A federal government plan for hunters to kill thousands of invasive owls to protect the rapidly declining northern spotted owl has ruffled the feathers of dozens of animal advocacy groups.
On Monday, a coalition of 75 animal rights and wildlife protection organizations sent a letter to U.S. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland asking her to scrap what they describe as a “reckless plan” to wipe out half a million barred owls in West Coast states over the next three decades.
The letter, spearheaded by the Animal Wellness Action group and the Center for a Humane Economy, lambastes the plan for being unworkable and short-sighted, arguing that it will lead to the wrong owls being shot and disruption to nesting behavior.
“Implementing a decades-long plan to unleash untold numbers of ‘hunters’ in sensitive forest ecosystems is a case of single-species myopia regarding wildlife control,” states the letter, signed by Wayne Pacelle, president of Animal Wellness Action, and Scott Edwards, general counsel for the Center for a Humane Economy.
Federal wildlife officials believe the action is necessary to control the population of the barred owl — which they consider invasive — and give the threatened northern spotted owls a fighting chance on their home turf.
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Decades of attempt to preserve Spotted Owls in the US and Canada have failed. Any attempts to curtail the human behavior making the situation worse have either been, at best, ignored by people or the governments themselves. At its worst, it’s lead to hate and violence.
The Barred Owl is much more adaptable than the Spotted Owl. At this point trying to stop the Barred Owl overtaking the Spotted Owl feels like trying hold back water.
One thing that could be a success in a less orthodox way is allowing the hybridization of the owls. Barred and Spotted Owls can mate successfully. The current problem with this approach is that hybrids all also killed in these programs.
They are not so similar visually, but since both are active at night, it makes positive identification more difficult when they would actually be hunted.
Many species of owls are in danger due to endless destruction of old growth forest necessary for owls. Owls do not build nests and require trees that have been around for about 100 years to be suitable to have natural cavities for them to nest and for the forest to have enough wildlife for them to eat. But this is also the most valuable timber, and the loss of this habitat has been the root of this problem.
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EDIT: I just read this article again after putting it in one of the links above. If anyone is interested in the topic of this post, I highly recommend reading this article. It touches a lot on what not just the owls, but mankind is losing by us failing to care for these creatures.
Only one female remains in the Canadian wilderness, a symbol of the country’s inability to save a species on the verge of destruction as politicians dither and the logging continues.
“My mom, she’d tell us stories about them, how they’d grab us if we didn’t behave or if we were out too late,” remembers Hobart, now chief of the Spô’zêm First Nation. “When you hear the owls, you better be inside … I remember the owls and I remember the fear.”
It has been decades since he heard the haunting barks and trills of the diminutive owl, but with the terror gone, they remind him of the warm summer nights of his youth.
“When I tell my own kids that story, it feels different. Because they’ve never heard the sounds of the owl at night. I don’t know if they ever will.”
Why does this article title sound like a Dale Gribble quote?
Okay those looks super similar to me, I think they look especially similar from afar. Are we sure Hunters are going to be able to tell the difference? Or rather bother to before they pull the trigger?
It does happen and they know about it. This has been going on for years, but not to this scale. The increase in cull numbers is why this is news, not that this process is new. This has been going on since the 1970s.
It gets more and more painful as the number of Spotted Owls dwindles. I feel this is just prolonging the inevitable at this point.
No offense to the OP, but this story wrecks my day every time I run across it because this was all so preventable.
While there certainly would be some mistakes, typical hunters and fishermen are usually pretty good about sustainability practices and identifying what should and should not be taken. It’s taken seriously, in my experience anyway. The exceptions to that are just that, they’re exceptions. They should get their permits revoked, since they ruin it for everyone.
Normally I’d agree but I’m skeptical of this one. The two species are very similar, and it easy to hide an owl carcass if you get the wrong one by mistake…
Why don’t they just trap the barred owls and place them in zoos, aviaries, and other protected places. Why do they need to be killed?
Barred Owls are very successful owls and there is no shortage of them. That’s why they can kill so many of them and it won’t hurt the population as a whole. Anyone who wants a Barred Owl already has one. It’s like how you would immediately overload regular animal shelters if you collected every stray dog or cat and asked them to feed and home them on their own dime. Zoos are a bit different I believe, but raptor shelters are all privately funded and in most states you can count one one hand the number of people licensed to properly care for them. There is a ton of bureaucracy in place, designed to protect these animals, that limits greatly who can do what with them. It’s technically a felony for a person to have a single owl feather.
The real problem is humans have destroyed the environment where these much less aggressive and adaptable Spotted Owls live, and we expect them to survive in a niche that doesn’t work for them. The Barred Owls are the unfortunate scapegoat here.
Without the US and Canada willing to say no to their respective timber industries, I say let them hybridize. Otherwise I’m afraid the Spotted Owl will be gone from the wild in my lifetime. Raising them captive and releasing them has not been working well either. See the article in the edit of my big post.
It’s like if we cloned a mammoth. We can make more, but the environment they lived in doesn’t really exist anymore.
