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The Shameful and Painful Spotted Owl Saga:
Shooting Stripes To Save Spots

By Teresa
Platts

Spots versus stripes? Which do you
prefer?

Our federal government prefers spots and is moving forward with a
million-dollar-a-year plan to remove 9,000 striped owls from 2.3% of 14
million Western acres of protected spotted owl habitat. Our government
is shooting wood
owls with stripes to protect those with spots; to stop the stripes from breeding
with the spots.

It had to come to this.

The 1990 listing of the Northern spotted owl under the federal Endangered
Species Act (ESA) gave the bird totem status in management decisions.

It didn’t work.  Spotted owls declined 40% over 25 years.  Timber
sales on federal government-managed lands dropped too.  Oregon harvests
fell from 4.9 billion board feet (1988) to less than 5%, 240 million board feet
(2009).  Beyond the jobs and business profits from making lumber, the
Federal and County  governments used to benefit from these harvests
too.  Harvests down: tax receipts down.  Today, with cutbacks in
Federal budgets and sequestration, the States are arguing
about how much of your tax dollars the Federal government should give
them to keep impoverished County governments afloat in timber-rich areas.

Beyond competition from barred owls, and after years of not enough
logging, mega-fires fueled
by too many trees now threaten spotted
owl survival.  An exhausted veteran of the spotted owl wars, who lives
dangerously close to a federally-“managed”
forest that is expected to go up in smoke soon, explained:

You have to realize that even moving a biomass project forward takes a
court battle.  No salvage of dead or burned timber - it just rots.
Not much thinning or fuel reduction - without a two-year court fight the
Forest Service usually loses.  Hell, the agency is still fighting
lawsuits over the Sierra Nevada Forest Plan Amendment started in ‘97 - after
four revisions and several court decisions - the Greens just keep suing until
they get what they want.

National forest growth, removals (million cubic
feet)Taxpayers pay for the conservation plans, recovery plans, and
action plans, many
stalled in court.

Taxpayers pay for all the lawsuits
too, on
both sides.

Taxpayers pay the salaries and pensions of government workers figthing fire
and those shooting striped
owls in order to give, temporarily, an advantage to ones with spots.

All this
sacrifice and the spots just keep declining and the stripes just keep
on coming.

The Northern spotted owl might very well be the most expensive avian
sub-species on the planet.

Invasive or just mobile?

It is theorized that striped and spotted owls were once the same species of
wood owl before separating into East and West Coast versions during the last
Ice Age. The common striped barred wood owl (Strix
varia) has expanded its range westward, establishing itself at
the expense of the less aggressive, less adaptable and smaller spotted wood owl
(Strix occidentalis).

By 1909, barred owls were found in Montana.  They made their way to the
coast, taking up residence in British Columbia (1943), Washington (1965) and
Oregon (1972).

A spotted owl family. Are any of these “sparred owl”
hybrids? Hard to tell.The owls, striped or spotted, are so closely
related they successfully interbreed and their fertile offspring, “sparred owls,” are hybrids
that look just like spotted owls.  The ESA does not protect the hybrids or
their  offspring so the birds are breeding their way out of the ESA!

Says
Susan Haig, a wildlife ecologist at the U.S. Geological Survey, is
exasperated by the interbreeding:

It’s a nasty situation.  This could cause the extinction of the
Northern spotted owl.

The ESA measures and categorizes, then stands steadfast against change.
It is attempting, by shotgun, to separate the birds.

Are these kissing cousins from the East invasive and unwanted when they turn
up out West?  Or just mobile and happy to mix it up with their spotted
relatives?

Whatever, and wherever, they are, striped and spotted owls are not the only
birds moving around.

111 species, almost 20% of the total bird species in North America have
expanded into at least one new state or province with 14 species
expanding into more states and provinces than the barred owl.  Changing
climates and habitats are the cause of 98% of range expansions.  The birds
go where the food is. 38 states or provinces have gained at least 10 new bird
species, some moving into a niche inhabited by an ESA-listed avian cousin.

Beyond birds, the last Ice Age killed off the North American earthworm. It’s
since been reintroduced, only to be labeled—by
our government scientists—as an invasive species, an undesirable.
And—oh no!—earthworms are beating millipedes in the game of survival.

The policy we embrace today for striped and spotted birds can be transferred
to other birds and other animals, even earthworms.  If this continues, will
we be reduced to digging up and killing earthworms to save millipedes?

The ESA is written thus and lawsuits by “green” groups—many paid
for by our tax dollars—are herding us in this direction.

A spotted owl in Arizona—the Mexican spotted
owl—considers moving East vs West. Court challenges may kill forest thinning
(logging) recommended by scientists for his habitat. Click the picture to learn
more.

Stripes, spots, species,
subspecies and stocks

In the Kingdom of Animalia, the Phylum of Chordata, the Class of Aves, the
Order of Srigiformes, are two Families of birds of prey: the typical owls
(Strigidae) and the barn owls (Tytonidae).

The Strigidae
Family is the larger of the two Families with close to 190 species,
covering nearly all terrestrial habitats worldwide, except Antarctica.  95%
are forest-dwelling; 80% are found in the tropics.

The Strigdae Family includes 11 species of the
genus Strix, characterized by a conspicuous facial disk and a
lack of ear tufts. They are known as screech owls, wood owls, the great gray,
the chaco in South America.  The Ural wood owl alone boasts 15
sub-species in Europe and Northern Asia.

Within this Strix genus, in North America, the barred wood
owl is broken into three sub-species (the
Northern varia, georgica in Florida
and helveolain Texas), with a fourth (Strix
sartorii) found in Mexico.

The spotted owl species (Strix occidentalis) is broken down into
three sub-species ranging across the western parts of North America and Mexico.
The “threatened” Strix occidentalis lucidaof Arizona and
Mexico, the California spotted owl subspecies, Strix occidentalis
occidentalis, and the endangered Northern spotted owl, Strix
occidentalis caurina, the sub-species of greatest concern.  The
Northern spotted owl ranges from California, through Oregon and Washington, and
up into Canada.

The Northern barred owl, Strix varia, is breeding with
the Northern spotted owl, Strix occidentalis caurina, causing hybrid
havoc.You can break this down even further, if you’d like, into
regional sub-stocks of sub-species.  If you have the time (our government
does) and the money (our taxes), you can follow family units, individuals, and
all the new hybrids, the result of striped owls breeding with spotted
ones.

The Wise Old Owl Asks, “Who Pays?”

This summer there will be more megafires in our overstocked Western forests,
often followed by mudslides from
the denuded hillsides next spring.

Another “green” group will file suit to stop another timber sale or attempt
to stop government workers from shooting stripes to save spots.

Since the spotted owl wars resulted in the export of so many timber jobs,
Northwest timber communities contribute far fewer tax dollars to the communal
treasury, so the costs of megafires, mudslides and lawsuits will be borne by
Eastern and urban taxpayers.  That’s where the people—and the
taxes—are.

The striped owl may be relentlessly working its way West, but its costs are
steadily moving East.

——————————————————————————

Teresa Platt is the Director of the Environment and Enterprise
Institute at the National
Center for Public Policy Research and a PERC Enviropreneur Institute
alum.

Cross-posted from Amy
Ridenour's National Center Blog. Photo: Wiki Commons. Chart:
California Forestry Association.

Topics:

Conservation

Forestry/Logging

Hunting

Law

Politics

Regulation

Science

Wildlife

Published:

Wednesday, May 8,
2013

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