Oregon Lawmakers Ask Trump Administration to Halt Barred Owl Bounty

A barred owl is shown in the woods outside Philomath, Ore., Dec. 13, 2017. To save the imperiled spotted owl from extinction, U.S. wildlife officials want to deploy trained shooters into West Coast forests to kill almost a half-million barred owls. Don Ryan/AP Photo

A bipartisan group of Oregon lawmakers is calling on Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, heads of the to-be-established nongovernmental advisory body Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), to help push for a halt in the federal government’s plan to kill roughly 450,000 barred owls.

The lawmakers said the cost of the project is $1.35 billion and are calling it expensive and unfeasible.

In a Jan. 6 letter to the DOGE leaders, the four lawmakers said the plan to hire specially trained hunters to kill owls in three states over 30 years, is “thoroughly impractical.”

“It just cannot work. It won’t work. It is a budget buster,” wrote ​​Republican Reps. Ed Diehl and Virgle Osborne, along with Democrat Rep. David Gomberg and Republican Sen. Bruce Starr.

“A billion-dollar price tag for this project should get the attention of everyone on the Trump team [who is] concerned about government efficiency,” Diehl wrote.

“This plan will swallow up Americans’ hard-earned tax dollars for no good reason.”

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) previously said that barred owl management is necessary to protect federally listed northern spotted owls from extinction.

Its plan was detailed in the “Final Environmental Impact Statement for the Barred Owl Management Strategy,” released in July 2024.

The plan was approved by the Biden administration in September and is set to begin this spring.

Northern spotted owl populations are rapidly declining due to competition with invasive barred owls, which the USFWS said are native to the eastern United States.

California spotted owls, proposed for ESA listing, face a similar risk, it said.

Barred owls are larger and more aggressive than native spotted owls and occasionally attack them.

As a result, as they move west they could disrupt the smaller owls’ nesting, compete with them for food, and eventually displace northern spotted owls, according to Fish and Wildlife.

“Barred owl management is not about one owl versus another,” wrote USFWS Oregon Office state supervisor Kessina Lee in a July 2024 press release.

“Without actively managing barred owls, Northern spotted owls will likely go extinct in all or the majority of their range, despite decades of collaborative conservation efforts.”

Preventing Extinction

If the proposed strategy is adopted and fully implemented, lethal removal of barred owls by trained professionals would occur within the Northern spotted owl’s range, according to the USFWS.

This would also limit their invasion into the California spotted owl’s territory.

Public hunting of barred owls is not allowed under the proposed strategy.

“Barred owl removal, like all invasive species management, is not something the service takes lightly,” Lee said.

“The service has a legal responsibility to do all it can to prevent the extinction of the federally listed Northern spotted owl and support its recovery.”

Beginning in 2013, the USFWS partnered with the Hoopa Valley Tribe to test the feasibility of barred owl removal and determine whether it improves conditions for spotted owls, according to the EIS.

Completed in 2021, the experiment showed that “barred owl removal helped northern spotted owls within the removal areas.”

The tradeoff has also drawn criticism.

“Killing one type of owl to save another is outrageous and doomed to fail,” Diehl wrote.

Bounty on the Barred

Gomberg said in a Jan. 7, 2025, press release, “This simply isn’t a sound strategy—fiscally or ecologically.”

“As a staunch animal welfare advocate and a believer in evidence-based policy, I cannot support a plan that calls on taxpayers to front $45 million a year to cull a protected species.”

The Oregon lawmakers said the price tag, which they said is hefty, was left out by the USFWS.

“The agency wrote a 300-page environmental impact statement but didn’t tell us a thing about how much it will cost,” wrote Senator-elect Starr. “We now have information to suggest it’s a budget-buster.”

That information came from the Center for a Humane Economy and Animal Wellness Action, both Washington-based animal welfare groups, which have challenged the plan in U.S. District Court in Washington state.

The center said that the 2013 grant of $4.5 million to the Hoopa Valley Tribe to kill 1,500 barred owls puts the price tag for the experimental removal at $3,000 per bird.

“This inhumane, unworkable barred owl kill plan is the largest-ever scheme to slaughter raptors in any nation by a country mile,” wrote Wayne Pacelle, president of Animal Wellness Action, in an October 2024 press release.

“It calls for unidentified, unspecified individuals to be allowed to kill barred owls over 24 million acres of federal, state, and private lands—including invading national parks such as Olympic, Crater Lake, and Redwoods National Parks at night to shoot owls that look like spotted owls.”

“It has a zero percent chance of success, but it will produce an unheard-of body count of a long-protected owl species native only to North America.”

Though the USFWS did not analyze potential costs during the National Environmental Policy Act process, the agency’s Public Affairs Officer Jodie Delavan questions the center’s estimates, which she said are based on “multiple, compounded hypothetical assumptions multiplied by decades to yield extraordinarily high numbers.”

In addition, Delavan told The Epoch Times on Jan. 17 that removing approximately 16,000 birds would represent less than one-half of one percent of the 3.5 million barred owls in North America.

It is also the maximum amount that would be culled annually, she said. The USFWS anticipates starting at about 2,500 birds in the first year of the program and increasing thereafter as needed.

Meanwhile, Oregon Rep. Virgle Osborne says that the communities he represents are already gun-shy when it comes to federal management policies.

“My constituents suffered a great deal when government biologists and radical environmentalists joined together to shut down Douglas County mills in the 1980s and 1990s, allegedly to save the spotted owl,” he wrote in the letter to DOGE.

“The spotted owl wasn’t saved by this gutting of our rural communities, and now the next generation of bureaucrats and environmentalists are telling us the barred owl is the problem.

“This nonsense has to stop.”