CHAPTER 13: One Bird, Two Stones
Propped up with pillows in bed in the Armstrong family’s guest room, Grace opened Ginnie’s hard copy of the Barred Owl Management Plan.
Back in Los Angeles, Grace had already read The Plan once, along with public comments, and watched Zoom meetings where the US Fish and Wildlife Service personnel dodged as many questions as they answered.
Some comments were insightful and 75 groups had submitted a joint letter stating the cull would need to continue forever, calling The Plan “reckless”.
Surprisingly, Big Timber and several of the large national bird groups had expressed support for the proposed cull.
You scratch my back? Grace had thought.
Grace was familiar with invasive species eradication programs of rodents, feral cats and other carnivores on islands where ground nesting birds evolved without mammals. She recalled the wolf cull to protect declining caribou herds in Canada. She also knew policy could be politically-driven and inconsistent. She’d written on bison range lost to soybean monocultures and wildlife agencies turning a blind eye to sanctuaries rehabilitating and releasing the invasive opossum into the wild even through it predates on ground nesters like the California quail and carries a parasite that kills endangered sea otters.
The Yellow Ribbon Alliance and many other groups criticized the US F&WS designating as “invasive” a native bird of prey protected under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. Was it acceptable to engage in a massive cull of an American raptor simply because it had slowly expanded its range, as is the case with many species including humans?
After the Supreme Court struck down the 1984 Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council, several groups added addendums to their comments, including the Yellow Ribbon Alliance. The Chevron Decision of 2024 limited the Administrative State’s law-making powers and removed requirements for the Judiciary to defer to the agencies in court. The Yellow Ribbon Alliance stated that the Chevron Decision delivered justice and ended forty years of workers being lost in the bureaucratic wilderness. They praised Cape May fisherman Bill Bright who sued all the way to the Supreme Court over a $700 a day fee to host a government observer on his boat and won.
The Alliance stated that, since Congress had not legislated a cull and now the Administrative State was legislating beyond its Constitutionally-allowed limits, confirmed under the 2024 Chevron Decision. It argued that The Plan, to kill hundreds of thousands of a North American native bird of prey simply because it was a biologically robust species, was illegal.
Government policy is not always what it seems or should be, thought Grace with a sigh.
Many of the comments submitted questioned whether the owls were distinct species so Grace carefully read the key paper on the issue. “Genomic Variation and Recent Population Histories of Spotted (Strix occidentalis) and Barred (Strix varia) Owls” opened with the authors undermining the validity of previous studies:
..BO and SO have duplicated mitochondrial control regions (Hanna, Henderson, Sellas, et al. 2017), making it unclear whether the earlier genetic results were completely accurate.
The authors boasted:
Our analysis of 51 high-coverage genomes is by far the largest genetic study of Strix owls, and the larger data set enabled us to conduct analyses that were not possible in earlier studies. …
…We used principal component analysis (PCA) on all 51 samples to get a qualitative picture of population structure….
51 birds? thought Grace. That’s it? That’s the largest genetic study ever done by far?
The paper referenced mitochondrial data by Barrowclough et al. 2011 which noted great diversity and substantial variation within Eastern Barred Owls (EBO). The authors posited that sampling near Indiana:
…may be fruitful in identifying a putative EBO “source” population for WBO. Second, it is possible that BOs were actually living in western North American forests before the earliest recorded observations.”
…These findings on evolutionary and demographic history of BOs are also important for conservation of SOs since little was known about the history of their “invasive” species, BOs.
Grace smiled, thinking, I like the way they put invasive in quotes.
The authors continued:
…we estimate that western and eastern BOs have been genetically separated for thousands of years, instead of the previously assumed recent (i.e., <150 years) divergence. … If we assume an average generation time of 5 years and an effective population size of 120,000, this corresponds to a divergence time of 7,000 years ago.
Wow, thought Grace. That’s a huge deviation from 150 years to 7,000 years. This PCA is a pretty amazing tool!
It only took her a few minutes to discover that PCA had been discredited in 2022 by another study, “Principal Component Analyses (PCA)-based findings in population genetic studies are highly biased and must be reevaluated”. It stated:
We demonstrate that PCA results can be artifacts of the data and can be easily manipulated to generate desired outcomes. PCA adjustment also yielded unfavorable outcomes in association studies. PCA results may not be reliable, robust, or replicable as the field assumes. Our findings raise concerns about the validity of results reported in the population genetics literature and related fields that place a disproportionate reliance upon PCA outcomes and the insights derived from them. We conclude that PCA may have a biasing role in genetic investigations and that 32,000-216,000 genetic studies should be reevaluated.
