Killing Barred Owls Isn’t Conservation—It’s a Crisis of Ethics and Ecology

Conservation Shouldn’t Begin With a Rifle

In April 2025, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) finalized a plan to lethally remove over 450,000 barred owls (Strix varia) across California, Oregon, and Washington over the next three decades. The stated goal: to reduce interspecific competition and prevent the extinction of the northern spotted owl (Strix occidentalis caurina), a federally listed threatened species under the Endangered Species Act since 1990.

This marks the largest avian culling program ever authorized in North America. It is framed as a necessary intervention. It is not.

As a scientist and ethical conservationist, I reject the false binary this strategy presents: kill or collapse. The ecological models are underdeveloped. The long-term viability is uncertain. And the ethical precedent—using lethal control as a conservation baseline—is deeply flawed.

Barred Owl (Strix varia), photo by K. Africanis

The Plan: Scale, Scope, and Scientific Premise

The USFWS proposal, released as a Final Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) in 2024, authorizes up to 30,000 lethal removals per year in designated Spotted Owl Critical Habitat Units. Removal zones include:

• The Klamath-Siskiyou region (southern Oregon & northern California)

• The Cascade Range (Washington to Northern California)

• California’s Coast Ranges

• Portions of the Sierra Nevada

The strategy relies on targeted shooting by trained contractors, often using playback calls and decoys to lure barred owls within range. The justification hinges on extensive literature (e.g., Wiens et al. 2014, Diller et al. 2016) showing the competitive displacement of Northern spotted owls, which are larger, more aggressive, and more behaviorally plastic.

Barred owls have reduced reproductive success, territory occupancy, and survival rates for spotted owls across their historic range.

But that’s not the whole ecological story.

What the Science Misses

Habitat Loss Is Still the Primary Driver

While competition matters, it is not the root cause of spotted owl decline. Decades of industrial logging, road building, and fire regime alteration have removed or fragmented up to 80% of late-successional and old-growth forest within the spotted owl’s range (Strittholt et al. 2006, Noon & Blakesley 2006). These structural habitats—high canopy closure, large tree cavities, and multi-layered vertical complexity—are essential for spotted owl nesting and roosting.

Barred owls thrive in younger, more disturbed forests. We created the conditions for their expansion. Killing them without restoring the landscape is at best a short-term patch. At worst, it’s an ecological deflection.

Interspecific Interactions Are Not Fully Understood

Although barred owls exhibit competitive exclusion, we lack sufficient modeling on

• The role of hybridization between spotted and barred owls (e.g., Haig et al. 2004) and what it means for evolutionary divergence.
  

• The indirect effects of removing a top mesopredator on prey species (small mammals, birds, amphibians), especially given dietary overlap between the two species.
  

• The potential for rapid recolonization, already documented in post-removal areas (Wiens et al. 2021), makes long-term population suppression extremely difficult.

Lethal removal also ignores ecosystem plasticity: will removing barred owls create vacuums for other opportunists (e.g., great horned owls, corvids) to fill?

The scientific basis for this program is narrow, and the ecological ripple effects are underexamined.

Operational Feasibility Is Logistically Implausible

Thirty years of sustained lethal control in rugged terrain assumes an unrealistic level of financial, legal, and social continuity. This plan demands:

• Continuous staffing of trained marksmen

  
  

• Annual monitoring of owl territories across tens of millions of forested acres

  
  

• Legal access across federal, private, tribal, and state lands

  
  

• The absence of significant public or political backlash

The plan’s estimated $1.3 billion price tag may grow with inflation, litigation, or programmatic delays. Past pilot programs involved removing just hundreds of owls. Scaling that to hundreds of thousands with measurable long-term benefit remains untested.

What About the Spotted Owl?

Spotted owls are declining rapidly—by 9% annually in some areas. But the culling strategy treats barred owls as a primary threat, not a secondary accelerator in a system already compromised.

Moreover, spotted owl recovery hinges not just on the absence of competition but on the return of structurally intact forests. Without fire-adapted, mature conifer ecosystems, spotted owls won’t persist, regardless of who else is present.

Killing a competitor may delay extinction. It will not reverse it.

Ethical Conservation Demands a Different Standard

If we normalize large-scale lethal control, what precedent are we setting for future ecological conflicts? Will we apply the same logic to red foxes, starlings, or other non-native species entrenched in complex landscapes?

This strategy avoids the hard questions:

Why is habitat still being logged in known spotted owl territory?

Why hasn’t the Northwest Forest Plan been fully reinstated or modernized?

Why are Indigenous co-management frameworks still underused in owl recovery areas?

Conservation should not be a proxy for convenience. It should be a reflection of responsibility.

What Real Conservation Would Look Like

1. Immediate moratoria on old-growth and mature forest logging across critical habitat zones

   
   

2. Large-scale forest restoration using structural targets suited to Northern Spotted Owl behavior and breeding biology

   
   

3. Investment in landscape-scale habitat corridors to support long-term territory stability

   
   

4. Hybridization research and non-lethal deterrence trials (e.g., acoustic disruption, exclusion zones)

   
   

5. Increased Indigenous leadership and governance over owl habitat management areas

We have tools beyond the trigger. We should use them.

A Call for Ethical Conservation

The decline of the northern spotted owl is heartbreaking—but a morally coherent conservation response cannot be based on mass killing. This plan is a warning sign: a pivot toward “management by removal” instead of management by restoration.

Conservation grounded in ethics is not afraid of tradeoffs. It’s afraid of shortcuts.

Let’s protect the spotted owl—but not at the expense of our scientific integrity or ecological compass.

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References:

• U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. (2024). Final Environmental Impact Statement for Barred Owl Management Strategy to Support Northern Spotted Owl Recovery. U.S. Department of the Interior. https://www.fws.gov/media/final-environmental-impact-statement-barred-owl-management-strategy

• Wiens, J. D., Anthony, R. G., & Forsman, E. D. (2014). Competitive interactions and resource partitioning between northern spotted owls and barred owls. Ecological Applications, 24(3), 608–622. https://doi.org/10.1890/13-0542.1

• Diller, L. V., Dumbacher, J. P., Bown, J. L., & Fish, A. M. (2016). Demographic response of northern spotted owls to barred owl removal. The Journal of Wildlife Management, 80(4), 691–707.

• Strittholt, J. R., Dellasala, D. A., & Jiang, H. (2006). Mapping and assessing fire‐dependent ecosystems in the Pacific Northwest. International Journal of Wilderness, 12(1), 24–29.

• Noon, B. R., & Blakesley, J. A. (2006). Conservation of the northern spotted owl under the Northwest Forest Plan. Conservation Biology, 20(2), 288–296.https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1523-1739.2006.00389.x

  Haig, S. M., Mullins, T. D., Forsman, E. D., Trail, P. W., & Wennerberg, L. (2004). Genetic identification of spotted owls, barred owls, and their hybrids: legal implications of hybrid identity. Conservation Biology, 18(5), 1347–1357.https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1523-1739.2004.00090.x
  

  Suggested Reading: Lawsuits seek to stop barred owl culling, including the Bay Area (January 13, 2025; The Mercury News)

• BLM endorses plan to kill barred owls on federal land, as Oregon lawmakers push back (January 8, 2025; Oregon Public Broadcasting)

• To save spotted owls, officials plan to kill a half-million of another owl species (July 4, 2024; The Associated Press) Plan finalized to kill thousands of barred owls around Northwest, (July 16, 2024; Washington State Standard)

• To save spotted owls, US officials plan to kill hundreds of thousands of another owl species (August 9, 2024; AP News)