS’s costly, unworkable, and inhumane plan to kill barred owls.
More than ever, we need you as a citizen advocate. Please write to your two U.S. senators and urge them to vote “YES” on S.J. Res. 69 to stop the barred owl massacre. And please forward my letter and this exhortation to 10 friends and ask them to reach their lawmakers, too.
S.J. Res. 69 is about so much more than protecting North American barred owls. It’s about halting a gross misuse of the Endangered Species Act, with the FWS turning it from a shield to protect native wildlife into a sword to kill native wildlife.
That was never the purpose of the Endangered Species Act. The FWS is morphing before our eyes into a wildlife-killing agency resembling the dastardly work of USDA’s so-called Wildlife Services’ program, which kills upwards of four million animals a year, mostly birds, mainly as a subsidy to different private industries.
And given the urgency of this policy issue, let me make one more ask of you: Please also call your senators and tell the receptionist that you want your U.S. Senator “to vote YES on S.J. Res. 69 and you do not want the government to wage war against North American owls.” Here’s the phone number: (202) 224-3121.
Send a group email. Ride through the town center. Shout from the rooftop. So much is at stake.
Wayne Pacelle is president of Animal Wellness Action and the Center for a Humane Economy and a two-time New York Times best-selling author.
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