In 2024, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service approved a senseless plan to save northern spotted owls by advancing the mass slaughter of 450,000 barred owls over the next 30 years in California, Washington and Oregon, and FoA filed a lawsuit to stop it. 

FoA will be in court today, June 3, to stop the massacre. The truth is logging companies’ economic interests in old-growth forests has historically been, and still is, the northern spotted owl’s greatest threat to survival, not barred owls. 

“Wildlife should not be killed merely for adapting to a changing environment,” said Jennifer Best, director of FoA’s Wildlife Law Program. “This strategy could set a dangerous precedent for how the government manages all wildlife in the future. This issue is of critical importance now as climate change is pushing species into new environments and the Trump administration is seeking to dismantle habitat protections. ‘Management’ by shotgun is not the solution. It is cruel and fails to address underlying threats. We can and must do better.”

FoA has been in court to protect barred owls since the summer of 2013 when FWS started shooting barred owls as part of an “experiment” to save northern spotted owls.

Since then, the agency has gone from sticking its head in the sand about why northern spotted owls are threatened—humans logging the forests they call home—to full-blown insanity. They’ve even given timber companies and the Oregon Department of Forestry the green light harass and destroy the habitat of northern spotted owls, the same birds who it claims to be “protecting.”

Meanwhile the federal government denies protection for northern spotted owls, such as listing them as endangered and protecting sufficient habitat.