They plan to kill 450,000 owls just to save another species

Fifteen years ago, Jack Dumbacher played a clip of an owl's call at night in the Klamath National Forest. Using the light of a flashlight, he watched the visitor emerge from the shadows: a large creature with white cheeks, horizontal black stripes on its chest feathers, and a cooing sound in eight-note bursts. Yes, it was a barred owl (Strix varia).

Then he raised his shotgun, took aim, pulled the trigger and shot it.

Over the next three years, he and his colleagues would repeat this process eighty more times. But Donbach was not a poacher; he was a wildlife researcher who wanted to know whether killing one species could save another .

Jack Dunbach holds a specimen of a northern spotted owl (left) and a barred owl (right). It can be seen that the northern spotted owl is smaller than the barred owl. | Karl Mondon / San Jose Mercury News / AP

Fifteen years later, his conjecture is about to become a cruel reality: the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service finally issued a permit in 2024, planning to use sound to lure and shoot 450,000 barred owls in California, Oregon and Washington over the next three decades.

The goal of this horrific plan — some would call it a massacre — is to save another endangered owl subspecies, the northern spotted owl (Strix occidentalis caurina).

How did two owls end up in this trolley problem? The simple answer is that the barred owl is an invasive species—but no simple answer captures the whole truth. The war between the two owls, like most wildlife conservation dilemmas, begins with humans.

A butterfly effect caused by tree planting

The typical reason why a species becomes an invasive species is that human global activities help it cross continents and oceans. Crayfish are native to freshwater rivers and lakes in North America. They were introduced to China across the ocean in the 1920s for farming and consumption. They then escaped into natural water systems and are now found in most provinces across the country. Kudzu took the opposite route. It was native to East Asia and was later introduced to the United States as an ornamental plant and forage. When the United States encountered the Dust Bowl crisis in the 1930s, this plant was widely used to control dust and prevent soil erosion, and then it became uncontrollable.

Pueraria montana, introduced to the United States by humans, has grown wild and completely covered trees; the invasion of the barred owl is different. | Scott Ehardt / Wikimedia Commons

However, the Barred Owl is an owl native to North America , distributed in the forests of the northeast, with no geographical barriers between it and the west. In addition, owls have no economic value and it is difficult for them to hitchhike on human transportation. So why did it suddenly invade western North America in the early 20th century?

The core of the answer is probably planting trees .

In 1872, in Nebraska, located in the Great Plains of the Midwestern United States, politician Julius Sterling Morton founded Arbor Day in the United States, planning to award prizes to those who planted the most trees on that day. In 1885, Arbor Day became a legal holiday in Nebraska, and by 1920, more than 40 states had participated. Arbor Day has achieved remarkable results. In 1907, Nebraska's artificial forests had been awarded the status of "national forests", and there is still the largest hand-planted forest in the United States.

But why did he create this festival? It wasn't because Merton was aware of the problem of deforestation - Nebraska is located in the Great Plains, and there weren't many trees to begin with. Instead, his goal was to create new forests. In his view, the empty Great Plains were a lesson from God to the westward colonists, so that they would realize how valuable the forest resources of the eastern United States were after they lost them - ironically, his solution was to destroy the Great Plains' own grassland ecology.

Nebraska National Forest, home to the largest artificial forest area in the United States | Bkell / Wikimedia Commons

The effect of tree planting was superimposed on two other large-scale environmental transformation movements at the time. One was the hunting of bison . Native Americans in North America had been hunting bison on a small scale, but starting in the 19th century, European colonists launched an unprecedented industrial hunting campaign, often taking only the skin and tongue, leaving the rest to rot. In just one hundred years, the number of bison dropped from more than 20 million to less than 100. The loss of bison was not only a fatal blow to the livelihoods and culture of the indigenous people, but also changed the ecology of the Great Plains: some places were converted to grazing for cattle and horses, the pressure on the grassland increased, and the vegetation became poorer; in places that were not converted to pastures, forests began to appear because of the loss of bison grazing.

