Somebody noticed years ago that many barred owls, (Strix varia), had moved from their original range in the eastern US to the old growth forests of the west. They began to displace the native spotted owls, (Strix occidentalis), a species whose continued existence has worried people so much that their preservation has had a huge negative impact on the logging industry.
audubon.org
A northern spotted owl
eastsideaudubon.org
A barred owl
Now, instead of calk-booted loggers waving snarling chain saws around, close cousins of the spotted owls are putting their future in jeopardy. A $5 million program to use trained hunters to kill with shotguns 3600 barred owls has received a permit for the US Fish and Wildlife Service. If successful, as it is sure to be, the plan is to dispatch as many as half a million barred owls to maintain the population of its relatives.
This is another example, if any were needed, of the environmental movement's never ending attempts to maintain stasis in the natural world. Nothing should ever change on planet earth. The same animals should inhabit the same range in the same numbers in perpetuity.
In the upper Mississippi watershed there's a concerted effort to prevent the Asian carp, an invasive specie, from moving upriver and displacing the native catfish, walleyes, pike,suckers, etc. No one seems to realize that all fish in the upper Mississippi are invasive species. Just a few thousand years ago the entire area was covered with a mile high continental glacier. No fish at all lived there for millennia until climate change melted the ice and enabled fish to move in from somewhere else.
Isn't it the case that species competition for survival is a key element in Darwinian evolution?
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