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The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s unworkable and inhumane “Barred Owl Management Strategy” will go into effect if Congress does not stop it.
The FWS plan—approved in September 2024—seeks to dramatically reduce populations of barred owls in Washington, Oregon, and California to alleviate competitive pressure on northern and California spotted owls. But barred owls are a native North American species, protected under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, and their expansion into western forests reflects a natural and ongoing range expansion—a phenomenon common to many bird species.
The goal is to reduce social competition between the owls and to kill 450,000 barred owls over the next 30 years. The plan involves shooting about 30 barred owls for every Northern or California spotted owl in existence. The shooters would play recorded sounds of barred owls and draw them in — known in some circles as “the hoot and shoot.”
This plan is cruel, as well as impractical. As Dr. Eric Forsman, a longtime U.S. Forest Service biologist, is quoted in this L.A. Times editorial and this NPR piece, “[t]o try to control barred owls across a large region would be incredibly expensive, and you’d have to keep doing it forever because if you ever stopped, they would begin to come back into those areas,” and, “…in the long run, we’re just going to have to let the two species work it out.”
Please call your two Senators and House of Representative!
Sen. Adam Schiff: (202) 224-3841
Sen. Alex Padilla: (202) 224-3553
Find your House of Representative:
https://www.house.gov/representatives/find-your-representative
Please tell them:
- I oppose the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s “Barred Owl Management Strategy.”
- I strongly urge you to support HJR 111/SJR 69 to cancel this unprecedented and unethical plan.
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