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The first time I ever saw a dingo I was completely shocked. They looked no different, to my estimation, than the kind of mixed-breed mutts I was used to coming across in the pound. And that made perfect sense, for dingos—though wild dogs and actually quite dangerous—are descended from previously domesticated dogs thousands upon thousands of years.
But I was also interested to see the videos of these African Painted Dog pups playing on the Savannah. African Painted Dogs have always been a wild animal, and in fact bear little relation to their domesticated (very distant cousins) despite the use of the name “dog.” However, you’d never know it to watch this pack of pups playing with their mom.
In this video, a pack of eight African Painted Dog puppies gambol and vocalize on a dirt road, while adults in their group look on. They have giant black splotches of coloration all over their light bodies and comically huge, adorably rounded ears.
But don’t let their adorable faces fool you—these little fur ball are actually savage and vicious hunters, who use their incredible stamina, mouth full of sharp teeth and cooperative hunting methods to bring down game far larger than they are.
A Common Name, An Uncommon Ancestry
The name of this species is one of some degree of controversy. They are most often called African Wild Dogs, though conservation groups say that the term makes them sound as if they are domestic dogs who are stray or feral, rather than actual wild creatures who have as much right to the land as any other. Others call them African Painted Wolves. African Painted Dogs are extremely endangered due to habitat loss and fragmentation.
They are the only surviving member of the genus Lycaon, and broke off from the rest of the canine family over two and a half million years ago. (Compare this to wolves and even coyotes, who like, domesticated dogs, are part of the genus Canis.) Their far remove from more familiar, American canines make these an animal more suited to zoos and far-off savannahs than as pets.
All About African Painted Dogs
Behaviorally, African Painted Dogs are not suited to domestication or taming, as they are extremely aggressive and adapted to run great distances in pursuit of their large antelope prey. All of their teeth are sharp, and they hunt in large packs dominated by a male and female breeding pair. Young females go off to join their own packs, which is an unusual structure in pack animals.
Their painted coats are made entirely of bristle hair, which becomes sparser and sparser as they age, until they are mostly hairless. They communicate through body language like tail movements and also a range of vocalizations, including a “sneeze” sound used during hunting to confer with the rest of the pack.
African Painted Dogs eat primarily antelope, impala, wildebeest, kudu, gazelle and sometimes warthogs. They compete with lions for their food, and lions will kill African Painted Dogs they perceive to be encroaching on their food source. They are also often the victims of having their kills stolen by hyenas. But the biggest threat to this species’ survival is habitat loss.
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“This is a book about a courageous woman. Often alone in wild country, she endures hardships and faces danger in many forms… It is a book I highly recommend: informative, fascinating, and beautifully written.” —Dr. Jane Goodall
Source: Amar Saleem/Pexels.
My research interests for decades have focused on the behavior and social ecology of wild carnivores with a focus on coyotes. I also have been, and remain deeply interested in, the social behavior and behavioral ecology of wild wolves.1 So, when I learned about Dr. Diane Boyd’s new book called A Woman Among Wolves: My Journey Through Forty Years of Wolf Recovery, I couldn’t wait to get my eyes on it. I’ve known of Diane’s long-term research for many years, and I remain fascinated by what she was able to do, often against all odds, Often called “the Jane Goodall of wolves,” a well-deserved monicker, I couldn’t agree more with the accolades her book has received—it truly is a story of passion, resilience, and determination in a career dominated by men. Here’s what she has to say about her landmark and deeply inspirational book.
Marc Bekoff: Why did you write A Woman Among Wolves?
Diane Boyd: I wrote A Woman Among Wolves for many reasons: 1) because it is a story that has not been told before, despite the numerous wolf books out there; 2) many of my old coworkers have passed away and can no longer share their narrative; 3) it’s a story that needs telling, of connecting those early years of natural wolf recovery through dispersal without reintroduction, when wolves were truly rare and endangered; 4) it travels full circle from the early wolf recovery efforts monitored by dedicated field biologists in the 1970s and 80s, and updated through present times, including the cultural shifts over these five decades as the societal pendulum has swung from one extreme to the other; and 5) most importantly, I hope through good storytelling and balanced knowledge to open peoples’ minds about what wolves are and what they are not.
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Source: Greystone Books/with permission.
This is my personal story that weaves revealing insights about a few individual wolves, wolf population dynamics, science, social dimensions, and politics throughout the book in a way that any reader can take away something new and hopefully thought-provoking. In the long run, I believe all of this will improve wolf conservation efforts and increase human tolerance for having wolves back on the landscape.2
MB: Who do you hope to reach?
DB: I wrote this book for the general public reader who might have an interest in wolves, ecology, facing challenges, or simply love a good adventure story. I also hope to mentor young future biologists, especially women, who want a meaningful career in the wildlife conservation field and to follow their dreams. I’ve published numerous articles in peer-reviewed journals and technical book chapters. However, I strongly believe that more headway is gained in conserving our wildlife and their habitat by reaching out to a broader public audience through well-written popular books and magazine articles based on sound science, but less technically written. Your average peer-reviewed journal article is read by a small number of academics and managers, whereas popular publications have readerships of millions across the world and, I believe, more power to change conservation perspectives.
MB: What are some of the major topics you consider?
DB: I discuss wolf ecology and behavior, trophic cascades, fear, resilience, wolf-dog-human relationships, the process of domestication of dogs from wolves, complex predator-prey relationships, interspecific carnivore interactions and competition, the myth of the Super Wolf, pro-wolf and anti-wolf perspectives, cultural differences across the world in wolf management, and social values as they impact/enhance/battle wolf recovery.
