I don't wish to open a "political" discussion on Tweeters, but was wondering
if the local Audubon groups, etc., are addressing this?

Thanks for any info,
Jon. Anderson
Olympia, Wash
festuca AT olywa.us

AP Story:
Feds propose selectively killing cousins of threatened spotted owls

PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) -- A few hundred aggressive cousins of the threatened
northern spotted owl may be rubbed out by government agents with shotguns
under a federal plan proposed Thursday.

The spotted owl was listed as threatened 17 years ago, but its numbers
continue to dwindle through much of its range, federal officials said as
they proposed a new plan to prevent them from dying out.

The barred owls have crowded the spotted owls out of prime habitat and, in
some cases, attacked them.

A new recovery plan would test weeding out a number of barred owls, a
program that has been tested in California.

The recovery plan envisions 18 study areas, from each of which 12 to 32
animals would be removed, lured to their deaths by recorded calls and an owl
decoy, then shot at close range.

The barred owl is not native to the West Coast, scientists have said, but
followed white settlers across the continent. Controlling the owl is a part
of a draft plan that covers habitat, research and monitoring.

It would cost $198 million and take as much as 30 years to nurture the
spotted owl's numbers to the point at which they could be judged as
recovered, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said. In response to the draft
plan, interests in the Pacific Northwest took their usual stances over the
resource that's been at issue since the spotted owl became a national
environmental figure in 1990: large trees in uncut forests known as
"old-growth" where spotted owls live.

An environmentalist who was a member of an advisory panel on the new plan
charged that Bush administration officials in the departments of Interior
and Agriculture ordered changes that could eventually open larger tracts of
old-growth for logging.

"They kind of stood the science on its head," said Dominick DellaSala,
executive director of the National Center for Conservation Science and
Policy in Ashland. "It's not the best available science."

A representative of timber owners and forest product manufacturers said
research since the spotted owl's listing has changed assumptions: The bird
has more breeding pairs than thought, and needs a variety of forest
conditions, not just old-growth, to survive.

"We believe the recovery plan must provide land managers with the
flexibility to adapt as habitat conditions change across the landscape,"
said Tom Partin, president of the American Forest Resource Council, in a
statement.

A lawsuit from the timber group led the Fish and Wildlife Service to work on
the recovery plan.

The "flexibility" is in an option that would allow local managers of federal
agencies to set the boundaries of owl reserves. DellaSala charged that the
flexibility was put in the plan on the orders of departmental higher-ups as
a step toward doing away with protections for the owl in the Northwest
Forest Plan, the Clinton-era document that reduced the cut on federal
forests.

Ren Lohoefener, director of the service's Pacific Region, said at a press
briefing Thursday he didn't recall who introduced the "flexibility" idea,
but said the spotted owl would continue to be protected by the Endangered
Species Act.

Interior Department spokesman Hugh Vickery said there was nothing untoward
in the work of what was called the "Washington Oversight Committee,"
including officials such as Mark Rey of Agriculture and Lynn Scarlett of
Interior.

He said the Endangered Species Act makes the interior secretary responsible
for administering the Endangered Species Act, and it was logical for leaders
of the agencies to give guidance. "There's nothing wrong with that," he
said. "That's the way our government works."