Killing owls might just help the animals in the long run. To protect a species of endangered owls, government biologists have proposed killing a different species.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has proposed that the agency shoot and kill hundreds of thousands of barred owls over the next 30 years in West Coast forests to protect the spotted owl. Barred owls are not native to the region and have been crowding out the spotted owl, which is known to be from the area.
Without this action against barred owls, biologists believe that the spotted owl could disappear from parts of Washington and Oregon within a few years and eventually go extinct. The decline of the spotted owl started in the 1980s as logging in the Pacific Northwest ramped up.
Human influence seems to be to blame for the barred owl’s presence in the Pacific Northwest. “It’s not the barred owls’ fault. It’s our fault for bringing them out here. It’s not the spotted owls’ fault either,” said Robin Brown, a Fish and Wildlife Service biologist who is the agency’s barred owl strategy lead. “The species’ future is extinction if we don’t manage barred owls. The writing is on the wall.”
In the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s proposal, they call for a total of more than 470,000 barred owls to be “lethally removed,” aka killed with shotguns. The push to have this proposal approved could be between life and death for the spotted owl species.
Spotted owl populations have declined by about 75 percent in the past two decades and continue to decline by about five percent each year. This is largely because of barred owls, whose population has reached more than 100,000 in forests on the West Coast.
“They come into these areas. They reach high densities. They’re basically eating everything and competing with spotted owls for food,” said David Wiens, a supervisory research wildlife biologist for the U.S. Geological Survey.
The USFWS’ proposed management plan calls for killing barred owls across around one-third of the spotted owl range in Washington, Oregon and California over the next three decades. The plan would remove the barred owl from one to two percent of its current range.
The public comment period for the USFWS proposal ends on January 16, 2024. After the public comment period ends, a final proposal is expected to be submitted in the spring or summer of this year.
Source: https://www.fws.gov/media/draft-environmental-impact-statement-barred-owl-management-strategy