The more complex scientific concepts are presented through stories, examples, and clear language, without the technical jargon of typical scientific discourse that may lose many readers. And yet, there is enough very current science to appeal to the ecologist-biologist-behaviorist. The public reader will better grasp the complicated and highly debated concept of trophic cascades by reading about dynamic exchanges between wolves, mountain lions, grizzly bears, and coyotes than if the reader waded through a long list of scientifically documented studies covering the same. I did not use citations in the text or footnotes (which, as a trained technical writer, was difficult at first until I got into the rhythm of writing a memoir) because my editor wanted the book to flow smoothly without readers being encumbered with a more technical format. There is a list of “further readings” at the end for those who want to delve into more of the research behind discussions in the book.
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MB: How does your book differ from others that are concerned with some of the same general topics?
DB: A Woman Among Wolves differs from other wolf books in that it is a memoir written by a woman and her crew who doggedly pursue wolf recolonization from the very first wolf to walk down from Canada in 1979, unaided by humans, and subsequent dispersers that recolonized northwestern Montana 15 years before wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone and central Idaho.
The story expands from this historical, small-scale natural recovery up to present times and a wolf population of more than 3,000 wolves in the western U.S. I would estimate that 99 percent of the public thinks that all wolves in the western U.S. were reintroduced into Yellowstone and Idaho, are foreign, and don’t belong on the landscape, thus packing some baggage; this needs to be corrected. There are many elements that set my book apart from the hundreds of wolf books out there: it is a long-term first-person memoir written by a woman biologist in a male-dominated field, a mix of heart and biology, covering viewpoints from pro- and anti-wolf philosophies, and not preachy. I tell a powerful story without telling readers what they should think, although it will be obvious to the reader that I am passionate about wolves, research, and communication.
MB: Are you hopeful that as people learn more about these wolves they will treat them with more respect and dignity?
DB: I can best answer this by quoting the last paragraph in my introduction:
“I hope these stories, spanning more than four decades of traveling the rocky road of wolf recovery, inspire conservation dreams and actions in the next generations, who will make critical decisions and craft solutions for future wildlife-human interactions. Finally, I hope that this story provides a nuanced understanding of wolf recovery that will make someone who is contemplating killing a wolf pause—and then decide not to pull the trigger.”
References
In conversation with Dr. Diane K. Boyd. Diane holds a PhD in Wildlife Biology from the University of Montana. She divides her time between her home in Kalispell, Montana, and her beloved cabin in the North Fork. She is the author of numerous scientific papers on wolves. An interesting story written about her work titled The Woman Who Runs with the Wolves was published in 1993 in Sports Illustrated.
2) MB: How does your book relate to your background and general areas of interest? DB: This book is a memoir about my life’s work, the interesting people and wolves I’ve encountered along the journey, and the remote places I’ve lived in and experienced deeply. So, the book encompasses my background and general areas of interest. Over the nearly fifty years that I have been involved with wolf research, I have had so many backcountry wildlife adventures/misadventures that it was a natural and straightforward process to weave the story telling with the science underlying my curiosity and passions.
MISSOURI, USA — The Missouri Department of Conservation recently released multiple rule changes ahead of this year’s deer and turkey hunting season, including an additional tool hunters can add to their arsenal.
Hunters can now use drones to recover wounded deer, turkey, elk, and black bear during the respective hunting seasons, according to Missouri’s Wildlife Code. All other uses of drones are still prohibited while hunting, including pursuing, taking, driving, or otherwise harassing wildlife.
Drone operators must first obtain permission from the public or private landowner where the game animal was shot. Using a drone to trespass on someone’s property to locate and recover a wounded animal is still prohibited. Drone operators also cannot have any kind of weapon on them while flying a drone.
“No person may possess or control a firearm, bow, or other implement whereby wildlife could be killed or taken while afield, whether acting singly or as one (1) of a group of persons, during times when an unmanned motor-driven air conveyance is in flight,” the wildlife code said. “Operators of unmanned motor-driven air conveyances used in the recovery of a wounded animal as prescribed in this paragraph are exempt from hunting permit requirement.”
Missouri’s archery deer and turkey hunting season begins on Sept. 15, kicking off the fall hunting season. The turkey firearms portion begins on Oct. 1 and runs through Oct. 31. Early antlerless deer hunting runs through Oct. 11-13, and late antlerless runs through Dec. 7-15.
Dog owners know their pups love them deeply, even if they express it differently than humans. Recent research, however, left many dog lovers saddened when it revealed that most dogs don’t like being hugged. This doesn’t mean our furry friends dislike affection; they thrive on our love and approval! Instead of giving them hugs, which can make them uncomfortable, try showing your devotion in ways they truly understand—belly rubs, treats, or playtime. These gestures strengthen your bond and express love in a language they fully appreciate.
Gaze Deeply Into Their Eyes
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Dr Brian Hare, Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at Duke University, topped the NY Times bestseller list with his book, The Genius of Dogs. In an interview with Anderson Cooper this past Spring, he told the dog-loving newsman that when your dog stares at you, he is “hugging you with his eyes.”
This doesn’t mean you should stare deeply into the eyes of the dog that guards your local junkyard! Direct eye contact is still considered a challenge or threat in many situations. But with your trusted pet, try gazing into his eyes when you are calmly relaxing.
Speak softly, stroke him gently, and maintain eye contact. According to Hare, these quiet moments stimulate the release of Oxytocin in the canine brain – the same hormone that bonds mother and child.
Raise Your Eyebrows
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A Japanese study published in the September 2013 volume of Behavioral Processes found that dogs raise their eyebrows – especially the left one – when greeted by their owners. Using a high-speed camera, they scrutinized the dogs’ facial movements when seeing their owners vs. strangers.
When the strangers came along to greet them, the test dogs displayed far less facial activity, most of which was right-sided. The significance is that the right brain controls the left side of the face and is tied to emotion, while the left brain controls the right side of the face and is tied to analytical behaviors.
The more facial activity you display when greeting your dog, the more they know they are loved. If you can raise one eyebrow (sadly, I cannot), then make it to the left one. Your pup will really feel special!
