Wildlife advocates who oppose a controversial federal management plan to slaughter one type of owl in Pacific Coast forests to save another appear to have found an unlikely ally in President Donald Trump’s administration.
The plan approved by the former Biden administration would cull barred owls, an Eastern U.S. species considered invasive in the West, to protect the West Coast’s northern spotted owl, whose endangered status led to broad protections for forests in the 1990s. Trump removed such spotted owl protections in his first term, but his current administration, without explanation, has canceled three grants to start carrying out the barred owl removal plan in Northern California.
Wayne Pacelle, president of Animal Wellness Action and the Center for a Humane Economy, praised the Trump administration for terminating the grants. Pacelle is organizing opposition to the project in Congress and said habitat protections for the spotted owl, not large-scale killings, are the best course of action. His groups have also challenged the culling plan in court.
“It’s basically a completely unprecedented massacre of birds of prey,” Pacelle said.
But the move by Trump officials dismayed other wildlife advocates, who said the jarring plan is nonetheless necessary to save the spotted owl.
“If we don’t manage the barred owl population, the spotted owl will go extinct,” said Mark Higley, an influential wildlife biologist for the Hoopa Valley Tribe, whose reservation is about 30 miles northeast of Eureka. In 2013, the tribe began pioneering research into barred owl removal and successfully promoted the spotted owl population. “The science is pretty clear on that.”
The spotted owl is nothing short of iconic. Fierce politics have surrounded the small brown raptor, speckled with white spots, since its protection under the federal Endangered Species Act in 1990 pitted loggers against environmentalists. More than 30 years later, the little owl is still a lightning rod for tensions over environmental protection.
Environmentalists, native tribes and animal welfare activists were divided over the plans approved by the former Biden administration, a 30-year strategy to kill barred owls, the more adept competitor, by the hundreds of thousands in California, Oregon and Washington.
Spotted owls are protected under state and federal endangered species acts, and the barred owl is protected by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. If carried out, the generation-long project to kill barred owls would allow land managers and scientists to hunt them in Muir Woods, Golden Gate National Recreation Area and Point Reyes National Seashore in Marin County, as well as Yosemite and other national parks. In studies that have already played out in California, that’s typically done with the blast of a shotgun.
In May, the Trump administration canceled three grants to start carrying out the long-term plan in Northern California, the Republican administration’s first major action on barred owls.
A Barred owl flies looking for prey, Saturday, March 26, 2022, in Keenansville, Florida. (Wade Payne via AP Images)
Officials have offered little explanation for it. In an email, a spokesperson for U.S. Fish and Wildlife did not answer questions and referred Bay Area News Group to the agency’s webpage for the program, which provides no information on the terminations.
The canceled grants come as the Trump administration takes other actions that could imperil the spotted owls, said Tierra Curry, senior scientist at the Center for Biological Diversity, a legal nonprofit. She noted that the administration also has frozen spending to monitor spotted owl populations and in June moved to rescind the “roadless rule” that blocks logging on national forest lands.
“It’s like they’re trying to expedite the extinction of the spotted owl,” Curry said.
The administration has frozen a slew of federal grants since Trump took office in January, spurring a barrage of lawsuits by California Attorney General Rob Bonta, a Democrat.
The canceled grants are a victory for critics among animal rights groups and a bipartisan group of concerned members of Congress. Among them: California Republican Rep. David Valadao and Democratic Rep. Adam Gray, plus far-right Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene. Gray’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
The $1.1 million in grants to the California Department of Fish and Wildlife were approved by the Biden administration. Two of those programs were a planned research collaboration with the University of Wisconsin to kill barred owls in Mendocino and Sonoma counties over at least two years, to carve “refuges” where spotted owls could live freely from the competition of barred owls. One of those projects would have unfolded in the Mendocino National Forest. The third program was a study of the barred owl’s range.
“Without barred owl management, there are significant concerns regarding the future of northern and California spotted owl populations,” Peter Tira, a spokesperson for the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, said in an email. There are two types of spotted owls in California: Northern spotted owls dwell from Marin County north through Washington State. California spotted owls call the Sierra Nevada and Southern California mountain ranges home.
This June 1995 file photo shows a Northern Spotted owl taken in Point Reyes, Calif. (AP Photo/Tom Gallagher, file)
However, the federal government and state wildlife agency are separately funding at least two other barred owl removal projects in far Northern California, on a smaller scale.
If Trump officials allow the rest of the Biden-era plan to proceed, it would dramatically scale up the killings of barred owls. That began more than a decade ago in California, but on a smaller scale, and only in research settings.
In a longstanding study in California that published in June, researchers found that killing more than 3,000 barred owls — a third of the population in the state — benefitted spotted owls. Without the bloody approach, spotted owls from Northern California through Washington State will probably disappear, “and possibly linger on as small populations in other areas until those populations are eliminated because of catastrophic events” like wildfires, a major 2021 analysis found. That analysis incorporated findings from the Hoopa Valley Tribe.
The Associated Press contributed to this story.