The second is forest fire prevention . For many forest ecosystems in western North America, regular fires are a normal part: fire can control the density of trees and maintain the balance between forests and grasslands. Although fires kill some animals and plants, they promote biodiversity in the long run. Some species even have to experience fires regularly to survive normally. For example, the seeds of some trees will only germinate after being roasted by fire. After European colonists settled in the West on a large scale, they generally adopted strict fire prevention and fire fighting measures. This not only led to the accumulation of flammable materials under the forest, laying hidden dangers for super-large-scale fires, but also disrupted the original ecological balance, leading to forest expansion and grassland retreat.

A pair of barred owls, a species found mainly in the northeastern United States and southern Canada｜ForestWander.com

The combined effect of multiple factors is quite obvious. The barred owl does not migrate long distances, but these new forests are close to each other and form a loose network, providing them with a springboard to move westward, allowing them to hunt normally while gradually spreading . Over the decades, they moved northwestward bit by bit from the forests of the northeast, and in the mid-1960s they finally arrived in the woods along the Pacific coast, encountered the northern spotted owl, and began to invade its territory.

Selected Banner Creature

The northern spotted owl , or the northern spotted owl, is an owl native to the Pacific Northwest coast. This ordinary-looking owl was the focus of half of the United States thirty years ago.

The Northern Spotted Owl prefers to live in old-growth forests. Tom Kogut / USFS

The Pacific Northwest has a mild climate and abundant rainfall, and was once covered with lush old-growth forests . But by the 1980s, after 150 years of intensive logging, the forestry industry had grown into a multi-billion dollar industry, and 90% of the old-growth forests had disappeared. Although the forestry industry would plant artificial forests as replacements, these new forests were too homogeneous and too young to be comparable in terms of ecosystem function. Environmentalists who realized the seriousness of the situation held large-scale protests, but protests alone could not stop the rotation of the circular saw, and legal and political recourse was necessary.

The United States did not have an ecosystem protection law, but it did have an Endangered Species Act, so environmentalists decided to look for a species threatened by logging as a flagship species (a species in conservation biology parlance). They chose the northern spotted owl, of which there were only a few thousand left.

The decision was not without controversy within the environmental movement. The flag can both rally and distort. Focusing on it inevitably turns the narrative into one of owls versus loggers, of humans sacrificing humans for the sake of animals. Indeed, the northern spotted owl has earned the logging industry’s deep hatred for it, with signs on cars reading “Eat an owl, save a logger” and plastic owl models hanging upside down in lumber mills. A logging museum has no toilet paper in its restrooms, and a wall reads “Save the forest, wipe your ass with a spotted owl.”

Loggers pose next to a Sitka spruce tree they fell in the old-growth forest of the Coast Range of Oregon | the State Library of Oregon

In the end, the strategy worked. In 1990, the northern spotted owl was officially listed as endangered, and timber production in the Pacific Northwest dropped by 80 percent. In 1994, the Clinton administration passed the Northwest Forest Plan, which required that at least 40 percent of old-growth forests within 2 kilometers of every northern spotted owl nest be preserved, creating a reserve covering about 10 million hectares of forest land that is still in effect today. This is about as good a flag as it gets —in other words, the northern spotted owl became their panda.

But now the flag faces a different kind of threat. Those who raised it will be forced to defend it, even if it requires extreme measures, even if it defeats the purpose of the cause.

Who is the intruder?

Both owls belong to the same genus Owl and are closely related enough to hybridize, so why can the Barred Owl beat the Northern Spotted Owl? The answer is simple: the Barred Owl is larger, has a wider diet, and is more tolerant of diverse environments. When the two sides meet, the former usually drives away the latter, sometimes even killing it; and the latter, which relies heavily on old forests, has nowhere to retreat. In 2021, the number of northern spotted owls has dropped to less than 35% compared to 1995. Similar scenes are commonplace in the field of ecological invasion.

