By COURTNEY SHERWOOD/Oregon Public Broadcasting
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 – including Rep. David Gomberg, D-Otis — 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.”
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,” Gomberg 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 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,” Rep. Ed Diehl, R- Scio said in a 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.
- This story originally appeared Jan. 8, 2025 on Oregon Public Broadcasting.
The only beneficiary of this appalling project is the timber industry, which will use it to justify strip-mining more old growth forests. Slaughtering one species allegedly to save another is not only insane — done with full knowledge it will not succeed — but also biologically unsound. The reason the barred owls came here was because we, the most rapacious invasive species in planetary history, destroyed their own eastern forests. So now we should kill them all while we continue to destroy the spotted owl’s forests, too? The only hope of saving either species is to stop cutting old growth. And if they interbreed to make a more successful hybrid, so be it: we need all the owls we can get, spotted or barred or polka-dotted, to control the exploding population of rodents since other ill-guided programs poisoned our coyotes in the Coast Range.
I agree that killing off the barred owl is just an easy way to get them out of the way. With all the people who have studied barred owls and the spotted owl, a better way to help this problem must be there. Spend the money on finding a way to solve this problem without the word “kill” in the equation. So if we kill off the barred owl and the spotted owl takes over and become a killing machine of birds and small animals, then we spend lots of money to kill them off? We are the invasive specie, just so self servicing.
This approach is not biologically sound. It never has been a successful way manage wildlife. Consider the cormorants near the mouth of the Columbia, the sea lions at Bonneville to name recent efforts. The BLM’s so called management of wild horses. In nature, managing for one goal is ill advised because the natural world functions as a system within many systems. You can’t do just one thing. Do better.