US Officials Finalize Plan to Kill About 450,000 Invasive Owls

United States wildlife officials finalized a plan on Wednesday to kill a little over 450,000 invasive owls from the Pacific Northwest.

In a plan by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to significantly boost efforts to get rid of barred owls crowding out native owls in forests along the upper West Coast, trained shooters will target the invasive species over a period of 30 years across a maximum of about 23,000 square miles in California, Oregon and Washington.

U.S. officials hope to kill up to 452,000 barred owls, which in effect will stop the decline of northern spotted owls, a federally protected threatened species, and California spotted owls. California spotted owls were proposed for federal protection last year and a decision is still pending.

Public hunting of barred owls would be prohibited under the new plan. Instead, government agencies, landowners, tribes or companies would be designated to kill the invasive owls and shooters would need to provide documentation of training or experience in owl identification and firearm skills.

Barred owls are native to eastern North America but began to appear in the Pacific Northwest in the 1970s. Currently, the ratio of barred owls to spotted owls within a given range is about 100,000 to roughly 7,100, according to U.S. officials.

Killing the barred owls will not only help the spotted owls but also the frog and salamander species that the invasive owls prey on.

“It’s not just one owl versus one owl,” David Wiens, a U.S. Geological Survey scientist who led a barred owl removal study that ended in 2020, told the Associated Press (AP). “Because of their predatory behavior, they are basically eating anything in the forest and this includes amphibians, small mammals, other bird species.”

Although controversial, killing invasive species to save native species has been done in the past such as when the National Marine Fisheries Service reduced the criteria to kill sea lions preying on salmon swimming along the West Coast in 2019.

Former Fish and Wildlife Service biologist Kent Livezey is critical of the new plan to rid the Pacific Northwest of the barred owl, telling the AP that it is ill-advised and could cost hundreds of dollars per bird.

“We should let nature take its course,” he said in an email. “Birds (and all animals) move. Competitions arise. Should we be stepping in and killing mass numbers of them like this?”

Livezey added that he has documented over 100 bird species that have expanded their range in recent years.

Meanwhile, Fish and Wildlife Service Oregon state supervisor Kessina Lee explained how this new plan would not totally wipe out barred owls from the West.

“We’re talking about managing in less than 50 percent of that northern spotted owl range to try and carve out space for those spotted owls,” she told the AP. “We’re still going to have barred owls in the West. This is really just about trying to prevent the extinction of spotted owls.”

This article includes reporting from The Associated Press.