What the hell? thought Grace angrily.
Ignoring the Chevron Decision and the collapse of its genetics studies built on the biased PCA tool, the US Fish & Wildlife Service insisted the birds were not one species but two distinct species that had diverged thousands of years ago and that owls with plumage with stripes were the primary threat to survival of owls with spots. They added:
Additional primary threats include the loss of habitat to timber harvest on non-Federal lands and to wildfires on Federal lands.
To this passage, Ginnie added two bright pink Post-its yelling:
MOST FIRES ON NEGLECTED FED LAND!!
WHAT ABOUT TOXIN THREATS?? FLACO!!
Good points, thought Grace. After someone vandalized his zoo enclosure in February 2023, Flaco, the Eurasian eagle-owl, flew off and settled comfortably in Central Park where pest control poisons are restricted. There he became a celebrity while feasting on New York’s finest rodents and pigeons.
Halloween night, Flaco flew into Manhattan, an urban jungle bustling with rodents being poisoned via a buffet of rat bait. Disoriented by the anticoagulant rodenticides accumulating in his system, on February 23, 2024, Flaco slammed into a building on West 89th, two blocks from Central Park.
Flaco’s post-mortem toxicology report revealed he carried a herpes virus transferred via his pigeon-heavy diet along with traces of DDE—a breakdown product of the long-banned DDT—and four anticoagulant rodenticides.
It says something about a society, thought Grace, when a magnificent raptor dies while providing rodent control by simply being.
The Alliance was vehemently opposed to culling the barred owl and noted that, calling it “exclusion”, the government had been killing barred owls since at least 1986 and noted that raptors faced a range of threats: collisions with electrical lines, windmills, vehicle strikes, clearance of land for monoculture crop production, poisons both direct and indirect via water pollution from cannabis operations. They linked to other commenters posing concerns about environmental toxins.
The Alliance’s comments noted that the first reference found on hazards of second generation rodenticide anticoagulants, SGARs, to avian species was reported as early as 1978 with the odd phrasing, “…but strangely bromadiolone is more toxic to chickens.”
They knew as early as 1978 that this was highly toxic to birds, thought Grace, and yet said nothing?
The Alliance referenced a 1988 paper which detailed researchers feeding bait-infested rats to six owls for ten days, in which time one of the owls died. No worries, argued the research team because:
Although one might interpret these data as being evident that bromadiolone is a potential hazard to raptors, one has to examine carefully the probability of a wide-ranging avian species to consume only bromadiolone-killed rodents for 10 consecutive days. …The potential hazard bromadiolone poses to avian species is low (Grolleau and Lorgue 1984). …The propensity for bromadiolone to accumulate in avian tissues is not evident, as demonstrated in the rapid metabolism of the compound in Japanese quail.
By 2014, California’s Department of Fish and Wildlife’ stated that wildlife was being poisoned and restricted the use SGARs to licensed and trained professionals only. A 2018 scientific study stated flatly:
…SGARs are persistent, bioaccumulative, and toxic and would likely have been removed from the market in many jurisdictions; but they remain because of the demand for rodent control and lack of effective alternatives...
The Alliance made a strong case for the pressing need for toxicology tests, along with fines and bans on anticoagulant rodenticides poisoning wildlife and birds at the wildlands-urban interface and by “trespass cannabis cultivation” hiding in state and national forests.
Damn, this is good work, thought Grace while outside, in the dark, a barred owl hooted, Who cooks for you? Who cooks for you?
The Alliance pointed out that, as it settled in western forests, the plumage, the camouflage, of the barred owl changed to more closely resemble the darker plumage of the spotted owl. The only way to tell them apart was by DNA analysis and from their calls and perhaps, given time, that would change too as they adopted the accent of their western cousins.
The Alliance stated the owls could interbreed and therefore were the same species, that their offspring, hybrid sparred owls, were crucial to survival of spotted owl genes. They believed this was a natural occurrence, that the hybrids were strengthened by the addition of the robust genetics of the barred owl.
Not so, argued the government and others within the bio-nativist movement, insisting they were distinct species and the barred owl and the hybrids had to be killed to maintain the “genetic identity” of the spotted owl.
