As I remember, when the Clinton administration achieved an agreement to curtail logging of old growth in WA & OR there was only 10% left. Apparently that amount of forest is not enough for the spotted owls to survive in competition with the barred which have increased in numbers in the degraded habitat, with less continuous acreages and increased clearcuts. I am sure there have been articles in Audubon, Birder's World, etc about this species' competition.. (if I could catch up).
Gordon Andersson St Paul from Frontiers in Ecology vol. 8: no. 1 (Feb 2010) ------------------------------------------------- Shooting to save a species Virginia Gewin To forestall the ongoing decline of northern spotted owls (Strix occidentalis caurina) in Oregon and Washington State, government officials are contemplating a once unthinkable recovery strategy - killing or translocating barred owls (Strix varia), the larger, more aggressive species that is displacing the spotted owls. US Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) officials have recently begun the preliminary stages of an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) necessary to conduct barred owl removal experiments that would allow the FWS to determine the strategy's merit. Two factors are at the root of the spotted owl's decline - loss of its old-growth forest habitat and the increasing abundance of the barred owl. "Right now, there is no specific plan, but we need to identify and document all the environmental consequences of any experimental removal of barred owls", explains Phil Carroll, FWS spokesperson (Portland, OR). Not surprisingly, the proposal promises to be contentious. "Shooting hundreds, perhaps thousands of barred owls, in perpetuity, is a horrible thing to contemplate - but the [possible] extinction of the spotted owl is also profoundly difficult to accept", admits Bob Sallinger, Conservation Director at the Portland Audubon Society. Sallinger points out that, although his organization has reservations about the proposal, they did encourage the FWS to conduct the EIS. "We can conclude that shooting barred owls is neither worth the cost nor effective enough or ethically untenable, but that needs to be the result of a thoughtful discussion." Ultimately, says Sallinger, Portland Audubon's position is to err on the side of preventing extinction. But that, he adds, also requires increased protection of old-growth forests - without which any plan to kill barred owls is simply unacceptable. According to Carroll, FWS is currently in discussions to determine the age and density of trees that will constitute adequately "valuable" habitat to warrant protection. Unfortunately, in the short term, old-growth forest can't be re-established quickly enough to save the spotted owl, which makes any decisions about barred owl management even more pressing. To help wade through the moral dilemmas resulting from this proposal, FWS isn't relying on science alone and has taken the unusual step of hiring an ethicist. Carroll expects a decision on whether to conduct experimental removal of barred owls later this year. ---- Join or Leave mou-net: http://lists.umn.edu/cgi-bin/wa?SUBED1=mou-net Archives: http://lists.umn.edu/archives/mou-net.html
