Five Northwest conservation groups have joined the federal government in defending a program to kill barred owls in the Pacific Northwest to protect the threatened northern spotted owl.
These environmental groups have joined the government’s side, in opposition to animal rights groups.
Tom Wheeler is the executive director of the Arcata, California-based conservation nonprofit EPIC. He said that like animal rights groups, they also believe that individual lives of wild animals are precious, but, “We also hold that ecosystems are real and important and that species are real and important. And that the preservation of ecosystems and species are really important and worth protecting.”
Barred owls, native to the eastern side of the U.S., have slowly made their way over to the west. In January 2025, five Northwest conservation groups joined the federal government in defending a program to kill barred owls to protect the threatened northern spotted owl.
Danny Hofstadter
Wheeler said it’s necessary to remove invasive barred owls from the region to give researchers more time to come up with a long-term solution to the growing threat of extinction for northern spotted owls.
Barred owls are invasive to the West Coast and are larger and more aggressive than spotted owls. That leads them to out-compete the spotted owl.
The barred owl management plan was finalized last year by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. That plan simply involves humanely killing barred owls or hybrids of barred and spotted owls. Wheeler said capturing and releasing the barred owls somewhere else isn’t feasible because of the amount of barred owls that need to be removed.
“We have no place to release thousands of barred owls without also impacting the environment,” he said.
The animals rights groups say the government is violating federal environmental law, and that the project is ultimately doomed to fail because of underfunding.
“The [U.S. Fish and Wildlife] Service claims that it has the ‘legal and ethical responsibility’ to kill nearly half a million migratory birds. This ‘legal and ethical responsibility’ seems to be constrained, however, to shooting barred owls from dense forest canopy at night; the responsibility has not extended to preventing the primary reason for the spotted owl’s decline: dramatic habitat loss directly attributable to the harvest of old-growth forest for its timber,” said the groups Animal Wellness Action and The Center for a Humane Economy in their lawsuit.
Wheeler said they’re joining this lawsuit because he doesn’t believe the new Trump administration cares that much about western forest issues.
“I think that to the extent that he does care, it’s as a political weapon to attempt to get after Democratic governors in western states over wildfire,” he said.
Wheeler said these groups want to show that many environmentalists support this barred owl management program.
The judge in Washington already approved the environmental group’s motion to join the lawsuit. Wheeler said that means they’ll be able to provide their own opinions, giving the judge another perspective to consider in the case.
This story comes to you from the Northwest News Network, a collaboration between public media organizations in Oregon and Washington.
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