As soon as next spring, barred owls will be shot in the woods in a plan finalized Wednesday. As many as 450,000 barred owls could be killed in three states over the next 30 years in an effort to save the spotted owl.
The cull is necessary to prevent extinction of the spotted owl, which is being pushed out of its native range by the barred owl, a native of the East Coast, said Kessina Lee, state supervisor for the Oregon office of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which developed the program.
The goal is not to eliminate barred owls, but to ensure both species survive into the future, she said. "This is about carving out that space for spotted owls to have the space to persist," Lee said.
The window to take action is closing on an animal in steep decline with competition from a competitor that is pushing — and eating — the spotted owl out of house and home. The spotted owl was listed under the Endangered Species Act as a threatened species in 1990.
Immense numbers of salamanders, flying squirrels, wood rats — even screech owls — have been depleted since the barred owl moved in, said Kathryn Fitzgerald, northern spotted owl recovery lead for the service. In that way, the spotted owl is an umbrella species, which if protected, can save other species too, she said.
Lee emphasized that as biologists and wildlife professionals, no one at the service takes the kill plan lightly. "But we do have a responsibility to do all we can to prevent spotted owls from going extinct." The program is intended to kill less than one half of 1% of the current North American barred owl population.
There will be no all-citizens barred owl shoot. Rather the plan calls for working with landowners to deploy shooters trained under the agency's protocol. Nonlead shot will be used to kill the owls with shotguns at close range, usually at dusk and at night when they are active and will respond to calls used to locate them. The kills would happen in Washington, Oregon and California over the 30-year plan.
The plan continues to draw sharp criticism.
"This would be the largest raptor slaughter that any government in the world has ever undertaken, and there is no close second," said Wayne Pacelle, president of Animal Wellness Action and Center for a Humane Economy, two national animal welfare organizations based in the Washington, D.C., area.
Barred owls are just doing what animals do, expanding their range to respond to human alteration of the environment — something that can be expected to happen more often as climate change alters habitats, Pacelle said. Native to North America for millions of years, barred owls will never be eliminated because they will just fill nest areas that hunters empty, Pacelle said.
"There is no precedent for success for any wildlife control program over such a vast area, with a flighted species ... you will have a never-ending treadmill of killing."
He also questioned the practicalities of the plan. "Who wants to do this? Who wants to kill owls? The whole thing is unworkable; they won't have the money, they won't have the labor, the area is too vast."
Bob Sallinger, executive director of Bird Conservation Oregon, said even playwrights have reached out to him over the pathos of the situation. "It's a bit of a tragedy, these things we do as human beings, the unintended consequences, and the hubris," Sallinger said.
The situation speaks to the essential need to preserve habitat for species in the first place, so species do not become threatened like the spotted owl, which lost much of its habitat to old-growth logging.
The Northwest Forest Plan adopted in 1994 was intended to save the owl by stopping logging on 24 million acres of old growth in the same states in which the service now wants to kill barred owls to save spottys that have continued to decline.
"Once a species is imperiled," Sallinger said, "it is very hard to get it back."
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