The U.S. Senate blocked legislation aimed at ending the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s controversial plan to forestall the Northern Spotted Owls’ extinction by killing thousands of non-native owls in specified areas, including parts of the North Coast.
The Joint Resolution of Disapproval brought forward by Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy under the Congressional Review Act was rejected 25-72 on Oct. 29, with three senators not casting votes.
Kennedy labeled the plan to shoot a maximum of 450,000 Barred Owls over the course of 30 years as “stupid” and “DEI for owls,” referring to diversity, equity and inclusion programs under attack since President Donald Trump took office this year.
But, the senator said, the Department of Interior under the Trump administration has embraced the Biden-era plan that “just won’t work.”
If the resolution and a bipartisan companion piece in the House had passed, and was signed off on by President Donald Trump, it would not only have stopped what’s known as the Barred Owl Management Strategy from proceeding but prevented the USFWS from moving forward with similar efforts unless specifically authorized by Congress.
The result was met with “deep disappointment” by two Washington, D.C.-based animal welfare groups that described the vote as setting “in motion the largest slaughter of birds in U.S. history.”
Sen. John Kennedy
“… We’re going to pass DEI for owls? We’re going to pass quotas for owls? Spotted owls, good. Barred Owls, bad. … They will kill them. They will kill 453,000 of them, dead as Jimmy Hoffa. Give me a break.”
While many of the plan’s proponents acknowledge the idea of culling one species to save another can be difficult to navigate, they say the hard truth is that without the intervention, the Northern Spotted Owl will cease to exist,
And the fear is the California Spotted Owl could face the same fate as Barred Owls continue moving south.
Since arriving in the Pacific Northwest and California in the 1970s, likely due to human intervention on the landscape and climate change, the larger, faster reproducing and more aggressive East Coast natives have been pushing Northern Spotted Owls out of their preferred and limited old growth territories. The result is the birds already fluttering on the brink and facing additional stressors from logging and forest fires are being thwarted from nesting and raising young.
According to the USFWS, habitat management alone is not enough to save the spotted owl due to the Barred Owls’ ability to outcompete them in any forest condition and the strategy carves out space for the endangered species to survive.
But concerns about the Barred Owl making themselves at home on the West Coast are not just about one bird versus another, but the interlopers’ impacts on sensitive old growth environments and species that evolved without their presence.
“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.”
Before the vote, Kennedy took to the Senate floor to urge his colleagues to support the measure, bringing along visual aids, including poster board-size pictures of a Barred Owl and Northern Spotted Owl, as well as one of the cartoon character Elmer Fudd carrying a shotgun.
“The Barred Owls are not hurting anybody. They’re just doing what nature teaches them to do,” he said. “We’re going to change nature? We’re going to control our environment to this extent? We’re going to pass DEI for owls? We’re going to pass quotas for owls? Spotted owls, good. Barred Owls, bad. But the Barred Owls won’t lose their constitutional rights. They will kill them. They will kill 453,000 of them, dead as Jimmy Hoffa. Give me a break.”
In a joint release, two animal welfare groups representing a coalition of nearly 450 “organizations and experts” opposing the strategy described the Senate vote as the result of “an unholy alliance of the Trump Interior Department, the timber industry and leading environmental organizations acting in lock step.”
“Senator Kennedy did a brilliant job of deconstructing the rationale for the kill plan and correctly argued that personnel with the Interior Department were playing God and substituting their judgment for Mother Nature with their unworkable and costly plan,” Wayne Pacelle, president of Animal Wellness Action and the Center for a Humane Economy, said in the release.
The “unholy alliance” was apparently a reference to what the Los Angeles Times reports were concerns voiced about timber harvests on BLM land in Oregon that could be at risk if the strategy didn’t move forward and that halting the plan could trigger the USFWS to start new Endangered Species Act procedures on the Northern Spotted Owls.
While the agency does not outline the strategy’s cost, the $1.35 billion number often used by animal welfare groups and others opposed to the plan was 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.”
In contrast, 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.
Built on promising results from experimental removal studies dating back more than a decade, including in Humboldt County, that showed spotted owl populations stabilize, the number of Barred Owls proposed to be killed would equate to a tiny fraction of the birds’ population in North America over that decades-long period, according to the USFWS.
North Coast Rep. Jared Huffman previously described the resolutions of disapproval on the strategy as “short-sighted.” He told the Journal over the summer 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.”
This article appears in Klamath River Ecosystem Booming One Year After Dam Removal.