• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

US Government Plans To Cull 500,000 Owls Over The Next 30 Years

March 29, 2024 by Deborah Bloomfield

As a result of concerns over the survival of owl species native to western North America, the US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) has made a draft proposal to cull nearly half a million barred owls over the course of three decades. This plan, however, has been met with uproar by animal advocacy groups.

Barred owls are typically native to the eastern coast of North America, but over the last 100 years or so, have expanded their range to the western coast. According to the USFWS, the species is invasive, and poses a threat to two species native to the east – the northern spotted owl, which is listed as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act, and the California spotted owl, which is in decline.

Advertisement

The barred owl is something of a generalist when it comes to its food and habitat, which can present a problem for the other two species – though deforestation has also been an issue for them.

“Because of their larger size, adaptability to a wide variety of forested habitats, and ability to eat a wide variety of prey, barred owls often occur in denser populations, outcompeting and excluding spotted owls from the latter’s preferred habitats,” reads a draft impact statement released by the USFWS back in November 2023.

In that draft impact statement, the USFWS outlined its plan for “the use of firearms to lethally remove” over 470,000 barred owls over 30 years in order to manage the problem, also exploring why some alternative plans wouldn’t be feasible. Under the chosen plan, roughly 90 percent of the barred owl population in designated areas would be removed each year.

“The purpose of this action is to reduce barred owl populations to improve the survival and recovery of northern spotted owls and to prevent declines in California spotted owls from barred owl competition,” the statement adds.

Advertisement

Unsurprisingly, the proposed plan hasn’t gone down to well with animal advocacy groups, 75 of whom have signed a letter, released on Monday, to Secretary of the Interior Deborah Haaland, urging that the “reckless” plan be scrapped. 

“This plan will cause severe disruptions to wildlife from the forest floor to its canopies,” reads the letter, “producing an untold number of mistaken-identity kills of other native owl species (including spotted owls), disrupting nesting behavior for animals, poisoning wildlife from dispersed and fragmented lead, and causing rapid dispersal and social chaos among many other species inhabiting these forest ecosystems.”

Whilst that sounds like a pretty scathing review, not all animal advocates agree with the letter. Tom Wheeler, executive director of the Environmental Protection Information Center, told the LA Times that the conclusions made were “divorced from what’s actually being proposed.”

The protocol for removing the owls requires the use of non-lead ammunition, for example, to ensure that there’s no lead poisoning, whilst there’s also an outlined protocol on how to avoid killing the wrong species that involves using trained and tested individuals.

Advertisement

“We have a functional choice, which is the extinction of one species, or we could have both species continue to exist on the landscape,” argued Wheeler.

At present, the proposal remains a draft, though public comments on the plan closed back in January. Until such a time a full proposal is published, as for the fate of all three owl species? We’ll simply have to wait and see.

[H/T: Los Angeles Times]

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. U.S. banking lobby groups oppose proposed tax reporting law
  2. Video Shows Albert Einstein Explaining His Most Famous Equation
  3. Venus’s Thin And “Squishy” Crust May Be Answer To Heat-Loss Mystery
  4. Secret Service Agent At JFK Assassination Casts Doubt On Single Bullet Theory

Source Link: US Government Plans To Cull 500,000 Owls Over The Next 30 Years

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • Impact That Made Meteor Crater May Have Triggered Giant Grand Canyon Landslide
  • Get Ready, Skywatchers: A “Dazzling” Total Lunar Eclipse Is Coming In 2025
  • How A Man Won The Lottery 14 Times Using Unbelievably Basic Math
  • What Are The Amazon’s “Flying Rivers”? And Why Every Single One Of Us Relies On Them
  • Curious New Microbe With Tiny Genome Toes The Line Between Cell And Virus
  • We’ve Just Found Out Where The World’s Longest-Living Vertebrate Has Its Babies
  • For The First Time, An Animal Has Been Shown Responding To Plant-Produced Sounds
  • Deep Ocean Currents Have “Weather” And Seasonal Changes That We’re Only Just Learning About
  • Stratus: What Are The Symptoms Of The Latest COVID-19 Subvariant To Spread Around The World?
  • In 1927, Henry Ford Tried To Build A Town In The Amazon And Things Went Very, Very Badly
  • Human Botfly: Say Hello To The Parasite That Would Love To Get Under Your Skin
  • Is The Weather Making Your Headache Worse?
  • “Zoning Out” Actually Helps You Learn? Data From Up To 90,000 Brain Cells Says So
  • Over Past 250,000 Years, Three Major Waves Of Human-Neanderthal Interbreeding Have Been Identified
  • Zebrafish “Catch” Yawns Just Like Us – We Might Need To Rethink Evolution To Account For That
  • 80,000-Year-Old Neanderthal Footprints Reveal How Children Hunted On Beaches
  • 5 Animals That Have Absolutely No Business Jumping (In Our Very Humble, Definitely Unbiased Opinion)
  • Polar Vortex Patterns Explain Winter Cold Snaps Against Background Warming Trend
  • Scientists Tracked An Olm For 2,569 Days And It Did Not Move An Inch
  • Look Out For “Fireballs”: The Best Meteor Shower Of 2025 Is About To Commence, According To NASA
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version