Grace wondered, What would Harry’s owl Hedwig and his owl friends think about this prejudice to hybrids, to mudbloods, especially when the solution offered was lethal, to kill one native bird in what would most likely be a failing attempt to preserve another?
On this her second reading, Grace noticed how The Plan chose phrases designed to demonize the barred owl. How did I miss that before? she wondered.
The barred owl’s natural range expansion over thousands of years was called an “invasion” even though its density in most areas was low and the species reproduced slowly. Grace thought about the Australian possum, a true invasive in predator-free New Zealand where it reproduces at a stunning 30%. She compared that to the demonized barred owls with a net reproductive rate of a very modest 1.1% per annum.
While The Plan and various reports made it sound like the forests were overrun with barred owls, another study set barred owl density at 0.33 owls per square kilometer.
Grace did the conversion: one square kilometer was 247 acres so that would be 0.00133603 barred owls per acre and this jived with Table 3-5 on page 69 of The Plan.
Grace realized F&WS had tried to enlarge these numbers by listing density rates per 1,000 acres as opposed to per acre. Ginnie had done the math, neatly on yellow Post-its, essentially the same result Grace had gotten with far more work—barred owl density was an absurdly low 0.0011 to 0.00289 per acre in the northern spotted owl range.
Grace knew that raptors, including barred owls, coexisted, oftentimes in tight proximity. So why was the barred owl portrayed as such a threat to the spotted owl in this region?
Again, The Plan attempted to demonize the barred owl, insisting the issue was that it was a larger and far more aggressive bird, but descriptions conflicted even on the same page. On page 292, US F&WS declared: “Barred owls are on average 18 percent larger than northern spotted owls…” and then referred to“…barred owl’s slightly larger body size…”.
Grace looked it up. Spotted owls and barred owls maxed out at 1.5 and 1.8 pounds respectively. The Plan made no mention of the presence of the truly large and aggressive great grey and great horned owls—birds twice the size of spotted and striped owls, weighing in at 2.6 and 2.8 pounds respectively—owls that had no issue with taking on other raptors including owls and eagles.
The Yellow Ribbon Alliance pointed out that, buried on page 293, almost at the end of The Plan, it stated:
There are relatively few observations of northern spotted owls aggressively chasing or physically attacking a barred owl but those that exist include a nesting northern spotted owl pair aggressively confronting barred owls, a male northern spotted owl in a family group pursuing a barred owl out of an area, and a northern spotted owl pair responding in an agitated manner to a barred owl (Gutiérrez et al. 2004, pp. 7-25).
The Yellow Ribbon Alliance added a few lines from another study:
Spotted Owls are highly territorial and regularly confront conspecifics with aggressive vocal displays (Forsman 1976, 1980; Forsman et al. 1984, Gutiérrez et al. 1995, Franklin et al. 1996). In extreme cases, physical confrontations may occur but are thought to be rare and of short duration. They apparently learn to recognize their neighbor’s voices and calling patterns and respond to them much less vigorously (Fitton 1991, Waldo 2002).
To this, Ginnie added another angry Post-It: THEY COEXIST!!!
Grace knew that surveyors entering barred owl territory and calling would often be greeted with what they called “aggressive” displays by barred owls. Maybe they took the calls as new animals moving in or perhaps the bird had learned that scientists often offer food? More cherry-picking of data by the government, wondered Grace, in an effort to create a villain, a target?
As for the hybridization, Grace assumed the more “aggressive” and “larger” barred owls were initiating breeding with the smaller female spotted owls, creating the hybrid sparred owls the US F&WS abhorred and were intent on eliminating.
She was surprised to discover her assumption was incorrect. The Yellow Ribbon Alliance’s comment letter included a link for a paper proving the “smaller” and reportedly “less aggressive” male spotted owls were the ones breeding with female barred owls, but their advances were accepted only when barred owl numbers were low. When male barred owls were abundant, the female barred owls preferred to mate with them and hybrids, sparred owls, declined.
Perhaps that is why the spotted owl disappears from areas where barred owls are abundant? thought Grace. They go looking for mates further afield, a change that would register as a precipitous decline in one area because the bird had gone to an unmonitored region? After all, it’s a great big forested world out there.
Grace also wondered if reducing populations of barred owls would encourage the female barred owls to accept the advances of male spotted owls once again, producing more hybrids as a direct result of a government cull.
