A plan to save one owl species at the expensive of another divides activists

LEILA FADEL, HOST:

A plan to shoot and kill up to 450,000 barred owls on the West Coast is dividing some conservation and animal rights groups. It's part of an effort to save their smaller, threatened cousin, the northern spotted owl. The federal government finalized the plan over the summer after years of discussion. Nate Hegyi from the NHPR podcast Outside/In has the sounds of this story, including a gunshot.

NATE HEGYI, BYLINE: Mark Higley has some ground rules when he's out in the middle of the night killing barred owls - bring a headlamp, a shotgun, some shells.

MARK HIGLEY: Never put one in the chamber until right before you're going to shoot.

HEGYI: OK.

HIGLEY: And always empty it completely right after.

HEGYI: We're on a logging road in the Hoopa Valley Reservation in northern California. Higley is a wildlife biologist here. He spots what he's looking for high up in a tree.

(SOUNDBITE OF GUN CLICKING)

HEGYI: He aims.

(SOUNDBITE OF GUNSHOT)

HEGYI: A ball of fluff falls to the ground. Higley has been doing this work for more than a decade.

HIGLEY: I probably average between one and two birds a night.

HEGYI: He drives out several nights a week, killing one owl to save another. He's shot roughly 900 here on the reservation through a special permit that the tribe has from the federal government.

Do you think that these spotted owls would be here if you hadn't started shooting barred owls?

HIGLEY: Oh, we wouldn't have any spotted owls left by now. Absolutely not.

HEGYI: Barred owls are native to the woodlands of the eastern U.S., but they started to move west in the early 1900s as more trees were planted in the Great Plains. Researchers theorize that that allowed them to hopscotch towards the Pacific coast. Now they've invaded a big swath of the Northwest from northern California all the way up to British Columbia. Joe Liebezeit is with the nonprofit conservation group Bird Alliance of Oregon.

JOE LIEBEZEIT: You got this bigger, rough-and-tumble owl coming in, and it easily evicts the northern spotted owl from its territory. And that's what's happening all over the Northwest.

HEGYI: The Bird Alliance of Oregon is one of at least 22 conservation groups that have lent support to the plan.

LIEBEZEIT: The northern spotted owl is on a trajectory where it will become extinct within a few decades really if nothing is done.

HEGYI: But it's also caught the ire of other wildlife protection and animal welfare organizations.

WAYNE PACELLE: We're going to unleash an unprecedented assault on a North American native owl, and we shouldn't do it.

HEGYI: Wayne Pacelle is the head of Animal Wellness Action. His group and another filed lawsuits this fall challenging the plan. They argue that the barred owls have been wrongly designated as invasive by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

PACELLE: If we want to define range expansion as creating invasive animals, I mean, where does that end? I mean, the reason that we have animals that populate this Earth is that they expanded in range.

HEGYI: He also argues that the plan is unfeasible. Federal wildlife managers say that coming up with the money to do all of this will generally be the responsibility of local land managers. And the coverage area is massive - three states, multiple reservations, private land, five national parks.

PACELLE: It's not workable. It's plainly not workable.

HEGYI: The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service says it does not comment on pending litigation. But Mark Higley, the tribal biologist, says killing barred owls has worked. An eight-year study on the Hoopa Valley Reservation and other small test sites showed that the number of northern spotted owls stabilized once barred owls were removed. And while he doesn't love this part of the job, Higley says it's necessary.

HIGLEY: 'Cause if we don't, it's pretty obvious the spotted owl will be gone, and I'd kind of hate to see that.

HEGYI: The government is expected to issue a response to the lawsuits from animal rights activists this month.

For NPR News, I'm Nate Hegyi on the Hoopa Valley Reservation in California.

(SOUNDBITE OF THE BARE BONES' "HOMESTEAD")

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