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Complex Tradeoffs

Published February 3rd, 2025 in Conservation, News, UW Blogs

https://www.northcoastjournal.com/news/complex-tradeoffs-31988826

January 30, 2025

‘Complex Tradeoffs’
EPIC among conservation groups defending barred owl removal in court
By Kimberly Wear kim@northcoastjournal.com @kimberly_wear

Five conservation groups, including the Arcata-based Environmental Protection Information Center, recently joined in the legal defense of a controversial U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service plan to protect the endangered northern spotted owl by killing thousands of invasive owls impeding their survival in designated areas, including parts of the North Coast.

On Jan. 21, a Washington District Court judge found EPIC, the Klamath-Siskiyou Wildlands Center, Umpqua Watersheds, Conservation Northwest and the Marin Audubon Society showed “good cause” in their request to enter the lawsuit brought by two animal welfare groups against what’s known as the Barred Owl Management Strategy.

The coalition’s motion to join as defendants alongside the federal government cites each of the group’s “active role in advocating for the conservation of the northern spotted owl,” saying the newly installed Trump administration “did not participate in the decision at issue.” Without their intervention, the groups argued “there will not be a consistent, northern spotted owl-focused party present in this case at all times.”

The plan released in August is built on experimental barred owl removal studies dating back more than a decade — some of which took place in Humboldt County — which showed promising results in stemming the decline of northern spotted owls, whose numbers have continued to plummet despite old growth logging restrictions imposed across the Northwest in the 1990s to preserve the dwindling specialized habitat on which the birds depend.

The two animal welfare groups, Animal Wellness Action and the Center for a Humane Economy, sued to stop implementation of the plan late last year, alleging USFWS violated several federal statutes, including the National Environmental Policy Act, “by failing to properly analyze the impacts of their strategy and improperly rejecting reasonable alternatives.”

“This inhumane, unworkable barred owl kill-plan is the largest-ever scheme to slaughter raptors in any nation by a country mile,” said Wayne Pacelle, president of both the nonprofits based in Washington, D.C., in a press release on the lawsuit that asks the court to send the strategy back to USFWS for “reanalysis.”

The conservation coalition disagrees, saying in an announcement of their intention to enter the case that the strategy is necessary and “offers a strong permitting and monitoring framework for federal, state and tribal governments and private landowners to engage in lethal barred owl removal under stringent and humane protocols.”

“As environmental organizations, our mission is to protect the health of the environment, which can sometimes mean hard decisions involving complex tradeoffs. This is one such situation,” Janice Reid, a wildlife biologist and Umpqua Watersheds board president, said in the release. “No one likes the idea of shooting one owl to save another owl, but without the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Barred Owl Management Program, the iconic northern spotted owl will go extinct in our lifetimes. That’s an outcome we are not prepared to accept.”

The legal move known as a motion to intervene is not unusual, according to Susan Jane Brown, the attorney representing the coalition, noting “public land issues like the ones involved in these cases garner a lot of attention and passion from the public, and stakeholders often seek to involve themselves in litigation where their interests are at stake.”

The coalition is also seeking to intervene in a similar case filed in the U.S. District Court in Oregon.

By joining as a party to the case, Brown said in an email to the Journal, the coalition can “file motions, merits and procedural briefs, and other supporting documentation” and “take a position” on the matter, giving them an equal seat at the table during the litigation.

“My clients believe that it is important to advocate for a difficult, but ultimately humane, science-driven, and legal decision to contribute to the recovery of the northern spotted owl by managing an invasive species that is compromising the continued existence of a listed species,” Brown wrote. “My clients have advocated for the conservation of northern spotted owls and their old growth forest habitat for decades, and are extremely concerned that the spotted owl may go extinct in our lifetimes unless we both protect and grow more spotted owl habitat and meaningfully reduce the pressure on northern spotted owls by the invasive barred owl. We are looking forward to sharing that perspective with the court.”

Larger, brasher and more prolific breeders than the northern spotted owl, barred owls have been rapidly expanding in range and population since arriving in the Pacific Northwest and California in the 1970s due to human intervention on the landscape and climate change. Since then, the East Coast natives have been outcompeting northern spotted owls for food and pushing the endangered birds out of their preferred old growth territories — preventing the species already fluttering on the brink of extinction from nesting and reproducing.

In addition, barred owls have a more varied appetite and their spiking numbers are negatively impacting the overall habitat and other species that evolved without their presence, including native predators beyond the spotted owl.

“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 USFWS strategy states. “This could affect not only spotted owls, but entire ecosystems.”

The plan calls for a maximum of around 450,000 barred owls to be killed over the course of three decades, in most cases by shooting the raptors, under a strict set of protocols. No public hunting will be allowed, and USFWS says even the 400,000 number would equate to a small fraction of the barred owls’ population in North America during that time period.

While most of the removals are slated for areas of the northern spotted owl territories from Washington to California, sections of the threatened California spotted owls’ range are also included in the plan in an effort to prevent the barred owl from encroaching farther south, including into the Sierra Nevadas, with the same devastating effects.

In addition to not following federal law, Animal Wellness Action and the Center for a Humane Economy also argue the plan is not only “unfunded, uncoordinated, poorly designed and doomed to fail” but will cause more harm than good, saying that USFWS has hid its “head in the sand” about “the primary reason for the spotted owl’s decline: dramatic habitat loss directly attributable to the harvest of old-growth forest for its timber.”

“The service’s plan, if fully implemented, will leave us looking back in 30 years at a half-a-million carcasses of dead barred owls and no living spotted owls to be found in the forests of the Northwest,” the complaint argues. “This is because the service has failed to address the core issues at hand. The service can, and should, implement an effective and feasible strategy that also avoids an unprecedented level of slaughter of protected migratory birds.”

Robin Bown, lead of the USFWS’ Barred Owl Management Strategy, previously told the Journal that she believes one of the points that 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 said. “California spotted owls face a similar risk as barred owl 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.”

EPIC Executive Director Tom Wheeler echoed those words in the coalition’s announcement.

“Without barred owl management and older forest habitat protections, the northern spotted owl and California spotted owl are likely to go extinct in the wild in the near future,” he said. “Barred owl control is well studied and has been shown to be extremely effective in countering barred owl threats to spotted owl survival, recruitment and recovery.”

Another member of the coalition, George Seton with Klamath-Siskiyou Wildlands Center, also noted the barred owls pose not only a danger to northern and California spotted owls but also to the habitats in which they live, saying “old-growth forest ecosystems are at risk of unraveling.”

“Unless we immediately address barred owl encroachment, there is a real risk that the complex ancient forest ecosystems that spotted owls and other wildlife depend upon for survival will simply collapse,” Seton said.

The Washington court has directed the parties involved in the case to conference by February to set out a plan for the discovery process, with a joint status report and discovery plan due to be submitted by March 4.

Kimberly Wear (she/her) is the Journal’s digital editor. Reach her at (707) 442-1400, extension 323, or kim@northcoastjournal.com.

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