Federal Wildlife Officials Plan on Shooting Barred Owls to Protect the Threatened Spotted Owls

In order to protect one species of owl that is threatened with extinction, federal wildlife officials are planning on shooting another owl species.

In order to protect the spotted owl that has been declining rapidly in number, the federal officials plan to send hunters into the forests of Pacific Northwest starting this fall to shoot barred owls. They will carry out a limited experimental removal of the barred owls, reports Associated Press.

An environmental review statement of the experiment was published by The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service on Tuesday. They want to check whether eliminating the barred owls will permit the northern spotted owls to survive after a loss of territory since the 1970s. The experiment includes killing more than 3,000 barred owls in four different study areas in Oregon, Washington and Northern California over the coming four years. The process would kickstart in the Hoopa Valley Indian Reservation in Northern California.

This plan costing $3 million, can actually happen only if it gains a permit under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act that allows the killing of the non game birds.

Since 2009 the agency officials have been assessing several alternatives to regain the number of spotted owls by working on public comments, scientific studies and such. The final decision on this plan is due in a month.

The federal plan received a mixed response.

"Shooting a few isolated areas of barred owl isn't going to help us as forest managers, nor is it going to help the forest be protected from wildfires, and catastrophic wildfire is one of the big impediments to spotted owl recovery," Tom Partin, president of the American Forest Resource Council, a timber industry group, told the Associated Press.

But according to Paul Henson, Oregon State supervisor for Fish and Wildlife, the number of barred owls needs to be managed and regulated. If this is not done then the chances of recovering the spotted owl drops drastically.

The plans proposed consist of a combination of ideas in order to reduce the number of barred owls and revive the spotted owl population. One is killing the bird by shooting it, else they plan on capturing the barred owls and releasing them in zoos, a less likely option as it is a costly affair to execute and not more than five zoos take captured barred owls.

Compared to spotted owls, barred owls are more aggressive and bigger in size. They started dominating across the Great Plains in large numbers since the beginning of 1990s. Now they have dominated the spotted owl's territory outnumbering them in a ratio of 5-1, reports Fox News.

In 1990 the spotted owl was declared as a threatened species.