Killing barred owls to save northern spotted owls: Rethinking American wildlife conservation

The Barred Owl is considered “invasive” in the Pacific Northwest and it’s pushing the Northern Spotted Owl to extinction. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has a plan — kill nearly half a million Barred Owls over the next 30 years.

Guests

Tom Wheeler, executive director of the Environmental Protection Information Center [EPIC]

Jay Odenbaugh, professor of humanities, professor of philosophy at Lewis & Clark College.

Also Featured

Kessina Lee, Oregon State supervisor for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Mark Higley, wildlife biologist at Hoopa Valley Tribal Reservation.

Transcript

Part I

(NORTHERN SPOTTED OWL CALL)

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: This is the call of the Northern Spotted Owl.

And this is the call of the Barred Owl.

(BARRED OWL CALL)

CHAKRABARTI: The two species are close relatives. The medium sized, dark brown, Northern Spotted Owl being smaller than its more aggressive and territorial cousin the Barred Owl. But the most critical difference between the two is that in the forests of the Pacific Northwest, the Spotted Owl is considered a native species. The Barred Owl, an invasive from the Eastern U.S.

The Spotted Owl is also a listed threatened species. And the successful spread of, and competition from, the Barred Owl is one of the factors pushing the Spotted Owl closer to extinction.

Now, the two raptors are at the center of a controversial federal plan that raises questions about the entire philosophy behind traditional models of conservation and the goals of the Endangered Species Act.

Put simply: How many hundreds of thousands of one species can be justifiably killed to preserve another? And what, exactly is it, that we’re trying to save?

This is On Point. I’m Meghna Chakrabarti.

To understand the importance of the current debate over Spotted Owl conservation and forest management, we have to go back about fifty years, before the invasive Barred Owl was firmly established in the forests of the Northwest.

Back then, the Spotted Owl was at the center of another years-long battle. One that went on for so long and created so much upheaval in the Northwest, it came to be known as the Timber Wars.

(CHAINSAW CUTTING OLD GROWTH / TREE HITS GROUND)

The old growth forests of the Pacific Northwest are some of the most complex ecosystems in the world. Conifer trees two centuries old and two hundred feet tall create an intricate canopy that protects a dense understory below.

The forests have a storybook aura to them, with pristine waterways and mist draped mountainsides. They were also a critically important natural resource, and therefore the economic heart of logging communities across the Northwest.

But a century of logging meant that the old growth forests were rapidly disappearing. Environmentalists made it their mission to save them.

In the 1980s and early 90s, as environmental lawyers sought court injunctions to stop timber sales on federal lands, protestors blockaded logging roads, chained themselves to trees, held hunger strikes, and camped up in the canopy of stands slated for cutting.

(PROTESTOR MONTAGE)

CHAKRABARTI: The Northern Spotted Owl lives in those old growth forests. And as billions of board-feet of timber were felled, the owl’s numbers plummeted too. That spurred the push to use the Endangered Species Act to protect the Spotted Owl. In June 1990, the federal government made its decision.

ARCHIVAL RADIO NEWS: Good Friday morning, it’s 8:30 in sweet home  … as a threatened species this morning.  

CHAKRABARTI: Logging communities who’d worked the forests for generations felt they were fighting for their lives. Automation in the timber industry had already cost thousands of jobs. Now, they feared that the federal mandate to protect the Spotted owl would wipe out their entire way of life.

LOGGERS: Why should the owl be protected 100% and a way of life not … thre are thousands more than that.

CHAKRABARTI: Between 1989 and 1995, logging on federal land fell by 90%.

I grew up in Oregon. When I was in middle and high school, it felt like we heard about another sawmill closing almost every month.

There were t-shirts and bumper stickers with “Save a Logger Eat an Owl” and “I like my spotted owl fried” sold in places like Sweet Home and Mill City.

And then, in 1994, the Clinton Administration established the Northwest Forest Plan. It protected 10 million acres of federal land, preserving old growth forests, encouraging younger trees, and creating buffer zones in order to protect endangered species, including the Northern Spotted Owl.

Did it work?

We’re now three decades on. The Spotted Owl is still a dangerously threatened species. In fact, in the past twenty years, the number of spotted owls has declined by as much as 80 percent.

And part of the reason for that dire decline – pressure from the Barred Owl, an East Coast native, but invasive in the Northwest.

Doug Heiken is with the conservation group Oregon Wild. He described the problem to Portland TV station KGW.

DOUG HEIKEN: You have these territorial species … you need to make your house bigger.

CHAKRABARTI: But making the owl’s house bigger is a project of decades, if not centuries. They are old growth forests after all. Instead, the US Fish and Wildlife Service opted for a different strategy.

Last month, the agency announced its Barred Owl management plan. It calls for the culling of almost half a million Barred Owls in the next thirty years, in order to reduce pressure on the Spotted Owls.

If we don’t do this, we are facing the extinction of the spotted owl, and I think folks really understand that the science is very clear, that if we don’t manage barred owls, we are facing the likely extinction of northern spotted owls, and no one wants that.

CHAKRABARTI: Kessina Lee is the Oregon State supervisor for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Her office leads the Barred Owl Management Strategy.

KESSINA LEE: What the strategy does not propose to do is to eliminate barred owls in the Western United States. That’s not a goal that we think is attainable. This is really about strategically managing barred owls in some places to create a kind of refugia that is for spotted owls to reoccupy and reproduce and grow those areas. Create a core and then try to grow that core understanding that we’re always going to have barred owls in the West. And we’re really talking about managing barred owls in less than half of the range of the northern spotted owl.

CHAKRABARTI: And though the cull may be controversial, Lee says U.S. Fish and Wildlife is legally required to do all it can to protect threatened species like the spotted owl.

LEE: The Fish and Wildlife Service, at its sort of most basic, we have a responsibility to do all we can to prevent the extinction of federally listed species.

In this case, the Northern Spotted Owl and to support its recovery. And as I said, the science tells us that if barred owls are left unmanaged, we’re facing the likely extinction of the Northern Spotted Owl. We’re asked sometimes if this is about choosing one owl species over another, and I want to be very clear that it’s not. It’s choosing to have both species on the landscape as opposed to just one, because if we don’t act now, we will only have barred owls on the landscape.

And if we act, we can save spotted owls for future generations in the Pacific Northwest as well as barred owls on the landscape.

CHAKRABARTI: Finally, Lee says the brutal truth is that time is running out for the spotted owl.

LEE: The science is telling us we’ve got a two-pronged approach, if we’re going to prevent the extinction of the spotted owl, it’s habitat management, which right now the biggest threat is catastrophic wildfire in terms of the habitat side.

And the threat of invasive barred owls, and we have time to act with regard to barred owl, but that window is closing. If we don’t act, that’s a decision to let the spotted owl go. And we simply have an obligation to do everything we can to prevent that.

CHAKRABARTI: We went over the history of the Timber Wars, because the truth is, the Spotted Owl has been on the brink of extinction twice, and both times because of human impacts on the land. In this sense, the Barred Owl is a victim of human management, too, because its spread West was facilitated by manmade changes to the Great Plains and the Northern Boreal forests that go back more than a century.

So with the Spotted Owl, we have a species pushed to the brink, saved from oblivion by drastic action, only to be pushed to the brink again, requiring a cycle of more drastic action that necessitates decisions such as culling a half million other animals? How long can this go on? Is there a better model for conservation – one that does not rely on the Endangered Species Act, which is now 51 years old?

This article was originally published on WBUR.org.