Mercy killing?: Plan would kill barred owls to save spotted owls

YAKIMA, Wash. — On a summer night in the Little Naches two decades ago, Annette Heinen felt firsthand what a northern spotted owl experiences when a barred owl gets protective or territorial.

Pain.

Heinen was in her first year as a wildlife technician surveying spotted owls for the Forest Service, imitating their calls to pique their curiosity and draw them close.

Upon hearing the begging whimper of a young owl, she hooted a four-note call and tilted her head up to listen for a response.

She got one, all right.

“It felt like somebody hit me with a baseball bat,” says Heinen, a Selah resident. “Incredible power.”

The “bat” Heinen felt was the talons of an adult barred owl, balled inward like a fist, slamming into her face. A rear, forward-facing talon sliced open Heinen’s forehead. She was left with a black eye; the eyeball itself remained blood-red for nearly a month.

The mewling of a spotted owl nestling, which Heinen thought she had been hearing, is virtually indistinguishable from that of a young barred owl, a similarly-sized but more aggressive species that is all but displacing spotted owls in the forests of the Pacific Northwest.

That the adult barred owl attacked Heinen, who was imitating a spotted owl, demonstrates all too well why federal biologists are planning to do something almost unheard of in wildlife science.

They will begin killing one species to save another.

That’s the plan, anyway: Under a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) plan still in the draft process, hundreds of barred owls will be killed — shot, to insure as instantaneous and painless a death as possible — in areas of Washington, Oregon and California that have seen both a marked rise in barred owls and a decline in spotted owls.

(Capturing and relocating barred owls was also considered, but there were numerous problems associated with relocation. Placing them in captivity isn’t a real option because there aren’t nearly enough zoos and similar facilities willing to take barred owls.)

The idea, of course, is to see if removing barred owls will help spotted owl numbers rebound. How many owls will be taken and from where has not yet been decided, partly because of the limited population data available on the region’s barred owls.

That it seems inevitable, though, is remarkable in itself and, for wildlife professionals, somewhat hard to swallow.

“It’s not a simple black and white answer for us,” says Shawn Cantrell, executive director of the Seattle Audubon Society which, he adds, “has spent a lot of time wrestling with the science issues and ethical issues, the species versus species issues.”

This won’t be the first time a governmental agency had culled the population of one animal to stem the diminution of another. The Canadian provinces of Alberta and British Columbia have each killed multiple wolf packs to save mountain caribou. Sea lions, Caspian terns and northern pikeminnows have all been targeted at different times to prevent predation on migrating salmon.

But while there seems to be general agreement among wildlife experts that habitat loss has had at least as dramatic a negative impact on “spotties,” which are federally listed as threatened, it’s their pugnacious new neighbors upon which the FWS project’s ax will fall.

“If there’s no habitat, there’s no spotted owls,” says Robin Bown, a FWS biologist overseeing the service’s Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) development process. “But if you don’t deal with the barred owls, spotted owls may not be able to use the habitat that does exist.”

• • • •

Northern spotted owl numbers were already reeling amid the loss of so much of their favored old-growth forest habitat when barred owls — once largely confined to the eastern seaboard — began showing up four decades ago.

Unlike northern spotted owls, barred owls can adapt to a greater variety of habitat and food sources, and are also quicker to declare and defend territory from their generally more timid counterparts. So wherever barred numbers have proliferated throughout the region, spotted owls have either moved out, died off or — perhaps to avoid confrontations with barred owls — simply become quieter and more reclusive.

“Either they’ve left or they’re just not talking openly,” says Dale Phipps, a retired Yakima forester who now works as a wildlife technician surveying owl nests for the Forest Service. “Occasionally you’ll have spotties move in close to where barred are, just for a year, then they’re gone. I’m sure they get run off.

“If the barred moves, occasionally the spotties will show back up again.”

It’s not hard to understand the spotted owls’ reticence around the barred owls.