Lean On Them
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Not just figuratively, but press your weight against your dog physically. Not to the point where he feels cornered (or crushed!), but just a little to show you trust him. Our pups do this to display their affection for us, which is often overlooked.
Have you ever had your pooch press up against the backs of your legs while you’re busy in the kitchen? That’s a type of dog hug! Try giving him one right back.
Let Them Sleep With You
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Emory University neuroscientist Gregory Berns is the author of How Dogs Love Us, and he has spent decades studying the canine brain using MRI. According to his research, sleeping with a human is the ultimate display of love and trust our dogs can give because that is when they are most vulnerable.
It also shows that they consider us a member of their pack. If you have a No Dogs in Bed policy, try snuggling up on the sofa or floor for a few minutes daily to show affection.
Rub Their Ears
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A pat on the head might feel natural to show praise, but rubbing your dog’s ears may express more love. When you rub your dog’s ears, their bodies produce endorphins. Endorphins are hormones that cause pleasure for your pup. A gentle ear massage in a circular motion is enough for your dog to know how you feel.
Spend Quality Time Together
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Engaging in fun activities with your dog is a great way to help your bond grow. Going for walks, playing fetch, or working on training are all ways to show your dog you care. These activities bring you and your dog closer together.
When your dog sees you having fun, they’ll feel happy too. In addition to feeling loved, your dog will get the exercise and mental stimulation they need.
Keep Using the “Baby Voice”
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We all do it! As dog parents, it’s hard to resist having conversations in a high-pitched voice with our dogs. It might be embarrassing to admit, but dogs enjoy it. They respond well to the exaggerated emotions in your voice, and it helps them know you’re addressing them.
So, there’s no need to feel crazy if you talk to your dog. Odds are, their love for you grows even stronger when you do. Reading to dogs is another special way to bond with them.
Give Them a Loving Touch
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Not every act of love has to be grand. You can show your dog you love them just by petting them. Touching a dog releases oxytocin, a hormone that makes you feel good. So, if your dog enjoys it, there’s no reason to hold back on the pets and belly rubs.
Adding an extra touch to your dog’s routine, such as a massage, grooming session, or extended petting time, might make your dog feel more loved. Most dogs will happily welcome the extra attention.
Just Be Yourself
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Throughout his extensive research Dr. Berns has found that although it’s sometimes hard for us to tell what our dogs are thinking, they definitely do not have the same problem reading our emotions! If your love is true for your pups, they know it by reading your voice, body language, and actions. So just keep doing what you’re doing, and your dogs will reward you by showing affection in their own special ways.
Shutterstock
Dog owners know their pups love them deeply, even if they express it differently than humans. Recent research, however, left many dog lovers saddened when it revealed that most dogs don’t like being hugged. This doesn’t mean our furry friends dislike affection; they thrive on our love and approval! Instead of giving them hugs, which can make them uncomfortable, try showing your devotion in ways they truly understand—belly rubs, treats, or playtime. These gestures strengthen your bond and express love in a language they fully appreciate.
Gaze Deeply Into Their Eyes
Shutterstock
Dr Brian Hare, Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at Duke University, topped the NY Times bestseller list with his book, The Genius of Dogs. In an interview with Anderson Cooper this past Spring, he told the dog-loving newsman that when your dog stares at you, he is “hugging you with his eyes.”
This doesn’t mean you should stare deeply into the eyes of the dog that guards your local junkyard! Direct eye contact is still considered a challenge or threat in many situations. But with your trusted pet, try gazing into his eyes when you are calmly relaxing.
Speak softly, stroke him gently, and maintain eye contact. According to Hare, these quiet moments stimulate the release of Oxytocin in the canine brain – the same hormone that bonds mother and child.
Raise Your Eyebrows
Shutterstock
A Japanese study published in the September 2013 volume of Behavioral Processes found that dogs raise their eyebrows – especially the left one – when greeted by their owners. Using a high-speed camera, they scrutinized the dogs’ facial movements when seeing their owners vs. strangers.
When the strangers came along to greet them, the test dogs displayed far less facial activity, most of which was right-sided. The significance is that the right brain controls the left side of the face and is tied to emotion, while the left brain controls the right side of the face and is tied to analytical behaviors.
The more facial activity you display when greeting your dog, the more they know they are loved. If you can raise one eyebrow (sadly, I cannot), then make it to the left one. Your pup will really feel special!
A Barred Owl from the Whispering Willow Wild Care facility of Schenectady, N.Y. (AP Photo/Hans Pennink)
The Barred Owl is considered “invasive” in the Pacific Northwest and it’s pushing the Northern Spotted Owl to extinction. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has a plan — kill nearly half a million Barred Owls over the next 30 years.
Guests
Tom Wheeler, executive director of the Environmental Protection Information Center [EPIC]
Jay Odenbaugh, professor of humanities, professor of philosophy at Lewis & Clark College.
Also Featured
Kessina Lee, Oregon State supervisor for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
Mark Higley, wildlife biologist at Hoopa Valley Tribal Reservation.
Transcript
Part I
(NORTHERN SPOTTED OWL CALL)
WBUR is a nonprofit news organization. Our coverage relies on your financial support. If you value articles like the one you’re reading right now, give today.
MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: This is the call of the Northern Spotted Owl.
And this is the call of the Barred Owl.
(BARRED OWL CALL)
CHAKRABARTI: The two species are close relatives. The medium sized, dark brown, Northern Spotted Owl being smaller than its more aggressive and territorial cousin the Barred Owl. But the most critical difference between the two is that in the forests of the Pacific Northwest, the Spotted Owl is considered a native species. The Barred Owl, an invasive from the Eastern U.S.
The Spotted Owl is also a listed threatened species. And the successful spread of, and competition from, the Barred Owl is one of the factors pushing the Spotted Owl closer to extinction.
Now, the two raptors are at the center of a controversial federal plan that raises questions about the entire philosophy behind traditional models of conservation and the goals of the Endangered Species Act.
