A Texas congressman recently introduced legislation with bipartisan support to halt a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service plan to kill thousands of invasive owls in select areas, including parts of the North Coast, in an effort to forestall the Northern Spotted Owl’s precarious slide toward extinction and protect a threatened cousin from a similar fate.
If passed by the House and the Senate, and signed off on by President Donald Trump, the Joint Resolution of Disapproval brought forward by Rep. Troy Nehls would not only stop what’s known as the Barred Owl Management Strategy from being implemented but prevent the USFWS from moving forward with similar efforts unless specifically authorized by Congress.
Under the Congressional Review Act, such resolutions are a “tool Congress can use to overturn certain federal agency actions,” according to the Congress.gov website maintained by the Library of Congress, a process that has been used 20 times since 1996.
Opponents describe the plan to shoot a maximum of 450,000 Barred Owls over the course of 30 years in targeted sites across the Pacific Northwest and California as inhumane, costly and “doomed to fail.”
While many of the plan’s proponents acknowledge the idea of culling one species in order to protect another can be a difficult one to navigate, they say the hard truth is that without the intervention, the Northern Spotted Owl will cease to exist and the California Spotted Owl could be on track to go the same way.
Larger, brasher and more prolific breeders that live in denser populations and are better equipped to adapt to different environments, Barred Owls have been systematically pushing Northern Spotted Owls out of the limited old-growth forest areas they prefer since arriving in the Pacific Northwest from the East Coast in the 1960s.
And the impacts of the Barred Owls’ incursion appear to go far beyond just preventing their more demure cousins from nesting and reproducing. According to the USFWS, the raptors are putting the sensitive habitats on which Northern Spotted Owls depend at risk with their penchant for hunting a greater variety of small mammals, in addition to “amphibians, reptiles and other birds,” some listed as threatened or endangered.
“Scientists have expressed concern that the Barred Owl’s breadth of prey and intensity of use could lead to cascading effects on the ecosystem and its food webs,” the strategy states. “This could affect not only spotted owls, but entire ecosystems.”
In a statement, Nehls calls the Barred Owl plan “a waste of Americans’ hard-earned tax dollars,” and says the resolution he introduced July 23 “would prevent $1.35 billion from being wasted on the pointless killing of Barred Owls in the Pacific Northwest.”
A companion Senate Joint Resolution of Disapproval was introduced a day later by Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy and Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul.
While the federal plan does not outline the strategy’s cost, the cost amount used by Nehls repeats a figure put forward by animal welfare groups opposed to the plan, extrapolated from a grant awarded to the Hoopa Tribe for Barred Owl removal, which one supporter of the USFWS strategy described as “an invented number.”
A 2024 research paper on Barred Owl removal estimates the price tag would start in the $4.5 million to $12 million per year range during the strategy’s initial launch but decrease over time. The paper’s highest estimate would place the project cost at around $360 million over the course of three decades.
In an email to the Journal, North Coast Congressman Jared Huffman described Nehls’ resolution as “short-sighted” and says that if there are concerns about the strategy in Congress, “there are more responsible and targeted ways to engage here,” adding that upending the plan will have “unintended consequences.”
“Congressional Review Act (CRA) resolutions are a blunt instrument and should be used sparingly — because they not only overturn the regulation being targeted, they bar any future regulation in the same space,” he says. “This is especially problematic when it comes to complex, science-based conservation efforts. No matter what you think about culling Barred Owls, using the CRA to overturn this rule could paralyze efforts to protect the Northern Spotted Owl, regardless of how urgent or well-supported the future science-based actions are.
“That means long-term uncertainty and risk around recovery efforts, habitat restoration, tribal forestry and wildfire resilience projects in the Pacific Northwest,” Huffman continues. “It also throws the existing work into chaos. Unfortunately, this is just the latest example of Republicans using the CRA as their weapon of choice to undercut conservation and weaken bedrock laws like the Endangered Species Act. And because the Fish & Wildlife Service’s plan calls for culling some Barred Owls, it raises animal rights concerns that have led some Democrats to co-sponsor this CRA challenge.”
Two animal welfare groups, Animal Wellness Action and the Center for a Humane Economy, which sued to stop implementation of the plan in federal court last year and put forward the $1.35 billion number, applauded the introduction of the dual resolutions, calling the strategy a “billion-dollar scheme.”
“Protecting spotted owls is an imperative, but assaulting other native wildlife occupying the same forests is not ethical or a practical means of achieving that goal,” Wayne Pacelle, president of Animal Wellness Action and the Center for a Humane Economy, said in a statement. “Once the government shoots Barred Owls, other birds will fly back in and the government will be on a never-ending killing treadmill, burning monies better used for conservation projects to help spotted owls and other threatened and endangered species.”
In an email response to a series of questions posed by the Journal about the status of the plan and the price tag attached by the two animal rights groups, USFWS spokesperson Lena Chang responded only that “removals have not yet occurred under the Barred Owl Management Strategy” and referred the paper to the strategy’s webpage for updates.
While the Northern Spotted Owl was listed as threatened under the federal Endangered Species Act in 1990, a move that resulted in contentious restrictions on old-growth logging operations across the Northwest to preserve the bird’s habitat, its populations continued to drop dramatically year after year. Eyes then turned toward the Barred Owl as the culprit and ensuing research indicated a direct correlation between the Northern Spotted Owls’ population decline and the East Coast native’s growing talon-hold in their traditional territories.
