{"id":693178,"date":"2026-06-09T08:50:18","date_gmt":"2026-06-09T08:50:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/693178\/"},"modified":"2026-06-09T08:50:18","modified_gmt":"2026-06-09T08:50:18","slug":"yakama-nation-begins-barred-owl-culling-in-washington-state","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/693178\/","title":{"rendered":"Yakama Nation begins barred owl culling in Washington State"},"content":{"rendered":"

Barred owls, the famously aggressive and territorial species known to attack Pacific Northwest hikers<\/a> and joggers, are now officially under attack themselves.<\/p>\n

Theoretically, they\u2019ve been in danger since the U.S. Department of Fish and Wildlife released its barred owl management plan<\/a> in 2024, announcing its intention to kill tens of thousands of barred owls per year for up to 30 years in the interest of protecting the northern spotted owl and California spotted owl populations.<\/p>\n

The federal government and some environmentalist groups<\/a> have agreed that protecting the endangered northern spotted owl is necessary, but some animal-rights advocates argue that the plan is inhumane<\/a> and exists only to aid the timber industry.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s been two years since the plan\u2019s announcement, but only since November has a group in Washington officially begun killing barred owls, a species that has been protected for over 100 years by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act.<\/p>\n

The News Tribune learned that the Yakama Nation Tribe in South Central Washington has initiated barred owl management on reservation lands and is actively killing the once-protected species. They are the first and currently the only group in Washington to do so.<\/p>\n

\"A A barred owl eating a garter snake in Olympia. Rollin Geppert Courtesty of Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife Why target barred owls?<\/p>\n

Barred owls, a species that has ranged from Maine down to Florida since the Pleistocene era, have only in the past 100 years migrated to Mexico and the West.<\/p>\n

The first barred owl in Washington state was documented in 1965.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey\u2019ve moved further west due to their own actions,\u201d Wayne Pacelle from Animal Wellness Action,<\/a> a nonprofit from Washington D.C., told The News Tribune. \u201cThey\u2019re not like Burmese pythons, which were captured for the pet trade in Southeast Asia and brought to the U.S.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 2024, the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife reported<\/a> the northern spotted owl population had decreased up to 90% in some federal landscapes across Washington and that the barred owl was to blame.<\/p>\n

In response to the rapid decline of the spotted owl species in the West, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service released the barred owl management plan, with intentions to legally permit selected groups and agencies to cull tens of thousands of barred owls from the West every year for 30 years.<\/p>\n

The plan includes the potential to open barred owl hunting in 14 national parks, including Mount Rainier, Olympic and North Cascades.<\/p>\n

Northern spotted owls are listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act, but barred owls are not.<\/p>\n

In November 2025, Tom Wheeler<\/a>, executive director of the California-based nonprofit Environmental Protection Information Center, told Owen Clarke<\/a> at Outside Magazine that barred owl removal is a habitat-protection strategy.<\/p>\n

\u201cBarred owls outcompete spotted owls and are driving the species to extinction,\u201d Wheeler said. \u201cBarred owl removal is likely to provide both long- and short-term habitat protection.\u201d<\/p>\n

At the time, Outside Magazine reported that the Sierra Club, Earthjustice and the Center for Biological Diversity were on board with the plan.<\/p>\n

Some animal rights activists disagree with the plan.<\/p>\n

\"A A barred owl watches for danger or prey at Point Defiance Park. James Crandall Is killing barred owls futile?<\/p>\n

The News Tribune recently spoke with Wayne Pacelle, author and president of Animal Wellness Action, while he walked his beagle Asher in the woods near his home. Pacelle argued that barred owls live only in North America and that range expansion is normal.<\/p>\n

\u201cAll species are range-expanding,\u201d Pacelle told The News Tribune. \u201cAnd birds have greater range expansion potential because they fly. Moving from the Dakotas to Washington state is not that far.\u201d<\/p>\n

Pacelle says barred owls are adaptive just like coyotes and deer, but northern spotted owls are not. He also thinks that culling hundreds of thousands of barred owls in a 30-year span is futile.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you shoot barred owls out of a particular area,\u201d he told The News Tribune, \u201cyou will have the juveniles move in and take it back over. So it\u2019ll just be a treadmill. They\u2019re going to start shooting owls, and they\u2019re never going to be able to stop. And they\u2019re not going to reduce the densities and pressure on the spotted owls. We probably have three to four million barred owls in the United States. You shoot a small percentage of them, and they\u2019ll fill the gap very quickly.\u201d<\/p>\n

Another point of concern is opening up owl hunting in national parks. Beyond killing a protected species, Pacelle doesn\u2019t trust the public to be able to spot the differences in spotted owls, barred owls and even great gray owls.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019ll just be open season on all owls,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Pacelle admits that spotted owls are losing the competition for nesting sites but says that it\u2019s just animals having a natural effect on an ecosystem.<\/p>\n

\u201cIsn\u2019t that nature?\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

