Claim that killing barred owls & Catalina mule deer is to protect endangered species is at best questionable
SALEM, Oregon; LOS ANGELES, California––Blazing gunfire directed at barred owls in the Coast Range of Oregon and at mule deer on Catalina Island, 26 miles west of Los Angeles, again demonstrates how successfully adaptive species can become allegedly maladaptive “invasive species,” and be massacred, when their presence jeopardizes not endangered species so much as monied interests.
The Oregon Department of State Lands on October 1, 2026 became the first agency in Oregon to begin killing spotted owls as “part of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service plan to kill more than 450,000 barred owls over 30 years in Oregon, Washington and California,” reported Gosia Wozniacka a day later for the Oregonian/OregonLive.
$1.2 million to kill 350 barred owls per year for 15 years
The Oregon Department of State Lands, Wozniacka explained, “has secured permits to kill up to 350 barred owls per year in the 83,000-acre Elliott State Research Forest in Coos and Douglas counties, northeast of Coos Bay.
“The culling will take place year-round for at least 15 years and cost as much as $1.2 million.”
Killing barred owls will purportedly protect endangered spotted owls from habitat competition.
Reality, however, is that spotted owls feed almost exclusively on red tree voles, who live almost entirely in old growth forests, and that the major threat to spotted owls, both now and always, comes from old growth logging.
Killing barred owls will not expand the diminishing old growth habitat that spotted owls need to survive.
Oregon Fish & Wildlife “does not plan to participate”
“In addition to the Coast Range,” Wozniacka wrote, “barred owls are slated to be killed in the Oregon Klamath region, the Western Oregon Cascades, and the Eastern Oregon Cascades, according to the federal plan.
“The Oregon Department of Forestry told the Oregonian/OregonLive it will also participate in the effort,” Woznicka added, “but does not expect to receive a federal permit until next year and has not yet identified where or when barred owl removals would occur, or how many owls will be killed, agency spokesperson Tim Hoffman said.
“The Oregon Department of Fish & Wildlife, on the other hand, said it does not plan to participate in barred owl removal.”
The Elliott State Research Forest became a designated barred owl killing field, Wozniacka recounted, after “A recent survey detected just three individual spotted owls in the research forest and approximately 775 barred owl detections between March and July this past breeding season, though some of those might have been the same barred owl, said Amy Price, the Elliott State Research Forest’s research biologist.
“She said the forest historically supported approximately 44 spotted owls at 22 breeding sites.”
26 to 54 years for spotted owl recovery, even with enough old growth to support them
Three spotted owls and their offspring, breeding at the optimum rate of reproduction for the species, might take anywhere from 26 to 54 years to produce a population of at least 44––if the habitat could still support that many in the first place.
“The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service has been in cahoots with the other federal land management agencies and the state fish and wildlife departments on this for more than a decade,” Animal Wellness Action and Center for a Humane Economy president Wayne Pacelle told ANIMALS 24-7.
“The agency looked at spotted owl declines, but never looked at the science of barred owl dispersal,” Pacelle charged.
“Very localized shooting will do nothing to diminish barred owl numbers in any enduring way. Surviving barred owls, especially the juveniles kicked out of their parents’ territory, will colonize the cleansed areas.
(Beth Clifton collage)
“Utter hypocrisy”
“The utter hypocrisy of the plan is laid bare,” Pacelle continued, “by the actions of the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service to narrow the definition of ‘harm’ under the Endangered Species Act, a rule-making motivated mainly by an interest in cutting old-growth forests and killing and displacing spotted owls, the proposed repeal of the Roadless Rule, and the [Donald Trump administration] plan to increase public lands timber harvest by 60%.”
(See Trump admin ESA rewrite brings spotted owls home to roost for enviros.)
“How can anyone in the Trump administration, with a straight face, claim that they are shooting barred owls to protect spotted owls,” Pacelle asked rhetorically, “with this massive, multi-pronged assault on the endangered species?
“What’s more,” Pacelle charged, “the barred owl plan was written to drive the killing of spotted owls: kill a barred owl, get a credit to cut thousand-year-old trees, and kill or displace the spotted owls in the process.”
