EnvironMENTALists in Government Plan to Save the Spotted Owl by Killing Off Native N. American Barred Owls

Yeah…  Isn’t that just like an EnvironMENTAList?   Euthanize the competition.

By the way, the EnvironMENTALists like to frame this debate by calling the Barred Owl an invasive species, implying that the Barred Owl is non-native.  That is not an honest assessment.  The Barred Owl is native to North America.  Once the old-growth forests were cut down on the Pacific side of America, the Barred Owl began expanding its range to fill the void.  It’s not like they were imported from Japan or something.  Even a wildlife and fisheries director in Washington state notes that they are native species:

“Population dynamics between two native species should not be artificially manipulated,” said Blake Murden, wildlife and fisheries director for Port Blakely Tree Farms in Tumwater, Wash. The company agreed in 2009 to manage 45,000 acres as spotted owl habitat in exchange for protection from additional logging restrictions. – [link]

Of course, one can’t help but notice that the Barred Owl has microevolved into a superior species to the Spotted Owl:

Murden said the population of barred owls expanded rapidly because they adapt well to mixed habitat and eat a variety of prey. Spotted owls, on the other hand, prefer old-growth to nest and mostly eat flying squirrels.

Yup, apparently, the EnvironMENTALists’ god of evolution has betrayed them.  So, they must exact their revenge by killing off the superior species: 

Gov’t Announces New Way to Protect Spotted Owls: Kill Their Competition

July 1, 2011 by Jonathon M. Seidl – The Blaze

The northern spotted owl is a beautiful bird. It’s also threatened under the Endangered Species Act. And now, the government is taking drastic measures to ensure it’s survival by advocating the “removal” of the bird’s major competition, while also seemingly targeting loggers.

“Removal” of the birds is really just another way to say shooting the barred owl, the spotted owl’s rival. And it’s part of a group of recommendations announced by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to help revitalize the spotted owl population:

Management of the encroaching barred owl to reduce harm to spotted owls. Most of the recovery actions the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has carried out since finalizing the spotted owl’s 2008 recovery plan deal with the barred owl threat. A major part of this is developing a proposal for experimental removal of barred owls in certain areas to see what effect that would have on spotted owls, and then to evaluate whether or not broad scale removal should be considered. This portion of the 2008 plan was not significantly revised.

The Seattle Weekly explains how “removal” has worked in the past:

Though the USFWS policy hasn’t officially been released yet, The Oregonian reports that it’s likely to include a strategy to kill off between 1,200 and 1,500 barred owls from northern California through Oregon and Washington.

Killing off invasive species is a common practice in wildlife management, but barred owls aren’t invasive–they’re native. And several environmental groups are arguing that killing them won’t help the problem unless people are prepared to shoot the owls by the thousands every single year.

One biologist estimates the cost of such a plan to be $1 million annually.

Plus, by seemingly all accounts, the barred owl is simply a stronger and better-adapted species. It eats a wider variety of food and nests in a wider variety of places than the spotted owl.

While the wisdom behind killing one species to save another is part of the debate, there’s also controversy surrounding another aspect of the recommendations — protecting the spotted owl’s habitat. But there’s just one problem: that conflicts with local logging.

The Weekly reports that loggers are skeptical of the idea:

Under the new plan, both the elimination of barred owls and the preservation of forest land are used.

Jerry Bonagofsky, CEO of the Washington Contract Loggers Association, says that protecting spotted-owl habitat at this point is useless, and that the Obama plan will hurt the economy and kill jobs.

“Given that the barred owl is now part of the equation, it’s not clear that protecting habitat will help at all,” Bonagofsky tells us. “I think the Bush plan, given time, could have worked. In the present economy, locking up more timber land will have a huge effect on rural communities, jobs, and families.”

All told, it would appear that environmentalists did get a bigger bone thrown to them under the new plan than the loggers did.

Another argument, it seems, is that environmentalists and anti-loggers can fight the industry under the guise of protecting the owls. For example, one environmentalist expressed his excitement that the plan opens the door to regulate private land.

“In some regards [the plan] takes important steps forward,” Shawn Cantrell, executive director of the Seattle Audubon Society, told the Weekly. “It talks about the need for non-federal land owners to do more and it points at gaps in the regulatory structure of non-federal lands. It also recognizes the importance of protecting the remaining high-quality forest we still have. But on the downside, in some places, particularly on the east side of the Cascades, they seem to open the door to much more logging, saying we have to cut down the forest in order to save the forest.” [Emphasis added]

Is it ironic that in a story on owls, the proposals to protect them don’t seem so wise?

Explore posts in the same categories: Environ-mental-ism