In the key study on which The Plan was built was lethal takes by private timberland managers who called it a success when a few spotted owls showed up. “After [barred owl] removals, the estimated mean annual rate of population change for spotted owls stabilized in areas with removals (0.2% decline per year), but continued to decline sharply in areas without removals (12.1% decline per year).”
Grace studied the charts. They were unimpressive.
Perhaps the spotted owl simply moved when barred owls were thick, moved back in when the numbers lightened up? wondered Grace. Might removing a great horned or great grey owl or shutting down a cannabis operation, removing toxins from the food chain deliver similar results? Either way, if this declining trend of -12% per year is correct, the spotted owl should be extinct by now.
She read on.
…We used multistate mark–recapture analysis with 7,665 captures and recaptures of 1,721 nonjuvenile spotted owls to estimate the effect of barred owl removal on apparent annual survival and dispersal movements of spotted owls between areas with (treatment) and without (control) removal. …We used a reparameterized temporal symmetry mark–recapture model with 6,661 captures and recaptures of 1,484 nonjuvenile spotted owls across all five study areas in a meta-analysis of apparent survival, recruitment, and annual rate of population change of spotted owls.
Capturing and recapturing thousands of spotted owls in the name of saving them? Good heavens! The stress! thought Grace.
Grace concluded that the premise that spotted owls would increase if barred owls were killed was weak.
She turned to the Methodology section in Appendix 2, page 109 of The Plan. The US F&WS had chosen shooting as the preferred method for the cull, declaring it a nonissue for nesting birds and other wildlife. No lead bullets allowed and, where legal, new quiet guns were to be included.
Ginnie had added a pink Post-It: Snipers + night vision, quiet guns with scopes+ thermal imaging.
The Plan, thought Grace, is full of cherry-picked data designed to demonize the barred owl as an unwanted and destructive invasive species. She sighed. This is political cover for what the agency really wants and what is that? she wondered.
Is this a surreptitious way to arm wildlife personnel and government contractors, preparing them for encounters in the woods with cannabis producers, legal and illegal?
As Jackson said, would the cannabis producers be the first to sign up for training with quiet guns, thermal imaging and night vision goggles?
Or is this a field exercise for snipers using barred owls for target practice?
The Plan required an army of fit and trained snipers using GPS devices and audio equipment for luring the barred owls into the kill zone. Another piece of tech would be needed to confirm the calls were from barred owls. The snipers would be outfitted with night vision equipment and guns equipped with silencers and thermal imaging mounted to their weapons inline with the scopes. Impressive, thought Grace. Terrifying.
After the kill, they’d log and photograph their prey and bring in a few hybrids—not for crucial toxin testing but for DNA analysis only.
The vast majority of the toxin-laden owl carcasses would be buried in the forest so no one would ever know the scale of the poisoning of our wildlife. No corporation, no government agency, would ever be held responsible for this environmental disaster.
The Yellow Ribbon Alliance closed their comments with a blistering rebuke:
Built on the ruins of the cult of spotted owl totemism, The Barred Owl Management Plan demands hundreds of thousands of striped owls be put to death. This Plan, masquerading as a wildlife management plan, is actually:
• A Training Program for Night Maneuvers using the striped owl for target practice in forested areas often occupied by those engaged in trespass cannabis cultivation.
• A Toxic Waste Disposal Plan that ensures the extent of the poisoning of America’s wildlife will never be known by mandating rodenticide-laden owl carcasses be buried deep in the forests with absolutely zero toxicology studies.
• An SGAR Marketing Plan benefitting the rodenticide subdivision of the global chemical industry. As a direct result of the lethal removal of a key bird of prey vital for controlling rodent populations, sales of anticoagulant rodenticides will boom, resulting in a wildlife food chain poisoning event of epic proportions.
Outside, in the midnight darkness, the barred owl hooted again. Who, who, who cooks for you?
Grace felt drained and sick. The Barred Owl Management Plan should be renamed The Cartel and Military Night Maneuvers Training Program and Rodenticide Toxic Waste Disposal and Marketing Plan, she thought. The owl is camouflage, political cover, for government delivery of military and chemical industry goals. One bird, two stones.
Grace put down her research, turned out the lights and closed her eyes. She fell into a restless sleep, a tumult of owls—spotted and striped—tumbling ’round and ’round and ’round in her head.
