A Barred Owl looking blending in beautifully in the bigleaf maples in the background (Image: Brendan McGarry)

If you have seen an owl on Capitol Hill in the past decade, there is a strong chance it was a Barred Owl (Strix varia). In our highly altered habitat melange full of rodents and other gulpable creatures, they reign supreme. These days, almost no other owl species are regularly seen on Capitol Hill.

I think Barred Owls are cool, but they also happen to be a sticky subject. They are recent arrivals, colonizers from Eastern North America. People paying attention to owl populations can agree that until the late 1990s, there were very few occurrences of Barred Owls in Washington State.

I recall a late 90s trip to Bainbridge Island to see a “for sure” pair of these owls during a 24-hour birding extravaganza. At that point in time it was worth the late night ferry trip even when our next destination was the mountains near Cle Elum. Today, that would be an absurd proposition (I suppose it always was but you get what I mean). I could probably choose any park on the Hill of decent size and adequate habitat and summon a Barred Owl with my moderately good impression of their barking,“Who cooks for you, who cooks for you owl” call.

Unlike so many newly arrived species we might strive and struggle to control, Barred Owls didn’t show up because they escaped from captivity or hitched a ride on a train. The most widely accepted reasons for their steady stream into our region over the past 40ish years are settler land management practices and climate change. More trees planted across the Great Plains and less harsh winters across the Boreal Forests laid out the welcome mat.

People who champion novel ecosystems might simply lean into Barred Owl arrival as a natural, inevitable progression, and something to celebrate as a harbinger of a new biodiversity. And it’s true, the distribution of life on this planet has never been static. Worrying about which species are where can just feel like an extension of a human desire for control. Ecological restoration, while certainly a noble cause, can feel nearly impossible in some instances. Besides, which point in history are we aiming for with restoration? Picking a single species out and focusing a lot of energy on it can feel incredibly messy and purposefully myopic at best.

And yet, here we are, looking at the US Fish and Wildlife Service’s (USFWS) final management plan for Barred Owls in our region. The goal: try to protect Northern Spotted Owls (Strix occidentalis caurina), a less aggressive, slightly smaller, and far more choosy cousin to Barred Owls. Management in this case, mostly means lethal removal of Barred Owls across their overlap with existing Spotted Owls and historical high quality habitat. Barred Owls have been identified by USFWS as one of two major threats to Northern Spotted Owls, the other being the loss of their obligate ecotype: old growth forests. Spotted Owls like the kind of heterogenous, messy forests that only time and specific conditions can accomplish – which also happens to grow the largest, most lucrative tree to log. If you lived in the Pacific Northwest through the 1990s you know the story of owl vs logging. The Endangered Species Act’s recognition of the vulnerability and decline of Northern Spotted Owls ground old growth logging across our region to a halt (in the US at least).

The USFW’s announcement of the ten year viability study of lethal Barred Owl control got some media attention but didn’t make waves. But the plan to potentially cull hundreds of thousands of Barred Owls over the next 30 years drew outrage when it was released to public comment last year. It spawned a scathing letter to Interior Secretary Deb Haaland signed by 75 wildlife and animal rights groups last march, and 8,600 people joined the fray during the open commenting period that closed in January 2024. When the final plan was announced this August, I had friends and family asking me about my thoughts as a birder, ornithologist, and conservationist.

A snapshot of the management plan for our region. The nearly transparent blue outlined areas are where the plan will focus energy. (Image: US Fish and Wildlife Service)

Something that kept floating to the top in the public discourse were concerns there’d be hunters running around shooting owls in some sort of open season. In our TLDR world it might be easy to assume that based on bad reporting and clickbait article titles, but even my fairly brief reading of the final plan made it obvious no one would be shooting Barred Owls, near the Hill, or anywhere near Seattle.

The simple fact is that there are basically no Northern Spotted Owls in lowland Western Washington anymore and those that are left in Washington are far from most humans. While the folks writing that open letter to Haaland might lead us to believe that the USFWS are a bunch of reckless idiots, a lot of very smart, concerned people have worked hard to create this management plan. When it actually starts to unfold, the management areas aim to reduce Barred Owls in places where Northern Spotted Owls still eke out a living or have in recent years. The work is already incredibly ambitious, hoping to operate across multiple land owners (Federal, State, Tribal, and some private timberlands) and it’s going to involve very specifically trained permit holders. So, don’t go rogue – Barred Owls are still protected by the Migratory Bird Act.