David Wiens, a U.S. Geological Survey research biologist doing doctoral research on the competitive interactions between barred and spotted owls in Oregon, has often seen the barred owls’ feisty nature when “spotties” respond to a surveyor’s call.

“The observer will be looking at the spotted owl to see if it has (been banded as part of the survey),” Wiens says, “and a barred will come in and smack the spotted owl — just fly into it.”

Owl survey teams will take advantage of the barred owls’ aggressiveness to band them. Technicians rig up a net trap around a spotted owl decoy and hoot like a spotted owl, knowing the barred will dive at the decoy to chase it off and get caught in the nets.

“Spotted owls,” Wiens says, “don’t have quite as strong a territorial response as barred owls. If a spotted owl wanders too close to a barred, it’s going to get chased off.”

Or killed. In May 1997, a Forest Service naturalist found a freshly killed spotted owl in a northern California redwood forest. When he imitated a spotted owl contact call, a barred owl immediately landed within five yards of him, spotted owl feathers still clinging to its talons.

But while it’s typical of humans to pick animal favorites by ascribing to them admirable personality traits — like the spotties’ apparent gentility — it’s easy to admire the barred owl.

People who deal closely with barred owls find them remarkably tame, even friendly.

“Here, you’d probably see a much different side of them than in nature,” says Kristi McKee, who works with injured raptors at the Northwest Wildlife Rehabilitation Center in Everson, Wash. “Here, they are extremely gentle. They’re one of our favorites. They’re so sweet, they eat really well, and they’re just so gentle.

“They don’t scream at you, they don’t try to attack you. They’re a well-tempered animal.”

Resourceful, too. A spotted owl will feed almost exclusively on wood rats and flying squirrels and is particular about its living quarters, existing primarily in drier, higher-elevation old-growth forests. A barred owl can live in those conditions but doesn’t have to, and will not only rely on mice and squirrels but also a wide variety of riparian-area prey — crayfish, frogs and salamanders, things a “spottie” wouldn’t touch.

“We’ve found them eating these little, tiny snails they’d collect from the stream,” says Wiens, the Oregon owl researcher. “They’d collect 60 or 70 of them and make a meal out of that. That impresses me, just their adaptability. And they have a very intricate social network among their territories as well, how they establish and maintain them. They clearly know who their neighbors are and where they are.

“I can tell you I find barred owls very fascinating.”

In a way, the barred owl’s very strengths — resilience, resourcefulness and willingness to defend aggressively its territory — work against them in the FWS plan: Barred owls aren’t in danger of disappearing, and spotted owls are.

But, of course, it’s never that simple.

“There’s no clear, compelling science that points out, ‘Here are the exact problems that barred owls are creating for spotted owls and here are the answers,’” says the Seattle Audubon’s Cantrell. “We support scientific evaluation of what the (spotted and barred owl) interactions are and identifying potential solutions.”

That those solutions will apparently have to come from “some experimental removal” of barred owls from known spotted owl territory, Cantrell says, is a circumstance “we don’t embrace lovingly and excitedly.”

It is accepted, instead, as a seemingly necessary evil.

How many barred owls have to die for experts to determine whether the spotted owls are even capable of rebounding, though, isn’t known. The FWS won’t finish its draft EIS until late summer at the earliest.

But even many field biologists who feel protective of the spotted owls they’re monitoring have doubts about the strategy of killing barreds to save them.

“I would hope for (spotted owls) to succeed, but the decline is just black and white,” says Heinen, who continues to survey spotted and barred owls, 20 years after her scary 1991 incident. “I used to feel more passionate about them, but when you see the numbers decline like this, hey: It’s a weaker species.”

“It’s the survival of the fittest,” says Phipps, the Yakima wildlife technician. “Don’t get me wrong — we do root for the spotties. They’re the gentle one. But … if we get rid of (barred owls) today, they’re going to be back tomorrow. The barreds are more aggressive. They’re prolific. You’d have to (kill them) continually.

“I don’t see the point in that.”