Folks, we’re reformatting Animal House to be more efficient.
We will continue to publish individual listings that we receive regarding animals that need homes. My email address is at the bottom of the story each week. Feel free to use it.
Producing this weekly column for the past eight months has taught us that there is no shortage of dogs, puppies, cats, kittens, turtles, guinea pigs, hamsters, birds, snakes, bearded dragons and all sorts of other creatures needing safe homes and loving care. We entrust them to you, our readers.
A story that we find heart-stopping is that, to paraphrase George Orwell, all owls are created equal, but…are some more equal than others?
We wax rhapsodic about both Strigiformes (typical owls) and Tytonidae (barn-owl family) and mythologize them as both wise and mysterious. Do you know that a group of owls is called a “parliament?” Scientists call owls “cryptic” for their protective coloring, nocturnal hunting habits, and silent but deadly flight. In brief, they are among the most highly specialized creatures on earth, and this inspires awe.
Except when things go wrong. Last week, the Associated Press reported that in 2025, trained sharpshooters authorized by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service will embark on a three-decade plan to blow to smithereens a half-million or so Barred owls (Strix varia, typically known as hoot owls), across an area of California, Oregon and Washington state approximating 23,000 square miles. This action will be taken in the name of biodiversity.
Why? Well, they’re invasive. They’re a big, pushy East Coast species that now encroaches on the West Coast territory of Northern Spotted owls and California Spotted owls (Strix occidentalis).
The aggressive Barred owl breeds more quickly, has bigger broods than the Spotted owl, and requires less territory. Wow, that sounds like my family in New Jersey.
The Barred owl population is now snapping up all of the juicy squirrels and wood rats that are also on the menu for the smaller Spotted owls, which are considered threatened or endangered, depending upon the specific population and location.
How did this happen? You can name that tune in less than twelve Barred owls. First, logging and mining have resulted in habitat loss. Second, climate change, which results in more wildfires, reduces available Stringiform housing. The federal government has struggled for decades to protect the native northern Spotted owl, even managing to halt logging on millions of acres of old-growth forest on federal lands after the owl was listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act in 1990. But the Spotted owl population continued to decline as researchers documented the arrival and proliferation of the larger, more aggressive Barred owl, which is now considered an apex predator.
The unfolding drama raises questions, both ethical and esthetic. Killing one owl species to protect another seems absurdly sad, if not cruel, especially because the changes in populations are primarily the result of human activity. We cringe to learn that the hunters will lure the Barred owls into submission with pre-recorded owl love songs right before they squeeze the trigger. Badda-bing.
Such purges have a spotty record of success, including the federal government’s past decision to kill sea lions and cormorants to protect West Coast salmon. Somewhat more effective was the trapping and killing of cowbirds, which, cuckoo-like, are brazen avian squatters that lay their eggs in the nests of unsuspecting Kirtland warblers. This small, yellow-bellied songbird nearly went extinct a half-century ago.
The cowbirds had once enjoyed an ancestral symbiosis with the bison of the Great Plains, plucking annoying parasites from the hides of the great woolly beasties. When the bison were nearly eradicated by Europeans, the cowbirds stopped traveling with the great herds and became localized butt-insky bird bullies. The warbler was removed from the federal protected species list in 2019 as the result of the cowbird liquidation project.
Scientists believe that the Barred owl began moving west in the early 1900s, perhaps tracking human settlement as farmers planted trees on their property and learned to prevent prairie wildfires, thus creating convenient nesting and hunting lands for owls. While human habitation is often flagged as a death knell for many species, for others, it’s a surprising and ironic golden ticket.
Gulls, dogs, cats, rats, mice, pigeons and coyotes, and, in Hawaii, mongooses were imported as rat-killers (except, oops, mongooses are diurnal while rats are nocturnal), and in Australia, rabbits originally brought in by white settlers as a food source are now feralized and munching everything in sight with a population estimated at 200 million. And these are just the obvious examples.
However, raptors are rarely seen as a nuisance species except perhaps by poultry farmers. Will removing an estimated 425,000 birds of prey result in a rodent birth boom? If so, then what? Maybe a few million of our nation’s homeless domesticated cats could be pressed into service to help, but they generally don’t return our calls.
Fluffy, Simba, you’ve got my number.
Global warming will continue to create hard choices just like this one. So will deforestation, conducted to grow palm oil trees and provide grazing lands for beef cattle as a hungry world clamors for more and more protein.
The fact is that humans are disruptors. Sometimes, this disruption is cold-hearted, but more often than not, it’s simply ignorant of the potential long-term consequences of actions taken. If we acknowledge our impact on other species, we also must examine the ethics of intervening again when we don’t like the outcomes of our initial disruption.
Here are critters in urgent need of homes
Click on the photos for larger images and captions.
