Richard J Wenning, Wenning Environmental LLC, Portland, Maine, US
Published on JD Supra, 04 November 2025
ABSTRACT:
On November 3, 2025, the US Senate voted to reject H.J. Resolution 120, which would have blocked the Fish and Wildlife Service’s (F&WS) Barred Owl Management Strategy, allowing it to proceed. The strategy aims to protect the endangered Northern Spotted Owl from competition with the more aggressive Barred Owl for food and habitat. The Barred Owl’s home range in eastern North America has expanded to the West Coast after several decades of landscape changes in the Great Plains that favored its westward migration. The F&WS concurs with the findings in several population studies that significant declines in spotted owl populations in the Pacific Northwest are likely due to human-caused biological invasion of Barred Owls.
The F&WS plans to issue permits to trained “removal specialists” to cull up to 450,000 invasive Barred Owls from forests in Washington, Oregon, and California. The strategy has proven effective through multiple experimental management trials, demonstrating that lethal removal of Barred Owls from shared habitats increases Spotted Owl survival. This approach is innovative in scale and strategy, but not the first time lethal control has been used to help recover a threatened or endangered species. However, it raises ethical questions: Is it morally acceptable and justified to kill one species to save another? Should we take lethal corrective actions for conditions in nature we indirectly caused — or should we let ecosystems evolve naturally, even if that means one species’ decline? Can a native species become “invasive” when expanding its range?
