To save an endangered owl species, kill off other owls, government proposes
The spotted owl, native to West Coast forests, is getting crowded out by barred owls. A new proposal suggests killing barred owls to save their genetic relatives.
The survival of one owl species hinges on the demise of another.
That’s what the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service argues in its proposal to allow the agency to shoot hundreds of thousands of barred owls over the next 30 years in West Coast forests. The service says the barred owl, which is not native to the region, is crowding out the spotted owl, a close genetic relative.
Without action against the barred owls, service biologists say the spotted owl could disappear from parts of Washington and Oregon within a few years and eventually go extinct.
The proposal is the latest in a series of efforts to save the spotted owl, whose decline became a rallying point for environmentalists opposed to logging in the Pacific Northwest in the 1980s.
Human influence — as European settlers spread west — likely caused the barred owl to colonize the Pacific Northwest. Now, the proposal raises questions about how far people should go to save a species and the costs of righting a historic ecological wrong.
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