U.S. Fish and Wildlife is playing God by carrying out largest massacre of birds of prey | Opinion

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service wants us to buy into the narrative of the “big, bad barred owl.” But the federal government is traveling down a dangerous path in picking winners and losers among our native wildlife.

In July, the Biden Administration’s wildlife agency issued a final Environmental Impact Statement to initiate the shooting of 450,000 barred owls in the famed and ancient forests of California, Oregon and Washington. The purpose of the 30-year kill plan is to reduce social competition between barred owls and their cousins, threatened spotted owls.

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Deputized “hunters” will be taking aim at nocturnal birds in forest habitats called home by more than a half dozen lookalike owl species — their silhouettes distinguishable perhaps only by experienced birders or ornithologists. The shooting will be conducted in forest habitats spanning 24 million acres across three states, encompassing six national parks, roadless areas within 17 national forests and thousands of pockets of private lands.

As planned, it will be the largest massacre of birds of prey ever attempted by any government.

Over decades, loggers turned many old-growth spruces and redwoods into millions of board feet of high-quality wood, degrading the habitats for forest owls. Just a few thousand spotted owls survive, and concern for them is well-warranted.

But let’s not scapegoat barred owls because of human commerce and excess. Nor is it appropriate to blame barred owls for expanding their range in response to other human impacts on the environment, including climate change (range expansion is a naturally occurring ecological phenomenon, a core behavioral characteristic of birds and mammals).

Former U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services biologist Kent Livezey wrote in one peer-reviewed paper that 111 North American bird species have experienced recent range expansion, with 11 species moving even more widely than barred owls. One of 19 owl species native to North America, barred owls are protected under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act.

No chance of success

By the agency’s own estimates, even if the preferred plan is undertaken, conscripted hunters will try to pick off 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?

Emigrants from Canada can easily hopscotch across tall trees and repopulate forest habitats in Washington and Oregon. 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.”

The federal wildlife agency can provide no example in the history of American wildlife management where a wildlife-control plan covering such a vast, unbounded area has ever succeeded.

It’s also going to break the bank, according to Livezey, who has studied both owl species in the Pacific Northwest. If the average cost to kill each barred owl (including training, vehicles, gas and staff wages) were only $500, the total cost would be $235,450,000 over the life of this project. The entire U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services endangered species recovery budget is about $100 million per year for a program to protect 1,600 species and subspecies.

Playing God in nature

Wild animals compete against one another. They breed with one another. They angle for prey and space. It happens within families, it happens within species, it happens between species. That competition animates ecological systems.

Is it realistic to think the federal government can micromanage these countless interactions? U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services previously documented that the great horned owl preys on spotted owls. Will that owl species be next on the hit list? Would the agency sign off on a plan, to flip the script, to conduct mass shootings of rare or abundant North American owls if they were predating on a highly endangered salamander? Will we start killing orcas along the Pacific Coast because they eat salmon, as they’ve done for thousands of years, if the fish are now endangered?

The whole plan is myopic, looking too narrowly at a single-species response and sidestepping the arduous and more complex task of disentangling myriad human actions that have collectively put spotted owls in peril.

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