FILE - Barred owls from the east have moved in and taken over spotted owl habitat in the western forests of Oregon, and are now pushing spotted owls closer and closer to extinction.
Nick Fisher / OPB
The Biden administration appears to be doubling down on a plan to kill barred owls in order to protect the northern spotted owl populations in Northwest forests.
But a group of bipartisan Oregon legislators says it’s a cruel and wasteful plan. They’re calling on the incoming Trump administration’s proposed Department of Government Efficiency to reverse the decision.
Two years ago, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced a plan to shoot and kill an estimated 400,000 invasive barred owls at a cost of roughly $1.35 billion over the next three decades. On Wednesday, the Bureau of Land Management said it’s signing on to that plan, too.
Barred owls, which are bigger and more aggressive than spotted owls, can out-compete the smaller native birds for prey and nesting spots. They’re one of the biggest threats to efforts to help spotted owl populations recover, alongside forest habitat loss. Fewer than 2,000 spotted owl pairs survive in Oregon, despite logging restrictions and decades of efforts to protect the species.
“Northern spotted owls are at a tipping point, and both barred owls and habitat have to be managed to save them,” Barry Bushue, BLM Oregon/Washington state director, said in an emailed statement. “If we act now, future generations will still be able to see and hear northern spotted owls in our Pacific Northwest forests.”
FILE - The northern spotted owl is on a slow but steady course toward extinction.
Todd Sonflieth / OPB
But the pitch to kill one bird species to protect another has drawn skepticism from the beginning. While federal officials say the Fish and Wildlife Service’s plan will help protect spotted owl populations, animal rights groups say it may just slow what could still be an inevitable extinction.
“This simply isn’t a sound strategy — fiscally or ecologically," Oregon state Rep. David Gomberg, D-Otis, said in a statement. “As a staunch animal welfare advocate and a believer in evidence-based policy, I cannot support a plan that calls on taxpayers to front $45 million a year to cull a protected species. We certainly need to better address the decline we’ve seen in our spotted owl population, but this is not the way to do it.”
Gomberg joined four Republican Oregon lawmakers on Wednesday to issue a bipartisan call to the next president. They asked Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, who President-elect Donald Trump has said he’ll appoint to a new agency dubbed the Department of Government Efficiency, to nix plans for culling barred owls in Northwest forests.
“Killing one type of owl to save another is outrageous and doomed to fail,” Republican state Rep. Ed Diehl of Scio said in an emailed statement. “This plan will swallow up Americans’ hard-earned tax dollars for no good reason.”
The Bureau of Land Management said the plan it’s adopting was the result of significant public input and a thorough environmental analysis by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.