One of the better recent articles on this that I’ve seen. Article is NYT, but it’s a free link, so I encourage all of you to check it out. It’s got some very nice pictures, if nothing else.
I’ve touched on this topic a few times before and I’m torn as to what a “solution” might be.
Let’s look at some snippets for those who don’t want to read the whole thing and see what we can unpack.
Bob Sallinger, the executive director of Bird Conservation Oregon, agreed but emphasized that the culling must complement the restoration and preservation of the few remaining old-growth forests. “The science clearly shows that you must both protect and increase habitat and remove some level of barred owls if the northern spotted owl is to have a chance of survival,” he said.
Habitat loss is crucial to the start and end of this. We’ve made the land more friendly to the more adaptable Barred Owls and much more difficult for the Spotted Owls to thrive. You can’t just make old trees reappear; it takes over 100 years. Also, Spotted Owls have a very limited diet compared to most owls. Most will eat anything that they can catch, but the article says Spotteds only eat flying squirrels and wood rats. Any damage to that limited food supply, by other owls or habitat loss, and the owls are still screwed.
Wayne Pacelle, the president of Animal Wellness Action and an author of the statement, said it was dangerous for the government to start managing competition and social interaction among North American species, including ones that have expanded their range as a partial effect of “human perturbations” of the environment.
“Implementing a decades-long plan to unleash untold numbers of ‘hunters’ in sensitive forest ecosystems is a case of single-species myopia regarding wildlife control,” the letter said.
As we just looked at, this is only really addressing one aspect of this problem. Ecology is a balancing act, and going hard at one thing is going to imbalance other things. We don’t seem to have a good sense of how these things work yet, and killing 500,000 of anything is probably going to influence things more far reaching that we can predict.
Also, I’ve seen different articles give different representations of who these shooters will be. Some make them sound like Dept of the Interior employees or contractors, while other things make it sound like private people/landowners can participate. It’s a very heated topic, so it’s proven difficult to get the exact answer to this, at least in what I’ve come across.
The Fish and Wildlife Service has been trying to save the spotted owl for decades. The effort became a cause célèbre in the 1980s as environmentalists saw it as a way to force the U.S. government to drastically reduce logging in northwestern federal forests. The birds depend on old growth woodland to survive, preferring towering trees such as Douglas firs that typically take 150 to 200 years to mature.
Over the passionate objections of the timber industry, spotted owls were listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act in 1990. As loggers mounted protests, dead owls were nailed to road signs and “owl fricassee” appeared facetiously on restaurant menus.
I remember a little bit of this from my childhood, and I’m from as far on the other side of the country as you can be. There was a real “nuke the whales” type of movement against protecting the owls, a joke for some, but serious for others who saw it as them losing their work to save some birds. I don’t think it came to any actual person on person violence, but there were threats and vandalism of property of the people trying to protect the owls.
Barred owls started making their way west in the early 1900s as European settlers transformed the Midwest landscape from prairie to patches of woodland. Aided perhaps by a warming trend in the boreal forests of eastern Canada and northern Minnesota, where barred owls are abundant, the birds spread across the Great Plains and, by 1943, were spied in British Columbia, the domain of the northern spotted owl.
“When spotted owls were listed in 1990, it was known that barred owls could be a potential threat,” said David Wiens, a wildlife biologist with the U.S. Geological Survey. “But we knew very little about barred owls then, and had no idea what their population trajectory would be in the Pacific Northwest.”
Once again, how do you rewind this aspect of how we have altered our environment?
Some animal activists have suggested that rather than shoot the barred owls, the Fish and Wildlife Service should try to stop them from reproducing. But Eric Forsman, a retired Forest Service biologist whose research informed the Northwest Forest Plan, countered that every other option had already been on the table. “Half-baked methods like sterilization and egg removal would be impossible at the scale needed to reduce numbers,” he said.
Another nonstarter is relocation, which would risk introducing new parasites and diseases from the West into the barred owls’ historical range. “If people complain about the cost and feasibility of 15,000 birds removed per year, the price tag for translocation would probably send them into cardiac arrest,” Dr. Gutierrez said. “And besides being too time-consuming, where would you relocate the owls to? No one wants them.” You could “let nature take its course,” he added, but that course would be extinction for the spotted owl.
Dr. Forsman is less sanguine. He feared that attempts to control barred owls were likely to fail, because the bird’s range expansion was too extensive. To him, the proposed policy is a call for action based on the “untestable” hypothesis that humans were responsible for the expansion.
If we were not responsible, would we still be making the same call for action? he wondered. “Or even if we were, is there some point at which we simply admit that we have screwed things up so badly that there is no going back to the good old days?” he said. “I am torn apart by this dilemma, and I find it difficult to get mad at anyone on either side of the argument.”
This is where we’re at. I don’t know what other alternatives exist. Do we massacre them, or let them overrun the Spotted Owls?
I’m not sure if just letting them hybridize is the only semi-lethal option left. The Spotted Owl would be gone, but it would become a part of the western Barred Owls. Is that better than nothing? I can’t say. I like the idea better than killing owls for nothing if this campaign doesn’t work. And I don’t like any of them suffering due to our lack of understanding of the environment. The owls are going to pay the price for what we did. All I can really do is hope it means something in the long run.
Thanks for breaking this down. I was in a rush when I posted the article this morning. I thought it was a good one and wanted to share.
I like your thought of the owls hybridizing and Spotted Owls living on that way. It’s not ideal, but none of the options are. I just wonder if the hybrids are able to reproduce? I seem to recall hearing that some animal hybrids are sterile, but maybe I’m misremembering.
I also think that since this was set in motion by humans changing owl habitat so long ago (early 1900s!) that we can’t really know all the impacts that the Barred Owls have had on their new homes. You can’t really untangle it. And killing that large of a population is sure to have repercussions on other aspects of the environment than just saving Spotted Owls. We also can’t know if Barred Owls would have expanded their range without human intervention, and if they had then they are just a more successful species than Spotted Owls and it is just survival of the fittest. That is hard to be ok with, but it is how nature works.
Anyway, lots to think about in this article. But also some great pictures.
Looking it up quick, successful hybridization, meaning the offspring can reproduce, seems very common in birds, with somewhere 10-20% of species being able to do it. I found one old study from the 70s putting mammals at 6% and birds for 10%.
I know animals like mules are typically infertile, and the fancy hybrids like zonkeys and ligers/tions are also. It seems to be the males of these hybrids that are infertile, females seem fine.
Sparred Owls, the hybrids of the Spotted/Barred pairings are usually killed when they do these programs, so I dont know how much they’ve actually been studied. They seem to have a mix of both physical attributes like coloration, a mix of spots and stripes, and also a mixed of behavior and calls.
I feel bad the headline is going to get not many people to click on it here, but that’s the actual title of the article… I do think this is an important issue now and is only going to become more important in the future when the same is going to happen to other species if we can’t pull the environment back and this starts to happen with more and more species.
The biggest downside to the hybrids will be if the hybrids are more successful than the actual Spotted Owls, if we magically come up with a solution/breeding program/environmental fix/genetic miracle, etc., how do we ensure we’re “bringing back” the actual Spotted Owl.
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