18 billboards
The barred owl killing in the Oregon Coast Range began about a month after Animal Wellness Action and the Center for a Humane Economy posted 18 billboards “throughout California and the Pacific Northwest,” Pacelle announced on September 6, 2026, “taking our campaign to stop the federal government from killing some 450,000 North American barred owls to the streets.
“The barred owl killing plan is extraordinarily cruel, reckless, and unworkable,” Pacelle declared then. “It would also be an astonishing waste of taxpayer money, with an estimated $1.35 billion in federal expenditures.
“And we believe there is something else going on here,” Pacelle said. “This is a timber company maneuver to divert attention from the industry’s assault on old-growth forests — at precisely the time it is working with the Agriculture and Interior Departments to institute devastating, sweeping new national policies to open those forests to more cutting that will have the effect of displacing, crushing, and killing threatened northern spotted owls.”
Catalina deer defenders lost appeal
Meanwhile, gloated Catalina Island Conservancy director of communications Pepe Barton in a September 28, 2026 media release, Los Angeles Superior Court judge Curtis A. Kin “today dismissed all claims brought by hunting groups and their partners challenging the Catalina Island Conservancy” scheme to shoot the estimated 2,000 mule deer on Catalina island out of existence, in a multi-year extermination campaign.
The Kin ruling followed his September 3, 2026 denial of an injunction against the mule deer culling.
Safari Club International and the California Rifle & Pistol Association, both of which sought to preserve 78 years of sport hunting on Catalina Island, joined the Coalition to Save Catalina Island Deer in bringing the lawsuit.
“The ruling dismisses the case in full,” Barton wrote.
“The court dismissed the groups’ claims under the California Environmental Quality Act, including arguments over the state’s environmental notice and the California Department of Fish & Wildlife’s authority to approve the project. The court found that the California Department of Fish & Wildlife’s acted within its authority in approving the restoration plan,” Barton said.
(See Catalina Island Conservancy invokes drone ban, starts killing 2,000 deer.)
Rusack Vineyards
Lora York, of Avalon, California, the only incorporated town on Catalina Island, argued on Facebook that, “The argument that the deer are not ‘naturalized’ after 100 years is a dangerous precedent. Under the California Environmental Quality Act,” York contended, the ‘baseline’ is the environment as it exists today. Removing a century-old grazer without first mitigating the attractant,” meaning Rusack Vineyards, “is a backward approach that prioritizes a private commercial interest over public safety and fire prevention.”
Rusack Vineyards, founded by aviation attorney Geoff Rusack and his wife Alison Wrigley Rusack in 1995, produces high-end wines grown from grapes raised on a 17-acre former horse ranch in Ballard Canyon, Catalina Island.
Alison Wrigley Rusack is a descendant of chewing gum magnate Philip Wrigley (1894-1977), whose family once owned most of the island, but donated much of it to the Catalina Island Conservancy, begun by Philip Wrigley in 1972.
(See Catalina Island Conservancy invokes drone ban, starts killing 2,000 deer.)
Winery is not an endangered species
“The Conservancy and Wrigley family have consistently attempted to rid the island of deer,” York recounted. “They have used several rationales. One states that deer eat all and only native or endemic plants because they are supposedly more tender to eat. They do not acknowledge the fire resistance benefits of the deer on the [other] 99% of the island,” where the deer eat potentially flammable vegetation.
“On five separate occasions,” York wrote, “the Catalina Island Conservancy has attempted to eradicate all the deer.”
Applications to kill deer under depredation permits were denied by the California Department of Fish & Wildlife were denied in 2007 and 2012, York said.
Applications to kill deer under scientific collecting permits in 2016 and 2023 were respectively denied and superseded, York continued.
The 2023 application was superseded by the application for a “Restoration Management Permit” that is now in effect.
Ignoring Charles Darwin
Both the barred owl cull promoted by the Donald Trump administration, now underway in Oregon, and the deer cull underway on Catalina have political origins in theories of wildlife management predating On The Origin of Species, published by Charles Darwin in 1859.
Darwin, elucidating the process of evolution as a continual succession of species, including through migration, colonization, and survival of the most successfully adaptive in ever-changing habitats, upset the previous notion, dating back as far as the Biblical Book of Genesis, that God created all species and placed them specifically where they belong.
The “invasive species” paradigm descends from the Book of Genesis.