A subadult Barred Owl in Washington state, where it is considered an invasive species. | Erica Gordon / Wikimedia Commons

Many texts use "stronger adaptability" or similar words to describe the winners of an invasion, but this description is actually biased. Adaptability is not an inherent attribute of an organism. Whether or not an organism is adaptable is determined by both the organism and the environment.

Research has found that the northern spotted owl has certain advantages in high altitudes, steep mountains and areas with old pines and cypresses over 120 years old. Unfortunately, there are not many of these areas left, and it is still questionable whether their population can be maintained. If there is no climate change and large-scale logging, the northern spotted owl may be able to take advantage of its small size and specific diet to defend a large enough core territory without becoming endangered. Of course, at this point, this can only be a possibility.

Such interspecies competition and replacement is actually very common, and can even be said to be a textbook-level natural selection process. Charles Elton, the father of ecology and the pioneer of species invasion research, once said that natural balance does not exist, and perhaps never has existed. The number and distribution range of organisms are constantly fluctuating irregularly, and the so-called natural distribution area is nothing more than a momentary accident of history; it is the endless birth, expansion, competition and extinction of countless species that have shaped the ecological diversity we see today. On an evolutionary scale, every species has been an invader ; although the barred wood owl also brings an impact on the ecosystem, the root cause is very different from the threat of loggers.

“Removing” the Barred Owl｜Lowell V. Diller

Unfortunately, we don't live on an evolutionary scale. Perhaps three million years from now, the barred owl will evolve into several new owl species that will be responsible for a more diverse Pacific Northwest ecology than today—but we won't see that day. All we can see is the northern spotted owl, which is protected by the Endangered Species Act, the result of a generation's struggle to save it, and the banner of the entire Pacific Northwest forest, and it is facing extinction.

The only countermeasure available is to remove the Barred Owl from the core distribution area of ​​the Northern Spotted Owl . The most effective means of removal is the hunting rifle.

The removal effort required guns, dogs, and owl calls to lure barred owls. The dogs were responsible for retrieving owls that fell after being shot. | Lowell V. Diller

This is not only their situation

Humans are not purely rational animals. Killing mosquitoes and cockroaches is one thing, but killing an owl is another. Using lethal means to control invasive species is not uncommon, but the barred owl has been with humans for thousands of years in the eastern United States, and countless bird watchers have entered the world because of it. Suddenly, an order to shoot it is not easy for even those who agree with this decision.

Moreover, the barred owl is different from most other invasive species in one respect— it did not rely on human transport to expand, but on its own flight . In an era when humans are fleeing heat waves, hurricanes, floods, and wildfires, isn’t its situation similar to the situation of the world?

Invaders and refugees are often only a fine line apart. In an era of climate change caused by human activities, we may be about to witness an unprecedented large-scale exodus. Migration is the main way for organisms to cope with environmental changes. It is estimated that half of the distribution range of mammals in the world has moved. Do we need to classify every species driven out by climate as an invasive species and control it? Or do we just sit back and watch them impact their destination without doing anything? Different species spread in different directions and speeds, and it is impossible for an ecosystem to move horizontally as a whole. Human society itself does not know how to deal with the conflicts and disasters caused by such a mixture, so why should we impose our answers on the natural ecology?

Mark Higley, a wildlife biologist, hates killing owls, but he also knows it's an effective strategy for protecting the northern spotted owl. | Morgan Heim

But we can't do nothing, because everything is caused by ourselves.

In March 2024, seventy-five animal protection and animal rights organizations jointly launched a protest against the plan to shoot the barred wood owl. Those who support this plan responded that species and subspecies are unique branches created by evolution, and once they disappear, they are gone forever. In the face of extinction, individual life can only take a back seat.

But the branches don't feel pain, but the birds do. In what kind of scenario is it worth sacrificing life for an abstract concept? The answer to this question may never come.

Author:fangorn