Brett,

The proposal to kill some Barred Owls in order to benefit Spotted
Owls may turn out to be so politically unpopular that it does
not get approved. Your reaction is probably typical.. I find it
distasteful myself, but I am willing to reluctantly support it,
because it may be the only way to maintain Spotted Owl populations
in some areas.

However, your comments betray a lack of understanding of both
Spotted Owl/Barred Owl ecology and of cowbird ecology.

Spotted Owl populations in the last few years have continued to
decline at an alarming rate, despite the fact that logging of old-growth
forests has nearly stopped. Many old-growth forests in WA and OR
that had Spotted Owls 10 years ago now have only Barred Owls.
It is clear to me that the main cause of decline of Spotted Owls
in the Pacific Northwest in the last 10 years is NOT habitat loss,
but Barred Owl competition.

Yes, Spotted Owls will not recover past a certain point unless
we can re-establish more areas of old-growth forests (which will take
hundreds of years). However, if control measures against Barred Owls
are not initiated soon, we may lose Spotted Owls in many parts of
the state before habitat recovery can even begin.

Your comments about Brown-headed Cowbirds are equally
misguided. No, cowbirds cannot be eliminated from large areas
(and nobody has ever suggested doing that). However, intensive
trapping efforts (several thousand Cowbirds a year, starting in
the early 1970s) HAVE dramatically reduced numbers of cowbirds
in the Kirtland's Warbler breeding areas in Michigan. Warbler nests
parasitized by cowbirds have become a rarity, and the breeding
success of the warblers has increased dramatically. There are
numerous scientific reports documenting this.

Yes, it is true that the initial reason for Kirtland's Warbler
becoming endangered was mainly the loss of their preferred
habitat of young jack-pine stands. However, once the warbler became
endangered, the main enemy became the cowbird, such that
the warblers had difficulty in fledging young even in those jack-pine stands
that remained. Had cowbird control not been started, the warbler would
probably have gone extinct decades ago, and all the habitat restoration
in the world would not have helped.

The reasons for any species becoming endangered are often more
complicated than they may appear at first, and a successful
recovery plan may require some control of predatory or
competing species as well as habitat restoration. Although
most of us (including me) don't like the idea of killing Barred Owls,
it needs to be tried, and I think it has a good chance of working.
Failure to act along these lines may be equivalent to signing the
death warrant for the remaining Spotted Owls (in WA and OR, at least).

Wayne C. Weber
Delta, BC
contopus at telus.net





----- Original Message -----
From: "Brett Wolfe" <m_lincolnii at yahoo.com>
To: "Wayne C. Weber" <contopus at telus.net>; "JON ANDERSON"
<festuca at olywa.net>
Cc: "TWEETERS" <tweeters at u.washington.edu>
Sent: Thursday, May 03, 2007 8:11 AM
Subject: Re: [Tweeters] Barred Owl "thinning" question - a dissenter to the
killers (long)


OK, I am going to make myself really unpopular here, but I feel that a
dissenting voice is needed to all of you who want to start offing owls. This
is not in response to just Wayne's comments, but to the thread as a whole.

Everyone agrees that Barred Owls were not introduced. Humans made it
easier for them to move in, just as we made it easier for deer by chopping
down all of the forests. These birds did what they were programmed
genetically to do; they saw a niche they could exploit and they out-competed
their smaller, specialist cousins, the Spotted Owl. None of this is in
dispute here.

What I dispute here is when Wayne (and others) say "In my professional
opinion, local Audubon chapters, etc., ought to be in favor of a limited
Barred Owl control program if it would help to increase the numbers of
Spotted Owls, which it almost certainly would."

Since we would not be replacing the old-growth forests that Spotted Owls
need, nor would we be replacing the flying squirrels that they depend on for
food, how exactly do you think that killing Barred Owls is really going to
increase Spotted Owls? The only thing that is going to help the Spotted Owl
is more old-growth forest, which even if we stopped all cutting right now,
would take hundreds of years to regrow. As much as I love seeing Spotted
Owls in the wild (and I have, at least 6 times), killing Barred Owls doesn't
seem likely to help. All it will do is kill Barred Owls. (as an aside, the
only way that I would even be a little bit for this plan, is if I knew that
every single owl killed would end up in one of our many natural history
museums).

I mean, look at Brown-headed Cowbirds for a second. By clearing vast
swaths of forest, we made it very easy for this bird to move across the
country. Brown-headed Cowbirds are now seen in pretty much every state (the
lower 48 anyway). Efforts to control their populations mostly waste money.
These birds can lay over 30 eggs in a single breeding season, so just
removing a female doesn't do much. If you kill a female, another is ready to
move in and take her place. Someone mentioned Kirtland's Warblers and
cowbirds earlier in this thread, but the constant effort to control cowbirds
is a ridiculous waste of time and funds for the most part. Ask a cowbird
scientist; they'll tell you. It's a losing battle. In the end, all you do is
kill cowbirds, you don't really help the target populations much, if at all.

So, now that a differing voice has been heard, y'all can go back to your
destruction and killing. I always feel that there are other ways of
thinking, and others ways to do things, but with other humans, it always
seems to come back to killing. Sad. Just very sad.

Brett A. Wolfe
Seattle, WA
m_lincolnii at yahoo.com