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Dear Friends,
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service scheme to kill 450,000 barred owls in the forests of California, Oregon, and Washington has to be one of the most ill-conceived government plans ever cooked up.
It is a billion-dollar expense.
It is unworkable.
And it is inhumane and unprecedented in taking aim at North American owls protected for more than a century under the federal Migratory Bird Treaty Act.
Here’s the big news: we are closing in on 30 signatures in the Senate needed to discharge S.J. Res. 69, led by Senators John Kennedy, R-La., and Rand Paul, R-Ky., from the Environment and Public Works Committee and bring it to the floor for a vote of all 100 senators.
We need your help to push it over the finish line.
Meanwhile, we are building bipartisan support for H.J. Res. 111 in the House, led by Reps. Troy Nehls, R-Texas, Josh Harder, D-Calif., Scott Perry, R-Pa., and Adam Gray, D-Calif. We now have 435 animal welfare, conservation, wildlife rehabilitation, and birding groups who’ve swung behind S.J. Res. 69 and H.J. Res. 111, including 35 local Audubon societies (among them, key groups throughout the range states of California, Oregon, and Washington).
Those promoting the massacre of owls argue that removing barred owls will ease competition for Northern and California spotted owls. But Kent Livezey, a retired U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist with more than a dozen peer-reviewed papers on barred and spotted owls, agrees with our assessment that the plan is impractical and doomed to fail.
Barred owls are firmly established in the Pacific Coast states, and even if shooters remove owls from one area, barred owls will swoop in from other areas to fill the empty territories. Juveniles disperse widely, moving up to 30 miles from their natal sites, ensuring a constant flow of replacements.
Livezey warns that this creates a perpetual, expensive, and inhumane cycle: the federal government would be placed on a killing treadmill it can never dismount, making the plan not only cruel but futile.
And the cost! A pilot project funded by the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation came out to $3,000 per owl killed. Scaled up to 450,000 birds, the project would cost an eye-popping $1.35 billion, diverting funds from more productive and life-saving programs to protect spotted owls.
Only a tiny cadre of people has any experience in selectively shooting barred owls, meaning poorly trained shooters would invade 14 national parks and 17 national forests, operating in the dead of night, and easily mistake spotted owls for barred owls. In the end, the owl body count would undoubtedly include members of both species.
The plan also diverts attention from the underlying cause of spotted owl scarcity: loss and degradation of old-growth forests. Shifting the focus away from protecting trees and putting money into shooting barred owls is myopic and it is a distraction from sound conservation practices.
There are better ways to save owls than to shoot owls.
Congress now can be as wise as an owl and stop this madness. Please call your senators and representative at 202-225-3121 and urge them to cosponsor S.J. Res. 69 and H.J. Res. 111. Together, we can halt this misguided, inhumane, and unworkable assault on our native owls.
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