Biden Wildlife Agency Approved Billion $ Plus Plan to Shoot 450,000 Barred Owls
The US Fish and Wildlife Service under the Biden Administration concocted a plan to save spotted owls in the West by killing off hundreds of thousands of barred owls that have invaded the smaller species’ habitat. Now four lawmakers from rural Oregon are asking the new administration to stop the cull before it can begin.
Under the plan the USFWS will send out teams of trained shooters – in California, Washington, and Oregon – to attract the invasive owls using bird calls, then blast away with shotguns. The extermination will be ongoing for some 30 years.
In a letter to the newly created Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the lawmakers — Representatives Ed Diehl, David Gomberg, Virgle Osborne, and Senator-elect Bruce Starr – say killing owls will be expensive. “The plan to kill upwards of 450,000 barred owls over a 30-year time horizon and across vast reaches of public and private lands in three states is thoroughly impractical,” they write.
The bipartisan foursome (one D, three Rs) appealed directly to DOGE heads Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, though DOGE isn’t an actual department of the federal government so much as an advisory body. The acronym just happens to incorporate one of the cryptocurrencies – DOGECOIN – touted by Musk. (Ramaswamy has since left the group.)
“It just cannot work, and it won’t work,” the legislators write. “It is a budget buster, with one well-grounded estimate putting the cost of the plan at $1.35 billion over the intended life of the project.”
That plan, detailed in a 300-page environmental impact statement that was approved by the Biden Administration in September, is designed to protect Northern and California spotted owls, which are being squeezed out by the invasive barred owls from back East.
That's a tough decision made with good intentions maybe, but exterminating nearly half a million of these birds sounds like the very definition of overkill.
The Oregon lawmakers may find a sympathetic ear in the Trump Administration, which has shown very little interest in environmental regulations of any kind. The new (old) president has already removed the US from the Paris climate agreement and has issued three executive orders to expedite the extraction of oil and natural gas. This was on just the first day of his second lap around the Oval Office.
Environmentalists are despairing the new regime, probably for good reason. It is hard to conceive of any policy touted by Trump and Co. that will be good for the environment. On the other hand it would not shock anyone if the great owl cull gets scrapped, and for that the barred owl – the invasives from the East – should be thankful.
Photo credit: Ray Bosch / USFWS
