Killing Owls to Save Owls

The northern spotted owl shot to fame as a powerful weapon in the long-running fight over old growth forests in the northwest; millions of acres of forest were eventually set aside to insure its survival. But now the owls are declining again, and not because of anything people are doing:

Barred owls, which are considered native to the eastern United States, are increasingly appearing in the Pacific Northwest’s old-growth forests where the threatened northern spotted owls breed and live. Where the two birds overlap, the barred owls tend to outcompete the northern spotted owls, taking the best nest sites and harassing, killing or occasionally mating with spotted owls.

To protect spotted owls from this new menace, the US government has just authorized states and individuals to kill all the barred owls they can find, potentially hundreds of thousands. I agree with these three philosophers (NY Times) that this is a terrible idea. It is not likely to succeed, but ever if it were, it would still be a terrible idea.

Many philosophers, conservation biologists and ecologists are skeptical of the idea that we should restore current environments to so-called historical base lines, as this plan tries to do. In North America, the preferred base line for conservation is usually just before the arrival of Europeans. (In Western forests, this is often pegged to 1850, when significant logging began.) But life has existed on Earth for 3.7 billion years. Any point we choose as the “correct” base line will either be arbitrary or in need of a strong defense.

Restoring or preserving those historical base lines is only going to get more difficult. In some cases, it will be impossible — and this might be one of them. It is unclear that killing barred owls will do anything but merely slow the northern spotted owl’s eventual extinction. When barred owls were previously removed in a before-and-after experiment in areas of Oregon and Washington, the number of northern spotted owls still declined. The removal slowed that decline, but even with the planned killings, the barred owl is here in the West to stay.

We should strive to care for ecosystems given their current ecological realities. Ecosystems are dynamic and have always changed over time as organisms move around. And now, humans are inescapable drivers of ecological changes. Climate change and wildfire have accelerated the dynamism of ecosystems. Killing barred owls will not restore the forests to the way they were in 1850.