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To learn more about the pro-cull side, go here.
To learn more about the anti-cull side, go here.
Michael Dunne: I’m Michael Dunne. For those of us old enough to remember, the timber wars of the 1990s in the Pacific Northwest focused on saving old-growth redwood forests from logging, and one of the key reasons to save those forests was to protect a signature species in our woods, the northern spotted owl. And while those timber wars did help protect the spotted owl’s habitat, it still faces an existential crisis. And some claim the danger comes not from chainsaws but from another species of owl. Today on the show, you’ll hear both sides of a debate about a program to kill the non-native barred owls so that the native spotted owls can have a chance. One side says the barred owls must go, but another side says barred owls are just a scapegoat for the logging industry. First up, we talk with a member of the Environmental Protection Information Center, which is in favor of the cull. Tom Wheeler is executive director and staff attorney for the Environmental Protection Information Center. Tom, thanks so much for coming on and talking to us.
Tom Wheeler: Thank you so much for having me.
Dunne: Yeah, can you just remind folks how it was decided, or why it was decided, to cull barred owls in the Pacific Northwest?
Wheeler: If we look to British Columbia, where barred owl invasion has occurred for the longest, the northern spotted owl is extinct in the wild. The northern spotted owl is virtually extinct in the wild in both Oregon and Washington, and is doing somewhat better in Northern California, only because barred owl invasion here is most recent. So, for the northern spotted owl, researchers have been trying to figure out if there was some way to deal with barred owls without lethal removal. Was there some area that northern spotted owls would inhabit that barred owls would not? Or if we could improve habitat quality for northern spotted owls, would that offset the effect of barred owls? And what has been discovered is that the only thing we can do to prevent the northern spotted owl from going extinct at this moment is to lethally remove, or kill, barred owls in their habitat. So, across the range of the northern spotted owl, forest managers are having a debate on whether or not they should engage in barred owl removal. There are questions on one hand about the ethics of barred owl removal, of removing wildlife from the landscape, albeit wildlife that is not native to the forests of this area, and weighing that against the benefits to the northern spotted owl. So, my organization and other conservation organizations have come out in support of barred owl removal, and some animal rights groups have come out in opposition.
Dunne: Okay, so what is the hope that this achieves? If I’m reading the literature right, it’s not going to completely remove barred owls, right? Is there a hope that some sort of balance will be restored?
Wheeler: So we have a choice. We have a future where we can have two owl species, or we could have one, and that one would be barred owls. So, barred owl removal is being targeted at the areas that are going to be most impactful for the northern spotted owl, things like old-growth forest habitat or areas that are well protected so that those forested conditions can develop. Barred owls live in a diverse set of forest conditions, including much younger forest than northern spotted owls could live in, so those areas are not being targeted for barred owl removal. So, the strategy that is in place is trying to remove as few barred owls as possible in order to sustain northern spotted owls, and it does this by targeting the highest-value northern spotted owl habitat.
Dunne: Okay, so how is it going to be carried out? Are there specially licensed hunters? Is it being carried out by specialists in various federal departments? And is it shooting them or trapping them? How does it work?
Wheeler: So barred owls are likely to be killed using a shotgun. A trained wildlife technician, certified by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, will call for barred owls and draw them into the area. The technician will then make a positive visual identification that it is a barred owl, and the barred owl will be killed with a shotgun. So, this is relatively quick. It is relatively painless for the barred owl, because over 97% of all barred owl removals have occurred with only one shot, and it is cost-effective. This is going to occur on federal public lands, those managed by the Bureau of Land Management, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service or the U.S. Forest Service. It will also occur on private lands, so it is an all-of-the-above approach targeting northern spotted owl habitat, regardless of who owns the land.
Dunne: Invasive species: How is that defined? Does it not matter how the species got to a particular environment, just that it isn’t supposed to be there? Is that the simplistic definition?
Wheeler: So I think that the definition varies, and you’ll find different definitions in federal executive orders issued by the president and in scientific literature. What I think is important here is to recognize that humans had a very substantial role in facilitating the range expansion of the barred owl. Barred owls are native to the eastern United States, and Euro-American settlement of the Great Plains helped facilitate their expansion. People planted trees. They killed things like bison, elk and beavers that kept down woody browse. They stopped native and cultural burning practices in the Great Plains, and as a consequence, the area became far more forested. Those forests then allowed the barred owl to expand its range, and we can watch the barred owl’s westward expansion in real time as people make their first recorded sightings in various U.S. states and Canadian provinces. So here, what’s important to realize is that humans played a substantial role. Humans are part of the environment, and I think that this gives us some moral culpability and moral responsibility to do something about the consequences. Lethal removal is a very common wildlife technique. The idea that this is just an owl-versus-owl struggle is misinformed. Really, this is an owl-versus-ecosystem issue. Our western forests are not used to barred owls because they did not co-evolve with barred owls. Barred owls have a much more varied diet than northern spotted owls. They have a larger body size, and they’re capable of existing at greater densities on the landscape. This is placing substantial pressure on the barred owls’ prey species, which are different from those of the northern spotted owl. They include things that northern spotted owls don’t typically feed on, like salamanders. We have a lot of native salamanders here on the West Coast that have very small ranges and are themselves at risk of extinction. We don’t have a great understanding of how barred owls are impacting them, except that we are finding lots of salamanders in stomach content surveys of barred owls that have been killed. So, I think it’s important that we also broaden this discussion. It’s not that we’re playing God and deciding which owl gets to survive. We’re trying to protect whole ecosystems by doing barred owl removal. The northern spotted owl is just the charismatic face of the threat of barred owl expansion.