Evolutionary reality, as recognized by Darwin, is that there is no such thing as an “invasive” species; only adaptive species.
As Darwin summarized evolution, “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.”
(Beth Clifton collage)
E.O. Wilson & the theory of massacre
E.O. Wilson (1929-2021), who fancied himself a successor to Darwin as an evolutionary theorist but largely contradicted some of the most basic Darwinian insights, in The Theory of Island Biogeography (1967) amplified the notion of “island ecology.”
(See E.O. Wilson, counter-evolutionary “evolutionary biologist,” dies at 92.)
Wilson used the interactions of limited numbers of species in isolated habitat as a model and metaphor for how ecological change occurs in general.
The Theory of Island Biogeography furnished fuel to efforts already underway around the world to purge island habitats––and “islands” of mainland habitat––of nuisance wildlife in the name of conservation.
Massacring the successfully adaptive deer on Catalina Island follows purges of other introduced “invasive” species on the other seven of the eight Channel Islands off the Southern California coast.
Spotted owl (left).
(Beth Clifton collage)
“Critical habitat”
Meanwhile, The Theory of Island Biogeography also helped to inspire the “critical habitat” provisions of the 1973 U.S. Endangered Species Act.
The idea behind designating “critical habitat” for endangered species was to protect the “islands” of habitat that the endangered animals and plants need to survive.
But what were conceptualized as “islands” soon became interpreted as large portions of the North American continent.
The northern spotted owl debacle, leading to the present massacre of barred owls, was the attempt of several major conservation groups, beginning soon after the passage of the Endangered Species Act, to invoke the “critical habitat” provisions of the act on behalf of “umbrella species,” and, coincidentally in many cases, to protect scenic landscapes favored by donors.
“Umbrella species”
The ecological rationale was to find endangered species whose “critical habitat” might cover the range of many other potentially endangered species.
Thus many other animals and plants could be protected, along with much scenic landscape, without environmentalists having to fight costly and exhausting battle after battle on behalf of unknown, obscure, and/or relatively unpopular but also endangered species.
Barred owls at the time were not even on anyone’s radar screen as potential “friendly fire” victims, having first been documented in Washington state in 1973 and in Oregon a year later.
Major environmental groups joined battle in the names of northern spotted owls, bald eagles, wolves, grizzly bears, and declining salmon runs, especially, in hopes of putting almost the whole of the Pacific Northwest, the part of the U.S. hosting the most species then perceived to be endangered, under protected conservation status.
In hindsight, the “umbrella species” conservation strategy of the early 1970s was deeply naïve and ultimately destructive of species conservation goals.
“Shoot, shovel, & shut up”
Instead of putting almost a quarter of the land mass of the Lower 48 states under protected status, the “umbrella species” strategy put many endangered species in the crosshairs, from wolves and grizzly bears to some of the most obscure varieties of brine shrimp.
Hunters, fishers, loggers, ranchers, miners, trappers, and others forming much of the political muscle that put the Trump administration in office increasingly saw their economic interests––often their personal livelihoods––in potential jeopardy, leading to the mantra of “Shoot, shovel, and shut up” uttered in response to any discovery of endangered or threatened animals on private property.
Spotted owls, always known to be a scarce species with narrow habitat needs, became arguably the most controversial “umbrella species” of all.
There was never any likelihood of spotted owls “recovering” to abundance, because old growth forest by definition takes 150 years or longer to grow. The old growth forest that existed in 1973 was all that would ever exist within the lifespan of any living person or animal.
Spotted owls cannot recover until––& unless––old growth does, which will take hundreds of years if it ever happens
But “umbrella species” theorists pushed to include younger forest land adjacent to old growth as “critical habitat” for spotted owls too.
And that is where the conflict between barred owls and spotted owls developed.
Instead of expanding outward into younger growth with few if any red tree voles, spotted owls remained isolated in old growth, while newly arrived barred owls came to occupy the adjacent younger forests, including second growth.
Shooting the barred owls now may protect the illusion that “critical habitat” exists for spotted owls to recolonize, but they never actually occupied most of that habitat in the first place, not since the very first time it was logged, or was burned over by wildfire, and never will occupy it again, even if barred owls too are driven to the verge of extinction.
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