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Put simply: How many hundreds of thousands of one species can be justifiably killed to preserve another? And what, exactly is it, that we’re trying to save?
This is On Point. I’m Meghna Chakrabarti.
To understand the importance of the current debate over Spotted Owl conservation and forest management, we have to go back about fifty years, before the invasive Barred Owl was firmly established in the forests of the Northwest.
Back then, the Spotted Owl was at the center of another years-long battle. One that went on for so long and created so much upheaval in the Northwest, it came to be known as the Timber Wars.
(CHAINSAW CUTTING OLD GROWTH / TREE HITS GROUND)
The old growth forests of the Pacific Northwest are some of the most complex ecosystems in the world. Conifer trees two centuries old and two hundred feet tall create an intricate canopy that protects a dense understory below. The forests have a storybook aura to them, with pristine waterways and mist draped mountainsides. They were also a critically important natural resource, and therefore the economic heart of logging communities across the Northwest.
But a century of logging meant that the old growth forests were rapidly disappearing. Environmentalists made it their mission to save them.
In the 1980s and early 90s, as environmental lawyers sought court injunctions to stop timber sales on federal lands, protestors blockaded logging roads, chained themselves to trees, held hunger strikes, and camped up in the canopy of stands slated for cutting.
(PROTESTOR MONTAGE)
CHAKRABARTI: The Northern Spotted Owl lives in those old growth forests. And as billions of board-feet of timber were felled, the owl’s numbers plummeted too. That spurred the push to use the Endangered Species Act to protect the Spotted Owl. In June 1990, the federal government made its decision.
ARCHIVAL RADIO NEWS: Good Friday morning, it’s 8:30 in sweet home … as a threatened species this morning.
CHAKRABARTI: Logging communities who’d worked the forests for generations felt they were fighting for their lives. Automation in the timber industry had already cost thousands of jobs. Now, they feared that the federal mandate to protect the Spotted owl would wipe out their entire way of life.
LOGGERS: Why should the owl be protected 100% and a way of life not … thre are thousands more than that.
CHAKRABARTI: Between 1989 and 1995, logging on federal land fell by 90%.
I grew up in Oregon. When I was in middle and high school, it felt like we heard about another sawmill closing almost every month.
There were t-shirts and bumper stickers with “Save a Logger Eat an Owl” and “I like my spotted owl fried” sold in places like Sweet Home and Mill City.
And then, in 1994, the Clinton Administration established the Northwest Forest Plan. It protected 10 million acres of federal land, preserving old growth forests, encouraging younger trees, and creating buffer zones in order to protect endangered species, including the Northern Spotted Owl.
Did it work?
We’re now three decades on. The Spotted Owl is still a dangerously threatened species. In fact, in the past twenty years, the number of spotted owls has declined by as much as 80 percent.
And part of the reason for that dire decline – pressure from the Barred Owl, an East Coast native, but invasive in the Northwest.
Doug Heiken is with the conservation group Oregon Wild. He described the problem to Portland TV station KGW.
DOUG HEIKEN: You have these territorial species … you need to make your house bigger.
CHAKRABARTI: But making the owl’s house bigger is a project of decades, if not centuries. They are old growth forests after all. Instead, the US Fish and Wildlife Service opted for a different strategy.
Last month, the agency announced its Barred Owl management plan. It calls for the culling of almost half a million Barred Owls in the next thirty years, in order to reduce pressure on the Spotted Owls.
If we don’t do this, we are facing the extinction of the spotted owl, and I think folks really understand that the science is very clear, that if we don’t manage barred owls, we are facing the likely extinction of northern spotted owls, and no one wants that.
CHAKRABARTI: Kessina Lee is the Oregon State supervisor for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Her office leads the Barred Owl Management Strategy.
KESSINA LEE: What the strategy does not propose to do is to eliminate barred owls in the Western United States. That’s not a goal that we think is attainable. This is really about strategically managing barred owls in some places to create a kind of refugia that is for spotted owls to reoccupy and reproduce and grow those areas. Create a core and then try to grow that core understanding that we’re always going to have barred owls in the West. And we’re really talking about managing barred owls in less than half of the range of the northern spotted owl.
CHAKRABARTI: And though the cull may be controversial, Lee says U.S. Fish and Wildlife is legally required to do all it can to protect threatened species like the spotted owl.
LEE: The Fish and Wildlife Service, at its sort of most basic, we have a responsibility to do all we can to prevent the extinction of federally listed species.
In this case, the Northern Spotted Owl and to support its recovery. And as I said, the science tells us that if barred owls are left unmanaged, we’re facing the likely extinction of the Northern Spotted Owl. We’re asked sometimes if this is about choosing one owl species over another, and I want to be very clear that it’s not. It’s choosing to have both species on the landscape as opposed to just one, because if we don’t act now, we will only have barred owls on the landscape.
And if we act, we can save spotted owls for future generations in the Pacific Northwest as well as barred owls on the landscape.
CHAKRABARTI: Finally, Lee says the brutal truth is that time is running out for the spotted owl.
LEE: The science is telling us we’ve got a two-pronged approach, if we’re going to prevent the extinction of the spotted owl, it’s habitat management, which right now the biggest threat is catastrophic wildfire in terms of the habitat side.
And the threat of invasive barred owls, and we have time to act with regard to barred owl, but that window is closing. If we don’t act, that’s a decision to let the spotted owl go. And we simply have an obligation to do everything we can to prevent that.
CHAKRABARTI: We went over the history of the Timber Wars, because the truth is, the Spotted Owl has been on the brink of extinction twice, and both times because of human impacts on the land. In this sense, the Barred Owl is a victim of human management, too, because its spread West was facilitated by manmade changes to the Great Plains and the Northern Boreal forests that go back more than a century.
