Barred Owls and The Northern Spotted Owl
Barred Owls may be partly responsible for the recent decline of the Northern Spotted Owl, native to Washington, Oregon, and California. Since the 1960s, Barred Owls have been expanding their range westward from the eastern US, perhaps because man-made changes have created new suitable habitat in the west. When Spotted Owls and Barred Owls share the same environment, the latter are generally more aggressive and out-compete the former, leading to decreased populations of the native owls. They have also been known to interbreed, with the hybrids named "Sparred Owl" or "Botted Owl".
On 5 April 2007, White House officials announced a proposal from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service that shooting Barred Owls would aid in effects caused on the Spotted Owl. The proposal called for 18 sites to be constructed in Spotted Owl territory, where 12–32 owls could be shot at each site. Environmentalists fear that increasing blame in Barred Owls as population-decreasing proponents in Spotted Owls will mean less attention will be paid to territorial protection, and logging will be resumed in protected Spotted Owl areas.
Read more about this topic: Barred Owl
Famous quotes containing the words barred, owls, northern, spotted and/or owl:
“Cinema is the culmination of the obsessive, mechanistic male drive in western culture. The movie projector is an Apollonian straightshooter, demonstrating the link between aggression and art. Every pictorial framing is a ritual limitation, a barred precinct.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)
“There was an old man with a beard,
who said, “It is just as I feared!—
Two owls and a hen, four larks and a wren,
Have all built their nests in my beard!””
—Edward Lear (1812–1888)
“[During the Renaissance] the Italians said, “We are one in the Father: we will go back.” The Northern races said, “We are one in Christ, we will go on.””
—D.H. (David Herbert)
“Two feathered guests from Alabama, two together,
And their nest, and four light-green eggs spotted with brown,
And every day the he-bird to and fro near at hand,
And every day the she-bird crouched on her nest, silent, with bright
eyes,
And every day I, a curious boy, never too close, never disturbing
them,
Cautiously peering, absorbing, translating.”
—Walt Whitman (1819–1892)
“For sounds in winter nights, and often in winter days, I heard the forlorn but melodious note of a hooting owl indefinitely far; such a sound as the frozen earth would yield if struck with a suitable plectrum, the very lingua vernacula of Walden Wood, and quite familiar to me at last, though I never saw the bird while it was making it.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)