I’d be concerned if society on the whole just shrugged and said “sure, sounds good” when a federal entity said, “let’s shoot a bunch of owls.” And a lot of the worries are definitely valid. For instance: Barred and Spotted Owls look a lot alike and will even hybridize. The people doing the culling could make mistakes. (I’d hate to be that person.) However, despite all the suggested viable alternatives brought up by opponents of the plan, no proven method of control outside lethal takes exists.

My personal concern is that it might not work because this feels like a bit of a Hail Mary. Removing invasive species has worked on isolated islands, but the geography in question here is the entire Northern Spotted Owl range from Northern California to Southern British Columbia and the invasive species (yes, the feds ran the analysis and call Barred Owls invasive in this instance), will continue to breed and try to colonize the areas they are being excluded from. In a way, Greater Seattle is just a breeding ground that will forever be a problem for the few Spotted Owls left in Northwestern Washington. And while the plan very specifically addresses this with take estimates over thirty years, it still feels a bit impossible. (Killing animals to control them is nothing new, but while I am personally conflicted about this specific plan, the “management” of Gray Wolves and other large predators across our country is largely shameful, ignores science, and panders to a specific few who can go kick rocks.)

The other impact on Northern Spotted Owls – the destruction of old growth habitat – will not reverse for many human generations, if at all. However, the survival of Northern Spotted Owls directly impacts our last slivers of old growth forest; their listing as endangered creates a roadblock to old growth logging. The Biden Administration has proven quasi-supportive of prohibitions of logging old and mature stands of trees on federal land, but it doesn’t take a genius to realize that is feeble protection that can and will differ with a different administration. For now, Northern Spotted Owls being an endangered species (another subspecies California Spotted Owls are also in decline but have yet to be listed), is one of the better ways to keep the last remnants of majestic forest we have.

A Barred Owl that showed up in my backyard several years ago. Not pictured is a gang of chickadees hitting its head. (Image: Brendan McGarry)

People smarter and much closer to the science than me have reviewed the Barred Owl management plan and landed on one side or another. But, to some degree, I suspect the yea and nay crowds ultimately boil down to philosophical points of view, even if there’s debate over the scientific efficacy. For the no crowd, knowing that Northern Spotted Owls have continued to decline annually, and now sit at around thirty-five percent of their population in 1995 (which is just when the alarm bells started ringing – they’d been in decline long before that), isn’t enough to warrant killing four hundred thousand Barred Owls. But let’s not forget the yes crowd aren’t excited to enact the cull either, to them it just feels like a brutal necessity.

You might be waiting for an opinion, because this article is rife with equivocation and explanations. Or maybe you realize that my opinions don’t matter and this issue is a bit abstract from a hyper local news perspective (once again, there will be no Barred Owl hunting on the Hill). Unfortunately, I don’t have a hard stance because I generally like Barred Owls even if I know they are problematic. I view their presence and impacts as a symptom of the environmental struggles of our day, not the root cause.

To further muddy the waters, note that Barred Owls have extremely variable diets – I have personally witnessed them eating small birds, snakes, frogs, rodents, and crayfish. When they invade an area that once had Northern Spotted Owls (who primarily eat flying squirrels and other native rodents), they have a different impact on that forest. There’s also documented evidence Barreds have ushered in the decline of Western Screech Owls in various places across the Pacific Northwest because they also eat them (particularly when young fledgling screech owls have just left the nest). Their presence is a conundrum because they don’t just kill, push out, and interbreed with Spotted Owls. They create trophic cascades as the new top predator the ecosystem wasn’t adapted to.

Barred Owls have regularly featured on Pikes/Pines for a good reason. They are charismatic, generally obliging, and just plain fun. For many people, they are the first and only owls they have ever seen. As I’ve said time and time again, our disconnected humanity needs any opportunity to see kinship with the more than human creatures we share our world with.

Barred Owls simultaneously hold the allure of the wild while living off city rats and are frankly better ambassadors for these connections than pigeons or gulls. I cannot count the Barred Owls I have seen and heard in my life but I’ve only seen a handful of Spotted Owls and I am extremely lucky and privileged. Barred Owls might not be the owls we want, but they might be the owls we need.

Even a poorly lit view of a Barred Owl is exciting. This young owl waiting for a meal from their parents watched me back with curiosity. (Image: Brendan McGarry)

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