So with the Spotted Owl, we have a species pushed to the brink, saved from oblivion by drastic action, only to be pushed to the brink again, requiring a cycle of more drastic action that necessitates decisions such as culling a half million other animals? How long can this go on? Is there a better model for conservation – one that does not rely on the Endangered Species Act, which is now 51 years old?
Part II
CHAKRABARTI: I’m joined today by Tom Wheeler. He’s executive director of the Environmental Protection Information Center, or EPIC, and he’s in Eureka, California.
Tom, welcome to On Point.
TOM WHEELER: Thank you for having me. Jay Odenbaugh is also with us today. He’s a professor of philosophy at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon, and he recently co-authored a New York Times opinion piece that was headlined, A dystopian effort is underway in the Pacific Northwest to pick ecological winners and losers.
Professor Odenbaugh, welcome to you.
JAY ODENBAUGH: Thanks for having me.
CHAKRABARTI: Tom, I’d love to start with you because I think we need a further explanation about why Fish and Wildlife has come to this conclusion that this mass culling over several decades of barred owls is an effective way to extend the protection to the spotted owl.
Can you talk us through that a little bit?
WHEELER: Absolutely. So this is something that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and researchers across the Pacific Northwest have studied for many decades now. The first paper considering the potential impact of barred owls on spotted owls was in the 1970s when barred owl invasion was really recent.
We have engaged in removal studies across the Pacific Northwest. Those removal studies have shown that when barred owls are removed from spotted owl habitat, the rate of decline significantly reduces. It basically flatlines. And so if we were to extend this across the range of the Northern Spotted Owl and really try to target high quality habitat for the Northern Spotted Owl, it seems that we have a chance to hold on to our precious Northern Spotted Owls.
CHAKRABARTI: What is it about the Barred Owl that’s putting so much pressure on the Spotted Owl?
WHEELER: The Barred Owl is slightly bigger than the Northern Spotted Owl. It’s more aggressive. It’s also a generalist both in habitat and diet. It eats a wider variety of life than the Northern Spotted Owl. And when Barred Owls and Spotted Owls overlap, the Barred Owls force them off of their territory, force Northern spotted owls out of their nesting and roosting habitat.
And Northern spotted owls no longer will reproduce. So it causes the Northern spotted owl population to drop very significantly, very quickly.
CHAKRABARTI: And Fish and Wildlife has said that other options were considered, right? Removing barred owls or seizing eggs in order to reduce reproduction rate of barred owls. But none of those seemed to provide the same impact in terms of protection of the spotted owls, or they were extremely expensive, is that correct?
WHEELER: That’s correct. We have to figure out what’s feasible in trying to protect the northern spotted owl.
And killing barred owls is frankly the most feasible option here.
CHAKRABARTI: Jay Odenbaugh, I’m going to come to you in just a second here, but Tom Wheeler, let’s get down to the bottom line here. And again, I keep thinking back to the upheaval that was caused from Northern California all the way to Washington State during those timber wars.
People did lose their jobs, but other folks were arrested. President Bill Clinton even came to Oregon to moderate essentially a conversation, to try to find a solution to this problem. So it seems like there’s a lot emotionally, morally, and politically on the line when it comes to the preservation of the spotted owl.
So what is at stake here?
WHEELER: There’s a lot at stake here. Not only is it species extinction, it’s also protection of larger Pacific Northwest mature and old growth forests. So I don’t want to treat the spotted owl as a tool, but it is often a tool for the protection of these forests. We environmental activists, I’m an environmental attorney myself.
We have utilized the listing of the Northern Spotted Owl to protect all of the myriad of life that also requires these mature and old growth forests. So when we lose the protections for the northern spotted owl, when they become extinct or when they are no longer present on the landscape, we also lose a critical tool for protecting these forests.
CHAKRABARTI: Well, Professor Odenbaugh, so you and your co-authors wrote this extensive opinion piece in the New York Times that challenges some of the ways we even see what the barred owl is. I kept using the word invasive, right? It’s native to the Eastern United States over what, a century and a half or so, it’s moved westward, considered invasive in the Pacific Northwest, but you challenged even just that approach to seeing what a species is in a landscape.
ODENBAUGH: Yes, my co-authors Avram Hiller and Yasha Rohwer, we worried about whether or not it’s best to think of the barred owl as an invasive, in part because of a study that came out recently. The study basically said that the eastern and western barred owl are so genetically different, but those differences would appear, have to appear over, say, 7,000 years of separation rather than the century.
As Tom knows, and I know too, this paper has some limitations. I think the bulk of evidence suggests that it’s invasive, our worries concern some other issues as well.
CHAKRABARTI: Such as?
ODENBAUGH: So the worries were basically twofold. So one thing that Tom mentioned is that there were experiments, removal experiments that happened in the Pacific Northwest and Washington, Oregon, and California.
And it’s true that removing barred owls did slow the decline of the Northern spotted owl. But on average, there was still a decline occurring. So they weren’t exactly stabilized, and they certainly didn’t increase. So one worry is that this very well may not work. And so you’re killing an enormous number of barred owls for something that really isn’t a guarantee.
So that’s the sort of first, where the second worry is that killing half a million barred owls over the next 30 years. The way the management plan set up is that this would happen over 30 years, but there’s no reason to think that we’ll stop killing barred owls then, it seems like we will have to kill them in perpetuity.
60 years, we’ll be at, say, a million barred owls killed at 90 years. … I think we have to ask is conservationists, do we want to be committed to endlessly killing barred owls?
CHAKRABARTI: This is how you put it in the Times piece, you say, you and your co-authors say, constant killing to keep ecosystems from changing in an already volatile world is a dystopian rearguard conservation strategy.
To me, that drives at the central question here, which is, what exactly are we trying to save? Yes, the spotted owl as a species, right? Extinction is bad whenever it happens. But it seems like it’s more than that. What’s being, trying to save here is an image of what the old growth forests of the Pacific Northwest should look like, should be like.