Dunne: Okay, I have heard from other environmental organizations that are obviously just as concerned as you and your organization are about the ecosystem, but they may be on the other side of this issue. I’ve heard some say this could be blaming the barred owl when the real problem is deforestation by humans, and that this is a way for loggers to get in and log more forest. I wanted to get your reaction to that philosophy, or at least that statement.
Wheeler: So, my organization has been combating bad logging practices for its 50 years of existence. We currently have four lawsuits on federal or state timber issues. So, if there is anybody who would be quick to blame the timber industry, I’m sure it would be us. But this goes beyond habitat modification and destruction. One thing that we know is that because of the Northwest Forest Plan, we’re actually seeing increasing amounts of spotted owl habitat coming back online on federal public lands. We lose some amount every year to things like fire or logging, but more habitat is aging in and coming online than is being lost. And despite improving habitat on federal public lands, we are seeing the northern spotted owl crater. It is in this extinction vortex, and the obvious cause, when you look at declines over time and where those declines occur, is barred owl invasion. The northern spotted owl is one of the best-studied species on the planet. We can draw very strong causal connections between barred owl invasion and northern spotted owl decline. So, I think that it is important, of course, that we maintain northern spotted owl habitat, which is something my organization does through litigation. And yet we should also recognize that barred owls are now probably the primary threat to the northern spotted owl.
Dunne: That is Tom Wheeler, executive director and staff attorney for the Environmental Protection Information Center. Tom, I really appreciate you taking time to talk to us.
Wheeler: Thank you for having me, Michael.
Dunne: Now let’s hear from the Center for a Humane Economy and Animal Wellness Action. Wayne Pacelle is president of the Center for a Humane Economy and Animal Wellness Action. Wayne, thanks so much for coming on and talking with us.
Wayne Pacelle: So glad to be with you.
Dunne: Could you give us a quick history of the barred owl in the Pacific Northwest? As I understand it, they weren’t always here. Can you talk about that species and its importance here in the Pacific Northwest?
Pacelle: Barred owls are one of 19 owl species native to North America. For thousands of years, they ranged between Maine and the Dakotas, down to New Mexico and all the way back east to Florida. Over the last couple hundred years, they’ve engaged in a modest range expansion, and they have moved all the way west. They probably moved through the boreal forests, a continuous stretch of forest between New Brunswick and British Columbia in Canada. They are forest owls, and they need trees in order to live and nest. Perhaps they came across as some of the so-called Great Plains were reforested, but it was a natural movement. Perhaps warming drove them a little bit north, but it was also just a matter of having forests they could live in. So, they now live in California, Oregon and Washington, and they are a beautiful species. Again, they are native to North America, and they’re here to stay.
Dunne: Yeah, so they weren’t introduced by humans. They got here on their own, correct?
Pacelle: They got here on their own. Range expansion is as natural for wild animals as reproduction is.
Dunne: But humans are going to intervene with regard to barred owls. Talk about the federal government’s plan for this wide-scale culling of the species. What reason is the U.S. government giving for this action?
