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Remember when lefties liked to sneer about “destroying the village to save the village”. Turns out that’s their only strategy for governing. But sometimes you have to kill a lot of owls to same some other owls. And if you kill enough owls, you save all the owls and the planet. That’s how it works, right?
To save the imperiled spotted owl from potential extinction, U.S. wildlife officials are embracing a contentious plan to deploy trained shooters into dense West Coast forests to kill almost a half-million barred owls that are crowding out their smaller cousins.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on Wednesday was expected to release its final plan to prop up declining spotted owl populations in Oregon, Washington state and California…The plan calls for killing up to 470,000 barred owls over three decades after the birds from the eastern U.S. encroached into the territory of two West Coast owls: northern spotted owls and California spotted owls.
Trained shooters. Is that what we’re calling it now?
“We’re at a crossroads. We have the science that indicates what we need to do to conserve the spotted owls, and that requires that we take action on the barred owls,” said Bridget Moran, a deputy state supervisor for the Fish and Wildlife Service in Oregon.
Shooting a lot of owls is ‘the science’. How many studies did Fish and Wildlife authorize to figure out what any hunter would have told them?
The problem with picking and choosing winners in the owl market is that it doesn’t actually work.
Shooting a whole lot of barred owls is not going to stop them from eventually expanding anyway. And if the spotted owls can’t compete, they won’t survive. That’s how the natural world works.
Perhaps Bridget can look at the ‘science’ and see how it works that way.
But this comes after decades of wasted time, lost money and endless government regulation.
Early efforts to save the birds culminated in logging bans in the 1990s that roiled the timber industry and its political supporters in Congress. Yet spotted owl populations continued to decline after barred owls first started showing up on the West Coast several decades ago.
It’s not about saving the spotted owls, but a government bureaucracy killing half a million owls to protect its authority. If the spotted owls disappear, how will Fish and Wildlife justify blocking logging?
And they kill chickens so they don’t die of bird flu.
Yes, and not a single case of the latest brid flu has been transmitted to humans, although the US government keeps hoping for an excuse to impose another scamdemic.
I guess harming the livlihood of chicken ranchers gives them the jollies, raises prices and benefits the government at public expense some way I don’t know of.
Scumbags. Do they do that in the UK, too?
Sick and twisted logic to decimate one owl species to “save” another! Narure must not have its way! Will we turn to human beings next?
So where is the Audubon Society to oppose this? I thought they wanted to save the Birds after all that’s why they were founded in the first place
I checked the Audubon Society website and it claims the Fish And Wildlife Service is in a four year program to kill 3600 barred owls, not nearly half a million. I have no idea why.
It makes ridiculous claims about spotted owls flying around without roosts or nests, though. When owls are nesting with eggs and chicks they’t try to chase off other owls who come close but that’s it. They don’t have territories like mountain lions. They only guard close to their nests.
And the only way to attempt to count them is by their vocalizations, which is an unreliable way to count them, to say the least.
Just when you think the Feds cannot sink any lower…
This is absolute evil.
The “Save the Spotted Owl” movement, during the Clinton Administration if I remember correctly, was one of the dumbest movements. Increased the problem of wildfires if I remember correctly.
Save the Great Auk Save the Passenger Pigeon Save the Heath Hen Save the Carolina Parakeet Save the Dodo Dave the Labrador Duck
Yes, it did, even though spotted owls don’t nest in dry underbrush.
I once saw a pair of those tiny little burrowing owls in the Mojave. They were cute. The ones I saw had a burrow right in the middle of a trail I was driving on and refused to get out of the way. I had to get out and shoo them into their burrow. A guess they never saw a car or four by before and weren’t afraid of it.
One of my late moms aunts from Northern Ireland got small Owl Caught in their Hair the Aunt removed the Bird let my Mom and her sister see it then released it
That’s funny. When I was in high school a pigeon landed right on my friends head when we were in the lunch line. I laughed at him and he punched me in the chest.
There was an owl who perched on top of a telephone pole or something, that I used to see on my night walks. Sometimes he would fly by me from behind, so close I could feel the whoosh of his wings. Good thing I wasn’t his prey 🙂
I wonder if it was nesting nearby? They dive bomb people sometimes when that’s the case. I’ve read about people who’ve had their hats snatched off, which is funny, but you wouldn’t want to get accidentally scratched by those talons. I read of a guy who got his scalp punctured that way although the owl was obviously just going for his hat and didn’t mean to hurt him. It didn’t actually attack him. They seem to know better than to get caught by a larger animal, which is why the dive bomb. I used to see mockingbirds do that to my cats when I was a kid. They’d harass the Hell out of them and I could tell the cats got super pissed off. They would pretend to be indifferent but after X amount of swoops, they’d whip around fast as lightning and snatch at the bird. I saw one of the cats who used to be feral and was a little savage around prey animals catch a bird that way twice.
