Wayne Pacelle: Spotted owls in peril and federal wildlife agency is hurting, not helping

In many respects, 2024 was the unfortunate year of the owl – the barred owl, long protected across the nation under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act – that ended up in the crosshairs of our own federal government.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has hatched an inhumane plan to massacre 450,000 barred owls with an outrageously expensive $1.35 billion price tag.

The agency is already financing the regional slaughter of the birds, but in spring, it is planning to expand the program to as many as 24 million acres across California, Oregon and Washington.

We’ll see government-financed hunters shooting into forest canopies from Olympic and Mount Rainier national parks in Washington to Crate Lake in Oregon to Yosemite and Redwoods national parks in California. They’ll be taking aim, mainly at night, at nocturnal birds in forest habitats called home by other look-alike owl species.

The kill aims to reduce competition between barred owls and spotted owls, but it’s doomed to fail.

Startling news of a recent grant from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation provides a benchmark cost estimate for the program.

The foundation funded a $4.5 million grant request from the Hoopa Valley Tribe to kill up to 1,500 owls. Taking the total grant cost and applying it to the number of owls to be killed, the cost estimate per owl is $3,000. With this investment-to-cost ratio as a new baseline for an economic analysis, the cost of killing 450,000 owls across the Northwest over 30 years would be $1.35 billion.

Wildlife will not ‘stay put’ for anyone, not even a wildlife agency

Barred owls are a range-expanding North American native species protected for a century by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. Former FWS wildlife biologist Kent Livezey wrote in one peer-reviewed paper that 111 North American bird species have experienced recent range expansion, with 12 species moving even more widely than barred owls. Indeed, range expansion is a naturally occurring ecological phenomenon, a core behavioral characteristic of birds and mammals.

To demand that species “stay put” in a range that was drawn at a moment in time by some avian population surveyor is to deny the dynamism of ecological principles, weather patterns and human impacts on the landscape and the atmosphere. If you look at the current distribution of barred owls across the continent, the forest owls traveled west over decades, with movements perhaps aided by climate change, hopscotching along the continuous boreal forests that are a belt of stretching across the width of Canada.

Humans fly across the continent in five hours or so. The barred owls, who needed no help from the Wright brothers to take to wing, took a century to go less than half that distance, since they have ranged into the Dakotas since the Pleistocene.

By the agency’s own estimates, conscripted hunters will slay barred owls on 28% of the land area inhabited by spotted owls. But the government seems to have forgotten that owls can fly. What’s to stop the barred owls on the other 72% of land areas from simply flying in and reoccupying sites that were recently purged of their kind? Or how about in-migration from British Columbia?

Eric Forsman, a wildlife biologist and forest owl expert, told the Seattle Times that “once you start” killing barred owls, “you can never stop.” His recommendation: “let the two species work it out.”

Indeed, wild animals compete against one another. They breed with one another. They angle for prey and space. It happens within families, within species, between species. That competition animates ecological systems. Is it realistic to think the federal government can micromanage these countless interactions?

Who’s next in this unthinkable plan?

Our wildlife agency previously documented that the great horned owl may occasionally prey on spotted owls. Will that owl species be next on the hit list? FWS is going down a dangerous road in trying to manage social interactions between species. This is nature at work, and impossible for the agency to keep up with countless interactions between wild animals in dynamic ecosystems.

The whole plan is myopic, looking too narrowly at a single-species response and sidestepping the arduous and more complex task of confronting the decades-long acts of human commerce and settlement that have collectively put spotted owls in peril.

This is a case of the federal wildlife agency not seeing the forest for the trees.

Wayne Pacelle, a two-time New York Times bestselling author, is president of the Center for a Humane Economy.