Pacelle: Yes, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which is the national fish and wildlife management agency, works with many of the state fish and wildlife agencies on different policies. It has responsibility for enforcing the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, which protects more than 1,000 bird species native to the United States, including the North American barred owl. It also has responsibility for implementing the Endangered Species Act, and both of those laws are very protective of species. The Migratory Bird Treaty Act protects barred owls, but also the northern spotted owl and other subspecies of spotted owls. Spotted owls are known to many people in the Pacific Northwest because of the timber wars of the 1980s and ’90s. The northern spotted owl in particular was listed in 1990 as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act. Historically, the ESA forbids not only directly killing a threatened or endangered species, but also destroying the habitats they need to survive. So there were lawsuits by environmental groups against the timber companies and against the U.S. government for allowing timber cutting decades ago. That was under the premise that if you cut down the old-growth forests, you’ll doom the northern spotted owl, which is a very habitat-specific species. It requires older-aged forests with Sitka spruces or redwoods or even sequoia trees, and a wide range of other species, many long-lived tree species that have deep cavities in their sides where the birds nest. And then they just hang out in the trees. They’re forest owls. That’s their thing. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has been concerned, as have we and many other organizations, with the long-term decline of the northern spotted owl, and almost everybody who is anybody in this space recognizes that it was habitat destruction, the loss of those old-growth forests, that really put the species on a downward trajectory. A few years ago, the timber industry came up with a plan, which we think was a bait and switch: Blame the barred owl for the spotted owl’s decline, so the timber industry is off the hook for its habitat destruction at the time that it wants to get back into those forests and cut more timber. The Fish and Wildlife Service bought the timber industry’s plan, and it produced an environmental impact statement called the Barred Owl Management Strategy. It calls for killing up to 450,000 North American barred owls in California, Oregon and Washington, shooting them across 17 national forests and 14 units of our National Park Service. That includes Crater Lake National Park in Oregon; Olympic, North Cascades and Mount Rainier national parks in Washington; and iconic parks in California: Yosemite, Redwood, Lassen Volcanic, Kings Canyon and Sequoia. That’s essentially about 20,000 of them a year for the next 30 years, as a way to reduce social competition with the northern spotted owl, because they’re both forest owls. They both seek those craggy old trees with cavities in them for nesting sites. This was a convenient diversion from the timber industry’s cutting of old-growth forests, and it’s been one part of a multipronged effort to dramatically increase timber cutting on our federal lands. In the One Big Beautiful Bill that Congress passed in July 2025, there was a provision to increase timber harvest on our public lands by 60%. That is really going to hit the O&C lands, the timberlands that the Bureau of Land Management manages in central and southern Oregon. The Fish and Wildlife Service also proposed a rule to eliminate the habitat protection provisions of the ESA, so they could aim right at the northern spotted owl and kill them by taking down that timber. And a different agency, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, has now proposed rolling back the roadless rule, which protects about 58 million acres of our national forests from road building. They need roads to log, to get the logging trucks and the heavy equipment in to cut down the trees. So the Barred Owl Management Strategy is a coordinated plan with the other federal agencies that have public lands responsibilities to cut down more trees and kill more spotted owls and barred owls, but to pin the murder, if you will, on the barred owls.
Dunne: And you’re leading a program, I think it’s called Hoot Don’t Shoot. Talk about this program that you’re a part of.
Pacelle: Yes. Well, barred owls have been protected in the United States for more than 100 years. This is completely unprecedented in terms of killing our protected raptors. No government in the world has ever proposed killing half a million raptors. It would be the equivalent of saying that bald eagles and golden eagles overlap in habitat, and one is scarcer than the other, so we’re going to kill off 500,000 of the more abundant eagles. We’re going to kill 500,000 golden eagles because they’re competing with bald eagles. Or take two hawks, a ferruginous hawk and a red-tailed hawk. They’re competing for the same prey, or they’re in the same area, so we’re going to kill 500,000 hawks. It’s stupid. It’s wrong. It’s never going to work. One of the terrible flaws in the plan is that they’re going to kill barred owls over 24 million acres, from Southern California all the way to the border between Washington and Canada, but they’re going to shoot them in just 28% of the area that these two owl species live in. That means that in 72% of the land area, the barred owls are going to be unmolested. So what’s going to happen is you’re going to shoot the barred owls in 28% of the land area, and then the barred owls in all the surrounding areas are going to move in and replace them, and we’re going to be back to square one over and over again. It is the least smart wildlife management plan I’ve ever seen in terms of not accounting for repopulation, for natural dispersal of the targeted species, and the fact that they’re a flighted bird and there are no barriers to reentry.
Dunne: So, Wayne, my last question for you is: What is the status of the lawsuit?
Pacelle: So our lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court in Seattle. It was moved down to Portland, Oregon, and we had oral argument. Another animal protection group also sued, so the cases were joined together. We’re eagerly awaiting an opinion. We want the Barred Owl Management Strategy, which calls for killing half a million barred owls, to be scrapped, and we want the U.S. government to focus on protecting spotted owls in more suitable ways. I’m so disappointed in some of my friends in the environmental community who cannot see that this is a weapon being used by the timber industry to destroy spotted owl habitat, and therefore spotted owls, as well as to massacre barred owls.
Dunne: That is Wayne Pacelle, president of the Center for a Humane Economy and Animal Wellness Action. Wayne, I really appreciate you talking with us today.
Pacelle: Michael, great to be with you. Thank you so much for having me.
Dunne: That’s the show for today. All episodes of “Oregon on the Record” are available as a podcast at klcc.org. One quick note: Obviously, this subject is very controversial, and both sides dispute the other’s claims and numbers. I’d invite listeners to go to both organizations’ websites to learn more about each position. Links to those websites can be found with this show at klcc.org. Tomorrow on the show, you’ll hear from staffers and guests of the Eugene Mission who just participated in the organization’s conversations on a bench about how it is to live homeless and hopeless in our community, and how hope can be found. I’m Michael Dunne, host of “Oregon on the Record.” Thanks for listening.