Who should be living there? But is that image or that ideal somewhat limited? Because it’s our ideal as human beings and it’s informed especially by human habitation. Let’s say colonial and westward expansion habitation that only dates back to the mid nineteenth century or so.
ODENBAUGH: That’s right.
I think this is sometimes called the baseline problem. If you want to restore an ecosystem, say, to some prior state, the question is what sort of, what prior state? And in this instance, we’re trying to hold the line, keeping the northern spotted owl around. I’m a big fan of the northern spotted owl and I would hope that we can save it.
But the thought here is that it’s trying to create a kind of stasis in these old growth forests, which unfortunately, face climate change, wildfire, and that’s all against the history of fire suppression. These forests are dynamic and they’re increasingly so because of what humans have done and are doing.
And so one worry is that we’re trying to hold the line, to use the metaphor, we were putting our fingers in a dam that’s leaking. And the question is, how many fingers do we have?
CHAKRABARTI: So Tom Wheeler, I’d love to hear your response to this. Because I think this is a perpetual challenge when it comes to what exactly are we trying to conserve?
Is trying to keep those old growth forests as close as we can, even as they are changing, to what they were like before mass logging began in the middle of the 19th century. Is that a worthy goal for conservation?
WHEELER: I don’t think that’s what we conservationists are attempting to do.
I know that our western forests are going to change because of climate change because the force is outside of our control. I think here with the barred owl, the impact of the barred owl is not just to the northern spotted owl, but the whole Western Forest ecosystem, because the barred owl is not a stand in for the Northern spotted owl.
It eats more varied prey than the Northern spotted owl. This prey is both common and rare. So we are seeing new pressure is being applied to prey species in the Pacific Northwest. Basically, anything small enough to fit into the talons of a barred owl is at risk of being eaten by a barred owl. This could massively disrupt West Coast ecosystems.
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I understand the point of wanting to allow forests to evolve and to change, because that’s inevitable. That’s nature. But I think that there is a very significant cost to doing nothing here.
CHAKRABARTI: But when you say massive disruption to the forest though, are you talking about ecosystem collapse in the old growth forest?
Certainly, the forest ecosystem as a whole is more robust than that.
WHEELER: So the barred owl eats a wide variety of life from things like newts and salamanders and crayfish to small birds, as well as rodents. The northern spot owl basically just eats rodents. So if we start to eliminate this other life from the forest.
If the Northern spotted owl is gone and replaced by the barred owl, we could see not maybe ecosystem collapse, but very significant ecosystem change. Because we’re going to have new and different pressures on some of these lower trophic life animals that really influence how forests operate.
So if we’re removing the newts and salamanders, we’re going to have an impact to the understory of our forest, to the duff layer of our forest. It could have a really destabilizing effect on West Coast Forest ecosystems.
CHAKRABARTI: Jay Odenbaugh, do you want to respond to that? Because I think what Tom is pointing to here is that while the law, i.e. the Endangered Species Act, may focus on one species, let’s say, in an ecosystem, by virtue of protecting that, the entirety of the ecosystem receives that protection, not just the species. So it’s not just trying to keep the old growth forest frozen in aspic. It’s actually effective, perhaps the most effectively legal way we have to protect the forest itself, even as it changes.
ODENBAUGH: That’s a really important point. I think Tom mentioned this earlier. The Endangered Species Act basically works by, you find, say, a threatened or endangered species, or in this case, subspecies, and you protect its habitat as a way of conserving it. And our best tool that we have for protecting old growth is through the Northern Spotted Owl.
One of the things that came up in our piece was advocating for, in addition to the ESA, the Endangered Species Act, is having legislation, you can think of it as Endangered Ecosystem Act, if you like. President Joe Biden recently issued an executive order for inventorying and also managing mature and old growth forest as another tool. And so I think it’s a really important tool in our toolkit. But one worry here is if we can’t save the northern spotted owl, and I have worries that even this barred owl management strategy will, once the northern spotted owl is gone, then that tool no longer works.
That is, we can’t protect the old growth, absent the northern spotted owl under the ESA. I think we need some extra tools to in our toolkit.
CHAKRABARTI: Okay. I want to come back to that a little bit later in the show, because we’re always seeking new ideas here on how to handle really complex challenges. But, and Tom, I want to hear your thoughts on that again, a bit later.
But again, I think a lot of people may have been stuck, or their minds are really still hooked into, in a sense, the moral cost of choosing to have to cull half a million other animals who are just doing what animals do. They move as environments become either more or less habitable to them.
And now human beings are saying, we are going to choose the future of the spotted owl over the lives of the half a million barred owls. That is a morally complex and challenging situation. How do you see that?
ODENBAUGH: I think the, sort of the really, the thing that makes this morally complicated is that we have our hands on a lot of different parts of these forests and we’ve affected them.
And because we have altered them, we now have moral responsibilities towards them. For example, we removed a tremendous amount of habitat of the northern spotted owl, basically beginning its decline. We also, given the best science, have pushed the barred owl west. And in that sense, we’re culpable for facilitating its invasion out here in the Pacific Northwest as well.
In both ways, we have to use a kind of ugly metaphor, blood on our hands, right? Every time that we intervene in these systems, we’re adding more and more responsibility for taking care of it. And I think that sort of implicates us in importantly complicated ways. One thing I want to mention about the previous point we were talking about, the trophic cascades and the effects of the barred owl on old growth.
I think the best science we have at the moment suggests that there could be things like trophic cascades or ecosystem collapse, but I think the data at this particular moment just doesn’t show that you can’t go from the fact that these forests will change, to necessarily they’re going to collapse.
And so I think we just need more studies to see what the effects will be right.
CHAKRABARTI: Especially because the word collapse is extreme, right? The trees, the protected trees will still be there. The waterways will still be there. Other species will still be there. I think I’m personally feeling challenged to what to envision what collapse might look like in the old growth forest.
