Owl vs. Owl

Published: Saturday, February 19, 2011, 11:07 AM

By The Oregonian Editorial Board  

 

Can a 12-gauge shotgun be a conservation tool? That's one question raised by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's newly revised recovery plan for the Northern spotted owl. Here's another:

After 20-plus years of struggling to save the spotted owl, must we keep trying?

The answer, in both cases, is yes.

A spotted owl perches in the Tahoe National Forest in California, July 12, 2004. (AP Photo/Debra Reid, File)

Yes, experimenting with shooting some of the barred owls that have aggressively moved into the spotted owl's precious old-growth habitat is worth attempting. The Northwest has made enormous sacrifices to save this bird -- much of its timber industry, countless jobs, entire rural communities. The influx of a hardier, more prolific owl is no excuse to give up now.

No one is calling for open season on barred owls. The federal recovery plan simply recognizes that the barred owl has marched in from eastern forests and become a serious threat to its smaller, less adaptable and more finicky cousin. A few early tests have suggested that when invading barred owls are removed, spotted owls move back and resume nesting.

After all the Northwest has been through, it's worth expanding those experiments and learning, one way or the other, whether it makes sense to do larger-scale barred owl controls.

It's an unpleasant thought, sending out shotgunners to call in and gun down hundreds of barred owls across Washington, Oregon and Northern California. These owls, too, are beautiful birds and impressive predators. But biologists often move to reduce the numbers of one species to help save another threatened species. Sea lions, terns and cormorants all have been targeted in defense of endangered salmon. Elsewhere, biologists have killed many other animals and birds, even golden eagles, to give more habitat and hope to endangered species.

All signs suggest that these are still desperate times for spotted owls. Surveys show their numbers continue to fall at a rangewide annual rate of almost 3 percent, a greater decline that biologists anticipated. Of course, barred owls are far from the only threat to the spotted owl. Wildfire, disease, insect outbreaks and drought all have accelerated on public forests.

But there's also much more than barred owl controls in the Fish and Wildlife Service's new recovery plan. Biologists are taking lessons learned from decades of spotted owl research, doubling down on protections of older forests and other key habitat that they now know are crucial to the birds, while lifting restrictions on logging across much of the rest of overcrowded and diseased public forests. Federal biologists want to begin a discussion about how private forest owners can contribute to owl recovery, too.

The new owl plan is in line with the emerging consensus that not only is there a role for commercial logging and thinning in public forests, there's an absolute need for it. For the first time since the spotted owl fluttered to the fore of the Northwest timber debate, there's broad agreement that forest thinning and timber production can be compatible with wildlife conservation and habitat restoration.

Whether all this will ever reverse the steady decline in spotted owls remains anyone's guess. But the Northwest already has sacrificed so much to create a survivable space in old growth forests for this species. If spotted owl recovery requires the taking of some barred owls, so be it.