The controversial approach put forward by the USFWS is based on experimental Barred Owl removal studies dating back more than a decade — some of which took place in Humboldt County — that showed promising results in stemming the tide of the Northern Spotted Owls’ decline.
Robin Bown, lead of the USFWS’ Barred Owl Management Strategy, told the Journal last year that the service “did not make this decision lightly.”
“However, we have a responsibility to future generations to do all we can to prevent spotted owls from going extinct,” Bown said. “We have been researching and working with partners over the last 15 years and the information shows that we must manage Barred Owls, in addition to habitat.”
She added that one of the points she believes gets lost in the conversion is that “habitat management alone will not save spotted owls because Barred Owls can outcompete them in any forest conditions.”
“If Barred Owls are left unmanaged, the northern spotted owl will likely go extinct in the near future,” she says. “California Spotted Owls face a similar risk as Barred Owls populations expand southward into their range. This strategy allows for a future where both spotted owls and Barred Owls continue to exist in the West. It carves out space for the spotted owl to survive.”
Under the strategy approved last summer, “interested tribes, federal and state agencies, companies or specific landowners” from Washington into California would partner with the service to carry out the lethal take of Barred Owls under a strict set of protocols. No public hunting would be allowed.
Historically found on the East Coast, Barred Owls began expanding across North America at the turn of the 19th century, likely the result of people planting trees in the once grassy expanses of the Great Plains and climate change creating more temperate temperatures in Canadian boreal forests, breaking down the traditional natural barriers and allowing them to spread their wings westward, according to USFWS.
Around 100,000 Barred Owls are currently estimated to live within the footprint of the plan, which lays out targeted sections for Barred Owl removal inside larger general management areas stretching from Washington into California. According to USFWS, the number of Barred Owls proposed to be dispatched would equate to a tiny fraction of the birds’ population in North America over that decades-long time period.
The North Coast general management areas outlined in the plan encompasses former and ongoing Barred Owl removal research and monitoring sites, including ones in the Hoopa Valley, the Yurok Reservation, Green Diamond Resource Co. property, Six Rivers National Forest, Redwood National Parks and Prairie Creek State Park.
Now, with the Barred Owl moving south, the fear is birds will also become entrenched within the range of the California Spotted Owl — currently under consideration for a threatened listing under the ESA — including into the Sierra Nevadas, with the same devastating effects.
Tom Wheeler, executive director of the Arcata-based Environmental Protection Information Center, or EPIC, has been upfront about his journey in coming around to the concept that Barred Owl removal is necessary to give the Northern Spotted Owl a chance of survival and to protect the California Spotted Owl from further declines, as well as, by extension, the ecosystems in which the birds live.
Putting a halt to the Barred Owl Management Strategy, he says, will have dire consequences.
“You’re already flirting with extinction and admittedly even with this strategy the Northern Spotted Owl still faces significant hurdles. More so in other states but in California, too,” he says. “The Northern Spotted Owl is basically extinct in Washington at this time. It is extinct in British Columbia and it’s not doing well in Oregon. As we go down where Barred Owls are more established in Washington, in British Columbia, they are nearly completely extirpated.
“The hope with Barred Owl removal is that we saw declines virtually vanish and populations stabilize,” Wheeler continues, noting the Northern Spotted Owl still faces stressors beyond the Barred Owl, including logging and wildfires. “So the spotted is not out of the woods even with the Barred Owl Management Strategy. But without this strategy, I’m fairly certain this species will go extinct within my working lifetime, which just depresses the shit out of me.”
Echoing Huffman’s sentiments, Wheeler says what stands to be lost if the resolutions are passed is a cohesive conservation effort built on a foundation of scientific research, noting “one of the things the strategy did was triage the range of the spotted owl and prioritized removal in certain areas.”
And, because the USFWS has a Migratory Bird Treaty Act special purpose permit that allows the agency to designate qualified parties to shoot or otherwise remove Barred Owls under extensive guidelines set out in the strategy, the plan also provides permitting efficiency.
“I think we have a very small window in which we can act to stop further invasions in places like Sonoma County and Marin County, where Barred Owls are very, very recent on the landscape and we’ll also probably lose the ability to stop the invasion into the Sierra,” he says. “So the California Spotted Owl would likely suffer the same fate as the Northern Spotted Owl.”
Wheeler also takes issue with the cost figure put forward by the animal rights groups, saying research shows Barred Owl removal is not only achievable but cost effective, and he believes “what has driven some of the Republican, conservative Democrat opposition to the Barred Owl Management Strategy is this invented number.”
As far as the resolutions, Wheeler says he intends to “fight like hell on this.”
“We are making calls, we are organizing groups to submit letters of support to Congress, we are talking with other entities that might be interested in Barred Owl removal that heretofore were not engaged in the subject,” he says. “I think both sides, the animal rights groups and environmental advocates are in for a fight, and I don’t think either of our sides will back down.”
Kimberly Wear (she/her) is the Journal’s assistant editor. Reach her at (707) 442-1400 or kim@northcoastjournal.com.
This article appears in ‘I Am an Artist’.