And that keeps making me come back to this question about the long-term dynamism of these ecosystems, that even before human beings were ever even on the North American continent in any way, shape or form, perhaps the ecosystem of the old growth forest at that time was just unrecognizable in comparison to what we believe is a more familiar model for it now.
ODENBAUGH: One thing that I think is remarkable, if you look at pictures of, say the Cascade Mountains here in the Pacific Northwest, say before wildfire suppression, the forest looks very different. They look much more patchy, et cetera. When you look at these for us now, they’re incredibly dense.
You might even say weedy, right? Because fire has not been allowed to move through them. And we look at these forests and think they’re absolutely beautiful and they are, but the human sort of imprint on these landscapes is there. In every way, shape, and form, the human imprint is there.
Part III
CHAKRABARTI: Today we’re talking about the new U.S. Fish and Wildlife Plan that calls for the lethal removal or the culling of half a million barred owls in order to save the northern spotted owl from extinction in the Pacific Northwest.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s decision to authorize the mass culling came only after a decade of detailed research on the impacts of Barred Owl removal. Mark Higley is the wildlife biologist at Northern California’s Hoopa Valley Reservation – the largest tribal reservation in California.
MARK HIGLEY: I think barred owls are a magnificent species. I really like barred owls and I would like to travel to a place where I don’t necessarily need to shoot them. Um, it would be great.
CHAKRABARTI: His first year working for the reservation, in 1991, straight out of grad school, Higley counted 27 pairs of Northern Spotted Owls – and just one pair of Barred Owls.
HIGLEY: That pair of barred owls was fairly unique in Humboldt County at that time, and a lot of people, uh, local bird watchers would come up to Hoopa and drive up Big Hill Road and listen for barred owls to get Barred Owl on their, uh, Humboldt County species list. Barred owls at that point were kind of a novelty. I do remember some people saying, um, basically we should shoot them now. And I kind of wish that that would have been the approach back then given how many more Barred owls we’re going to have to shoot in order to protect spotted owls now that Barred owls have saturated the landscape.
CHAKRABARTI: Hoopa Valley Reservation is 12 by 12 miles, approximately 90,000 acres and during the early 2000s as the population of Barred Owls was exploding in Washington, Oregon, and into California, the Hoopa Valley Reservation became one of the first experimental Barred Owl removal experiment sites for the US Fish and Wildlife Service. In 2013, Higley began removing Barred Owls and he’s been doing it ever since.
HIGLEY: You know, I’ll go home after I work today, feed my kid, and then I’ll turn around and come back and go out for barred owls tonight. I drive out there, um, just as it’s getting dark, start to play my broadcast calls of barred owls. [BARRED OWL SOUND]
They’re vigorously defend their territories against all other barred owls and spotted owls, and so they’re relatively easy to call into shotgun range. And then once they are, you identify them as barred owls. I use binoculars, you know, a flashlight, and of course vocalizations, and look for a clean shot so that once you pull the trigger, the bird’s going to fall dead. And that’s essentially it. And sometimes they come in as a pair. I generally take the male first because they tend to be more shy than the females.
Once the female is removed, the male will often stay back and not come into range. So that’s basically the process. Locate them, call them in, shoot them.
CHAKRABARTI: Higley says on average about 73 Barred Owls a year are culled from the Hoopa Valley Reservation. Since 2013, he personally has killed 693 barred owls.
HIGLEY: Doing this work, to me, it’s a bit soul crushing at times. I was never, I never in a million years thought that I would be shooting a raptor of any kind ever. But the conservation benefit to spotted owls, I believe, is warrants actually culling barred owl populations. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be able to do it at all.
CHAKRABARTI: Higley says recently the moral cost of killing so many owls is taking its toll on him. And, at times, it also feels futile. The Barred owls always come back into the reservation from the surrounding areas where they aren’t being culled. But with the new U.S. Fish and Wildlife plan, he has renewed hope for the future.
HIGLEY: I’d like to be around to see spotted owls come back to the point where they’re fairly stable. I believe it’s possible. You know, for the last decade and a half, they’ve been, the populations have been declining rapidly. And I do believe that at least in parts of the range, there’s still enough spotted owls in the landscape that the population will rebound and fill in the spaces made available.
CHAKRABARTI: That was Mark Higley – wildlife biologist at the Hoopa Valley Reservation in Northern California.
In the late 90s, he said, at Hoopa Valley, they had 35 pairs of northern spotted owls. By 2014, they were down to 12, and as of last count, it’s 20 pairs of spotted owls. Now, Tom Wheeler and Jay Odenbaugh, as we’ve discussed, and even as we heard there in Mark Higley’s example for what’s happening in Hoopa Valley, the barred owls do come back.
I guess their superiority in competing with the spotted owls makes it easy for them to come back after they’ve been, even their numbers have been reduced. And so Tom, it makes me wonder, as Jay pointed out earlier, does that mean that we are going to be in a forever cycle of culling of barred owls in order to protect the spotted owl, for as long as another critical piece is not in place, and that is simply more habitat for these animals, Tom.
WHEELER: So there’s no amount of habitat that could exist that would allow barred owls and northern spotted owls to coexist without barred owl management. That just means the extinction of the northern spotted owl. There are ways that we can reduce the number of barred owls killed. If we begin an aggressive barred owl removal program now, then we can clear out areas of barred owls and then it’s cleanup work after that.
There might be some that return or migrate into the area, but it largely means that we will just have to kill fewer barred owls. There are also areas that do not have substantial numbers of barred owls that we can clear out and then set up bright lines and prevent the expansion of the barred owl’s range.
So this is not only for the Northern Spotted Owl, this is also for the California Spotted Owl. The barred owl is not as significantly in California spotted owl territory, yet which is largely in the Sierra mountains of California. So if we have an area where we ensure that barred owls do not cross, that’s going to be a very significant benefit for a cousin of the Northern spotted owl.