According to Pacelle, the timber industry is primarily to blame for the management plan.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s worse than the fact that it won\u2019t work to protect spotted owls,\u201d Pacelle said. \u201cIt\u2019s worse than the fact that they\u2019re violating a 100-year-plus protective act against barred owls, and it\u2019s worse than opening up hunting season of owls in our national parks.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s that this is going to be a new age of the cutting down our old-growth forests. And how environmentalists can go along with this because they\u2019re so concerned about the spotted owl is mystifying to me.\u201d<\/p>\n

Pacelle emphasized that spotted owls have been on the decline for a long time.<\/p>\n

During the timber wars in the 1980s and 1990s, environmentalists fought to stop the clear-cutting of old-growth forests that spotted owls depended on, which greatly affected<\/a> the spotted owl. Older trees have deeper cavities where spotted owls like to nest, and due to the loss of that habitat, spotted owls began to decline.<\/p>\n

By the 1990s, the survival of the spotted owls didn\u2019t look great<\/a>, and barred owls were still extremely rare in the Pacific Northwest.<\/p>\n

For the renewal of old-growth clear-cutting, Pacelle blames the one big beautiful bil<\/a>l and its massive increase in timber harvest on public lands.<\/p>\n

He has a theory about the environmental offset of cutting down old-growth trees.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou have an offset created by the barred owl management strategy,\u201d Pacelle explained. \u201cOtherwise, they wouldn\u2019t be able to cut down old-growth trees that the spotted owls depend on. That\u2019s the scheme. It\u2019s to allow the killing of barred owls, so the timber industry can cut down more trees and meet the new quota. Particularly in Oregon<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

The damage: the loss of old-growth trees. The offset: the culling of an invasive species (barred owls).<\/p>\n

On June 3, Pacelle met with the U.S. District Court in Portland in a forum to hear concerns<\/a> about the implementation of the management plan. On June 6, he emailed The News Tribune the following statement:<\/p>\n

\u201cWe asked the court to vacate the barred owl management plan, which means that the agency cannot implement the plan as designed and will be unable to hand out permits to allow third parties, including timber companies, to engage in the mass killing of owls in the Northwest.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe judge had very few questions for either side today about the details of the actual plan, including its implementation and its likelihood of success. She mostly listened to both sides without interruption, so there were no real indicators of how she might be viewing this highly complex scheme.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"A A barred owl swoops at Point Defiance Park James Crandall So who\u2019s killing owls now?<\/p>\n

In May, the News Tribune reached out to the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife to ask whether it had begun implementing the barred owl management plan in Washington State.<\/p>\n

\u201cAlthough the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife supports the strategy and intends to implement barred owl management to support spotted owl recovery in Washington, we have not yet done so,\u201d Bridget Mire from the WDFW responded, \u201cWe are currently working on permitting and funding.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mire said that the WDFW has applied for federal funding, and awards have not been announced. She then noted that federal permitting is typically a long process.<\/p>\n

The News Tribune later learned that the Yakama Nation Tribe<\/a> in South Central Washington has initiated barred owl management on reservation lands and is the first and only group in Washington to do so.<\/p>\n

Mark Nuetzmann, a Yakama Nation wildlife biologist, spoke to The News Tribune about the management plan last month. He said he wasn\u2019t ready to publicly release much information or talk in depth to reporters until he had more data, but he did answer a few questions.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve been training,\u201d Nuetzmann told The News Tribune. \u201cWe need to provide training to get on the Fish and Wildlife permit. We\u2019ve been doing that on and off since November last year. Now we\u2019ve completed that and are ramping up removal efforts.\u201d<\/p>\n

When asked, Nuetzmann said he was aware that Yakama Nation was the first to implement the barred owl management plan in Washington state.<\/p>\n

Yakama Nation has applied for more federal money but has enough funding to continue culling efforts through September 2027. The culling efforts so far have been carried out with shotguns.<\/p>\n

Nuetzmann said the plan now is to continue their efforts, monitor how the remaining spotted owl populations on reservation lands are doing and note whether their culling efforts have had a positive impact.<\/p>\n


\n \"Profile
\n <\/a><\/p>\n

Gavin Feek<\/a><\/p>\n

The News Tribune<\/p>\n

Gavin Feek is the outdoors reporter for The News Tribune. He is a Seattle-born writer who covers the intersection of public lands, climate-related issues and outdoor recreation. After working for many years in Yosemite National Park, Gavin pivoted to journalism in 2020. You can find his bylines in The Seattle Times, The Stranger, Outside, Climbing, The Intercept, Vox Media, Vertical Times, McSweeney\u2019s, and various other publications. He spends his free time outdoors with his family.\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Barred owls, the famously aggressive and territorial species known to attack Pacific Northwest hikers and joggers, are now…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":693179,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[51],"tags":[79,201],"class_list":["post-693178","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wildlife","tag-science","tag-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/693178","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=693178"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/693178\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/693179"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=693178"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=693178"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=693178"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}