Aggressive owls may be shot

PORTLAND, Ore. — A few hundred aggressive cousins of the threatened northern spotted owl may be killed by government agents with shotguns under a proposed federal plan.

The spotted owl was listed as threatened 17 years ago, and its numbers continue to dwindle through much of its range in the Pacific Northwest, federal officials said Thursday in proposing the plan to prevent the species from dying out.

The barred owls have crowded their cousins, the spotted owls, out of prime habitat, sometimes even attacking them. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service hopes that thinning the number of barred owls will allow the spotted owl to move back into historic nesting areas and increase its numbers.

The recovery plan envisions removing 12 to 32 barred owls in each of 18 areas, first by luring them with recorded calls and an owl decoy, then by shooting them at close range.

The barred owl is not native to the West Coast, but followed settlers across the continent, scientists say.

Controlling the barred owl is a part of a draft plan that includes work on spotted owl habitat, research and monitoring. It could cost $198 million over 30 years — the time the Fish and Wildlife Service says may be needed to bring the spotted owl's numbers to the point of recovery.

The Humane Society of the United States called the plan to kill barred owls nonsensical, saying the bird wasn't the primary threat to the spotted owl.

"The decline of the spotted owl is not due to the barred owls but to the degradation and destruction of old-growth forests" by the timber industry, the society's Lauren Nolfo-Clements said in a statement.