The California spotted owl.
CHAKRABARTI: So Tom, but if conservation requires an endless amount of killing of another species, is it conservation at all? At what point in time are we as humans basically fighting the inevitable? And it’s inevitable because of all the ecological changes that we as a species have caused that have brought us to this moment with the spotted and the barred owl.
WHEELER: We are also buying time through doing barred owl removal. In 2024, it appears that removing barred owls via shotgun is the necessary way to preserve the Northern spotted owl. It’s possible that in 2050 we might have developed, some new barred owl birth control or some sort of other creative method of managing this problem in a less dramatic way.
But if we don’t remove barred Owls today, the Northern Spot Owl will likely be extinct in the wild by 2050.
CHAKRABARTI: So buying time critical there. And I do definitely acknowledge that other perhaps forms of management or conservation can emerge in that time. But Jay Odenbaugh, you and your colleagues write in this New York Times opinion piece that restoring or preserving those historical baselines for old growth forests is only going to get more difficult, and in some cases, it will be impossible, and this might be one of them.
And you say that current policy offers us a choice between a forest out of time, engineered to look more like the forests of old, but only by a hail of bullets or nothing at all. So what’s the alternative then?
When you mentioned, maybe we need something like an endangered Ecosystems Act. What did you mean?
What would that look like?
ODENBAUGH: So the sort of the idea here would be to continue with the Endangered Species Act. So we wouldn’t want challenge it. It’s an incredibly powerful and important piece of legislation. Rather, we would want to add something to it. So part of what makes these old growth forests so crucial is that they sequester or store enormous amounts of carbon.
If all of the old growth forests on the planet disappeared in a day we would blow our carbon budget. In other words, it would make our fight against climate change that much harder. So what we would like to see is legislation and policy targets ecosystem functioning, right? Things like carbon sequestration as a target of conservation.
So not just the individual species or subspecies in the system, but the system as a whole. And old growth is remarkable for its biodiversity, but also its role in storing carbon.
CHAKRABARTI: Do we already have tools like that, like the creation of national monuments, things like that? So what we have on the books now is the Endangered Species Act.
This is why the Northern Spotted Owl is so important as a subspecies. I should say there are three subspecies in the species of Spotted Owl. There’s the California Spotted Owl, there’s the Northern Spotted Owl and the Mexican Spotted Owl. The sort of Barred Owl Management Plan had a variety of possible proposals or alternatives that were being considered.
And even if we lost the northern spotted owl, the spotted owl species will not yet be extinct. It would be a bad thing to lose the northern spot. Obviously. But so we don’t have currently existing legislation. As I said earlier, President Biden issued an executive order, which is targeting the protection of mature and old growth forest.
And we think that’s a really wonderful tool. The problem is executive orders can come and go depending on the president who’s been elected. And so it’s a more fragile tool.
CHAKRABARTI: Tom Wheeler though, even if say we did have ideally some sort of Endangered ecosystems act as Jay has been describing, it seems that with the spotted and barred owl situation, to put it bluntly, would we still find ourselves in the position of having to choose as human beings, winners and losers because of, as you’re saying, the threat to the spotted owl from the barred owl?
WHEELER: So first, I just want to point out something that is the political reality, which is an Endangered Species Act would not be able to pass this Congress today. So it is from 1973. So the idea of protecting endangered habitats is one that I share and would love to see that pass. I don’t think that it’s a political reality, so I don’t want to pin too many hopes on some sort of future legislation that I don’t believe is possible.
And also, I do think that even in this sort of future, if we are talking about preserving endangered habitats, we’re probably also talking about removing barred owls because barred owls are impacting ecosystems, not just Northern spotted owls.
CHAKRABARTI: So there’s something that you told our producer Hilary McQuilkin before the show, Tom, that I wanted to follow up on because I think it’s really important to understand.
You told her that there’s a question of moral consistency here, right? Because we, meaning human beings and the way we were managing old growth forests and logging them and then having to suddenly put the brakes on that, caused all those mills or it was one of the causes of all those mills shuddering in the Northwest in the 90s.
So that means that we have to be able to be willing to do other hard things to protect the spotted owl, because the cost has already been so great. And then you said that you reject the idea that we have to let nature be nature, because we have that moral obligation to protect the spotted owl. But, how can we stop nature from being nature?
WHEELER: I think that this idea that we are disconnected from nature is a false premise. We are part of nature. Even in our discussion earlier in this show about Euro Canadian management of the Great Plains that resulted in the range expansion of the Barred Owl, the Great Plains were maintained in part because of native burning.
WHEELER: So our Western forests have also had human intervention in them prior to Euro American colonization. I think that here when we just have a tally sheet of pros and cons, to me the pros of barred owl removal frankly just outweigh the cons of it.
CHAKRABARTI: And ultimately, can you just take a second and then I want to give Jay Odenbaugh the last question here.
As I said earlier, I grew up in Oregon and love those forests for everything that they provide the people and obviously the environment of the Pacific Northwest. When you walk through this forest, Tom, how do you feel?
WHEELER: One of the things about the Northern Spotted Owl is that it gives me greater joy when I’m in the forest.
The knowledge that the Northern Spotted Owl could exist, could be watching me. It’s not an overreaction to say that my first time seeing a northern spot owl was a life changing experience. It is such a fascinating, unique creature. I’ve dedicated my life to protecting the Ecosystems in protecting wildlife.
I went to law school to do this sort of work. I never would have anticipated I would be advocating for the killing of wildlife. But here I am. I think that my enjoyment to the forest themselves, will be slightly dimmer. If we don’t do something about barred owls. Jay Odenbaugh, I apologize because we’ve just run out of time to give you a last thought here, but I appreciate so much you bringing to the table really the long term sort of moral tensions that we have in terms of our current system of managing ecosystems.
This program aired on September 5, 2024.
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Exposing the Big Game 