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Federal Plan to Massacre Native Barred Owls Impractical, Costly, and Cruel
Where does it end for U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service if it starts to manage competition and social relationships among native species?
By Wayne Pacelle
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is traveling down a dangerous road in plotting to kill 500,000 barred owls in a Hail Mary attempt to spare the Northern spotted owls from inter-species competition in the forests of the Pacific Northwest. Barred owls, like the Northern spotted owls the agency aims to protect, are native to North America, along with 17 other owl species.
The barred owls, over decades, have expanded their range. But range expansion by species is as natural as the sun rising or the clouds forming. That’s how ecological systems work.
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 doing so over an area larger than the barred owls’. With range expansion occurring so widely with bird and mammalian species, given human impacts on the environment, these kinds of movements of wildlife will be a never-ending feature of species interactions. And let’s talk precedent and what this kind of plan means for future wildlife-control programs.
Would USFWS, in the future, sign off on a plan to conduct mass shootings of North American owls if they were predating on a highly endangered salamander?
Would agency leaders seek to massacre orcas if ocean temperature changes caused orcas to spend more time in Hawaii and they started feasting on endangered monk seals?
If the USFWS wants to start to manage social relations between animals, it’s going down a very deep rabbit hole.
Will you support us so that we can fight this plan and make sure the forests of the Pacific Northwest don’t turn into a killing zone for forest owls? [[link removed]]
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The Costs Are Too High and the Plan Is Unworkable.
If the average cost to kill each barred owl (including training, vehicles, gas, staff time, guns, reporting, etc.) were only $500, the total cost would be $235,450,000 over the life of this project —nearly a quarter of a billion dollars. The entire USFWS budget for endangered species recovery is $82 million per year, and the barred owl control plan would consume 10 percent of that budget per year through 2055.
If the USFWS had that kind of allocation for the species it is working to recover, it would only be able to execute recovery efforts on 10 of 1,600 species—or .6 percent of listed species. In this case, it’s an allocation of a major chunk of finite resources that does nothing for habitat preservation or restoration that all agree is the key to long-term protection of spotted owls.And the chances of this plan working are next to impossible. We are talking about a wildlife-control-plan across 10 million acres!
And there is nothing to stop barred owls, living in adjacent areas, from flying in and repopulating the newly cleansed areas of forests where the owl shooting occurred. The Vancouver Columbian, a newspaper in the heart of forest owl habitat in southwest Washington state, also opposes the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service plan, noting “officials would trigger a never-ending cycle” of barred owls “moving into new habitat.” It will be impossible to stop in-migration of barred owls living in adjacent habitats.
The federal government has a long history of failure in controlling “unwanted” wildlife populations over vast areas. This plan is simply way beyond the agency’s ability to conduct, it’s unworkable.
Dozens of Organizations, Including Some Audubon Groups, Say Scheme Cannot Work
A few weeks ago, we sent a letter to USFWS leaders to urge the agency to nix its plan to kill 500,000 barred owls between now and 2055. We started with 75 groups, and that number is now at 115 and climbing fast, and it includes 17 local Audubon organizations.
Recently the Los Angeles Times asked the agency to scrap the plan: “Maybe the government should consider what one biologist who has long studied spotted owls has suggested [[link removed]] : Let nature take its course and leave it to the owls,” wrote the biggest paper in the West in its editorial [[link removed]] .
Beyond its inordinately long timeline, this plan has other practical elements making it unworkable. For one, there is no readily available workforce to conduct such a complicated animal-control program, with mass killing of a nocturnal species living in such low densities across vast forest lands, controlled by a diverse set of federal, state, tribal, and private parties.
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.
Smarter, more strategic, less violent uses of the agency’s finite funds for endangered species recovery are in order.
This is a case of the federal wildlife agency not seeing the forest for the trees.
Will you take action today by writing to Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland to demand a stop to this plan? [[link removed]]
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For all owls,
Wayne Pacelle [[link removed]] Wayne Pacelle
President
Animal Wellness Action
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