The federal government has sparked a whole new round of controversy in its decades-long quandary over saving spotted owls, with plans to kill nearly a half-million other owls to protect them.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) plans to send trained and permitted shooters into Pacific Northwest coastal forests to kill up to 470,000 barred owls. They’re larger than spotted owls and have reportedly been crowding out spotted owls and hogging their food.
Wyoming has barred owls, but they’re not on the state’s hit list.
Killing Owls To Save Owls
Barred owls are originally from the eastern United States, but they’ve been moving west, claiming new territory as they go.
“Barred owls have been spotted in Wyoming and there is evidence of a successful breeding population in Grand Teton National Park,” raptor researcher Chuck Preston told Cowboy State Daily.
Barred owls have reached northern California, Oregon and Washington state. They’ve been encroaching on California spotted owls and northern spotted owls, according FWS.
To give the spotted owls better odds, feds have already killed roughly 4,500 barred owls along the West Coast since 2009.
But apparently that’s not enough, so the the plan is to shoot another 470,000 over the next 30 years or so in California, Oregon and Washington.
That plan has sparked both praise and outrage.
Some have heralded the plan to kill barred owls as a bold step toward finally saving spotted owls from potential extinction. Others have slammed FWS over what they claim will be a needless owl massacre.
Indefinite Killing
Preston, who was the founding curator of the Draper Natural History Museum at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West in Cody, said he has doubts that the mass barred owl shooting will work.
“From a philosophical perspective, it presents a sticky dilemma,” he said. “Barred owls have expanded their range due in large part to human activities. Many other species and subspecies have done the same.”
Barred owls might not count as an invasive exotic species in the Norwest, he added.
Barred owls are “not quite the same as, say, reticulated pythons released by humans in the Everglades,” he said. “So, should barred owl expansion be considered true invasive or simply species expanding its range due to environmental change?”
And shooting barred owls to save spotted owls might be futile, Preston added.
“From pragmatic standpoint, I think it’s a moot point. The genie is out of the bottle, and barred owl seems better adapted to niche opened. You would have to kill barred owls indefinitely,” he said.
Killing Things To Save Things Is Nothing New
There’s a longstanding precedent of killing one wildlife species to save another, retired FWS game warden Tim Eicher of Cody told Cowboy State Daily.
Predators such as coyotes have been knocked back by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Wildlife Services to save deer and other big game, he said.
He also noted the recent killing of pelicans on lakes and reservoirs near Laramie and in Idaho to save prized trout populations.
Eicher said he doesn’t know enough about the situation in the Northwest to know whether the plan to shoot barred owls is a good idea.
The results of culling one species to save another are best judged on a case-by-case basis, he said.
“That comes down to the question, does the means justify the ends?” Eicher said.
There is also the law of unintended consequences, he added.
For instance, in the 1980s, there was an effort to save desert bighorn sheep in New Mexico by killing mountain lions there.
However, it ended up being mostly large, mature mountain lions with established territories that were killed. And that just drew in more mountain lions, to claim those vacant territories, Eicher said.
“Nature abhors a vacuum,” he said, adding that a more recent mountain lion culling to save desert bighorns in a different mountain range appears to be working.
Mark Heinz can be reached at mark@cowboystatedaily.com.
