By Matthew Randazzo V Guest columnist for Peninsula Daily News
AS THE FINAL curtain call of the Northern spotted owl continues, so does the controversy that has accompanied its decline like an out-of-tune funeral dirge.
In the 1990s, countless loggers lost their livelihoods when the feds froze the timber industry in the forest habitats deemed critical to the spotted owl’s survival.
At the Northwest Raptor & Wildlife Center, we had the product of their outrage delivered to us swaddled in bloodstained blankets: innocent owls shot, nailed to signs and lynched from trees. These acts of retaliation were even more misplaced than it appeared.
Every single owl brought to us was anything but a spotted owl.
If anything, murdering the spotted owl’s competition only helped the beleaguered species, a fact that apparently came to the attention of wildlife biologists.
We now face an ironic twist on the original controversy.
Wildlife lovers are furious as government wildlife agencies consider “saving” the spotted owl by systematically slaughtering its competition, the barred owl.
The barred owl’s natural migration from the East to
spotted owl country over the past few decades has resembled the Goths storming the declining Roman Empire.
The larger, stronger, more adaptive newcomers take no prisoners as they displace families, kill males and impregnate spotted owl widows.
Since the spotted owl cannot win in a fair fight, scientists are contemplating intervening with sniper rifles, erecting a wall of bullets against this seemingly unstoppable immigrant invasion.
This “solution” would be little more than a delaying action.
The barred owl’s advantages in population and biology are so great that the hunting operations would need to be gigantic and perpetual to even have a chance of working.
Even if this plan initially succeeds, the maintenance of spotted owl populations would require the culling program to persist for the rest of natural history.
The unintended ecological and economic cost would be staggering. How much money will we spend on pest control to make up for the barred owls that eat millions of rodents every year?
We also must reckon with the morality of this proposal.
As any wildlife rehabilitator will tell you, barred owls are perhaps the most intelligent, emotionally sophisticated American raptor.
They enjoy human company and comprehend the revolutionary idea that some humans mean to help them instead of eat them.
Barred owls are wise enough to cooperate as veterinarians remove damaged feathers or floss broken beaks.
Of the Ambassador Animals that meet the public on behalf of the Raptor Center, only Juliet, the barred owl, will voluntarily step down from her perch onto a handler’s glove.
When Juliet gets tired after hours meeting hyperactive schoolchildren, she does not complain — she simply snuggles onto her handler’s shoulder for a nap.
She is like a winged lap cat.
The idea of having barred owls like Juliet delivered to the Center, wheezing and crying from the searing agony of bullet wounds, is an unthinkable horror.
It is also dumb policy.
Shooting barred owls will not the save poor spotted owl or diminish the culpability we have for their decline.
It will simply prolong a bitter controversy and incur new ecological and moral debts to be paid.
Human wisdom has been found wanting.
It’s time to let Nature be the judge in the case of the barred owl vs. the spotted owl.
________
Matthew Randazzo V is a Port Angeles-based author and journalist who volunteers as the public relations director for the Northwest Raptor & Wildlife Center in Sequim.
He is also chairman of the Clallam County Democratic Central Committee.
He can be contacted through MRVBooks.com and NWRaptorCenter.com.
