The greatest threat in the US to the northern spotted owl, an imperiled bird at the center of a decades-old environmental clash in the Pacific Northwest, is no longer the timber industry — it’s another owl.
The federal government says it plans to launch a program to kill or otherwise remove hundreds of barred owls — originally from the East Coast — that are overtaking the spotted owl’s natural range in Washington state, Oregon and northern California.
The proposal to thin barred owl populations in old-growth forests favored by their native cousins is a key component of a broader recovery plan unveiled for the spotted owl on Thursday, outlining how the US Fish and Wildlife Service intends to stem its decline.
The spotted owl was listed as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act in 1990 amid high-profile battles between the timber industry, which fought to retain the right to log centuries-old evergreen trees, and conservationists, who argued both the bird and its ecosystem were on the brink.
Years of litigation ensued. Last year, a federal judge ordered the Fish and Wildlife Service, an Interior Department agency, to produce the recovery plan announced on Thursday.
The plan calls for stepped-up conservation of spotted owl nesting sites — some in areas previously slated for potential logging — as well as controlled burns in forest lands prone to catastrophic wildfires and measures to ease habitat and food pressures imposed by barred owls.
“We regard barred owls as the biggest threat spotted owls are facing,” Robyn Thorson, Pacific Northwest director for the Fish and Wildlife Service, said during a telephone news conference.
The larger, more aggressive barred owls were first documented in Washington, Oregon and California in the 1970s. They have since made steady gains in displacing spotted owls, which are being disrupted during nesting and are losing out in the competition for mice and other food.
Estimates by government scientists suggest fewer than 5,000 spotted owls inhabit the region, with numbers declining by 3 percent a year. Biologists said a ballpark estimate for breeding pairs in 1990 was 2,000.
The impact of barred owls also promises to be a new bone of contention between logging interests and conservation groups. Timber industry representatives said the plan puts too much emphasis on land conservation and too little on encroachment by the barred owl.
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
UNDER INVESTIGATION: Members of the local Muslim community had raised concerns with the police about the boy, who officials said might have been radicalized online A 16-year-old boy armed with a knife was shot dead by police after he stabbed a man in the Australian west coast city of Perth, officials said yesterday. The incident occurred in the parking lot of a hardware store in suburban Willetton on Saturday night. The teen attacked the man and then rushed at police officers before he was shot, Western Australian Premier Roger Cook told reporters. “There are indications he had been radicalized online,” Cook told a news conference, adding that it appeared he acted alone. A man in his 30s was found at the scene with a stab wound to his back.