I also had a Pima friend who thinks a white owl is an omen of death and I saw a white owl pecking around in his backyard. I told him and he asked if it was white but I lied and said “no” because I didn’t want him to worry.
I think owls are neat. As you know they probably have the best hearing in the animal kingdom. And killing 470,000 of them is a crime, in my opinion.
If they only did this for terrorist supporting invaders.
And Dirtbagocrats and child groomers, although thankfully there aren’t that many kiddie groomers out there.
if it’s the foreign controlled coup d’etat installed China Joe TaliBiden administration – where are the whacko environmentalist to stand in the way of the hunters?
No link between the Spotted Owl and the war on logging, right?
Insightful point about the government attempting to justify its war on logging, even though logging companies replenish every tree they cut down and then some.
And who says the spotted owl population is dwindling? The same government liars who want to curtail logging. How do you even count owls? That would be impossible. They rarely come out in the day and who could count them at night, even with night vision equipment?
There was a huge great horned owl that hung out in my southern California backyard for a few hours in broad daylight when I was a kid but that was a one in a million bird watching opportunity. I lived in the suburbs surrounded by “semi-desert.”.
This is all a load of shit. Barred owls aren’t displacing spotted owls. Owls don’t attack each other and neither species is going to run out of rodents to prey on in forests. Hell, the park down my street is a tree filled oasis near the center of downtown San Jose so the supply of squirrels and rats is limited but there are several owls who hang out there and they never molest each other.
I did see a big red tailed hawk chase off a smaller one, though. Somehow it knows the supply of prey is limited in the park because when I lived in North Carolina I would see big oaks and dogwoods full of red tails, and they never molested each other.
I don’t believe for a second that spotted owls are endangered or even dwindling in population. I’m sure it’s been anti-logging bullshit from the start.
How much lead will these hunters leave in their wake to be ingested by various & sundry animals, killing them off, too? How about just shooting the … oh .. nm.
Actually, professional pest control guys use air rifles but who knows who the government is going to send out for their planned owl genocide. They could be using shotguns with buckshot for all I know.
And who are they going to hire that can reliably tell the difference between these two similar species? Bird book photos use the most distinctive images they can find, but in the real world individual variation can make things less clear.
https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Spotted_Owl/id
https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Barred_Owl/id
Yes, that’s true and the coloration of juvenile raptors is significantly different from that of adults.
All about birds is a cool website. I used to play its recording of the bird hunting Cooper’s hawk from my open back window when I lived in Orange County CA and all the yard birds would go silent in cautious fear. After the recording would end, they’d explode into chatter. It was funny and worked every time. It may seem cruel but I actually did them a favor my conditioning to be more cautious. Birds aren’t as bird brained as some people think they are and they learn from experience. I’ve seen a Cooper’s hawk hunt in a park here in San Jose and those things are deadly to the small foraging birds.
Using this EXACT SAME LOGIC… we should kill (at least) a half-million other invaders encroaching on OUR habitat: The Global South. maybe then THEY’LL stop invading OUR habitat, right?
So we’re gonna kill a half-million owls to save another half-million owls to be killed by the bird cuisinarts – windmills?
What would the Eco-Freaks do when they find a Marbled Murlet Eating a Delta Smelt
Probably have aneurysms and poop their pants.
You’re right
This whole thing is so cruel. so surreal, so ridiculous, that I don’t know whether to laugh or vomit
Yes, protect the worthless bay smelt from nothing because no aqueduct originates in a SALT WATER bay which is part of the Pacific Ocean, just to cheat Central Valley farmers from water they’ve been entitled to by law since the early 30s, but commit owl genocide to “protect” another owl species that isn’t endangered. As if the enormous tracts of forest which stretch from Central CA into Canada don’t have enough space for both species. There are much more than two owl species sharing that expansive wilderness.
Ironically, it’s the environ-mental case lobbies which caused this. Greens and government ALWAYS make the world a worse place.
Good vs bad owls – who decides? Oh, right – it is all about the logging bans that identifies the Spotted Owl as the good ones. After all, they would have no reason to continue the logging ban without them.
Want to screw up Mother Nature? Just let the Government pick the winners and losers and just like that, you create chaos and unintended consequences.
That’s it exactly. Kill the barred to save the spotted to hold off the saw.
I wonder what would happen if it was discovered that wind turbines are killing spotted owls.
It would probably be blamed on Trump.
The self hating a-holes running the country are complete morons.
This is an analogy for what our government is doing to us! Killing off those already so the foreigners can take their place!