Northern California—The next casualty in the owl wars appeared in the pickup truck’s headlights like a ghost, gliding across the dirt road in California’s Marble Mountains and disappearing into the forest. Danny Hofstadter stepped on the brakes, rolled down the window, and listened.
The eerie call of a barred owl emerged from the night—a sound people have likened to a throaty “Who cooks for you? Who cooks for you all?”
The University of Wisconsin–Madison (UW) wildlife ecologist quickly swung into action. He placed a small speaker on the hood of the truck and set it to play the same “Who cooks for you?” call on repeat, an irresistible provocation for the aggressively territorial owl species. Then, he pulled his 12-gauge Beretta shotgun from the truck’s cab and snapped a single birdshot-packed cartridge into place.
Hofstadter waited for the owl to hoot back at the calls. For several minutes the only sounds came from the speaker and Charley, a 3-year-old German shorthaired pointer who was whining excitedly at the base of a Douglas fir. The ghost had gone quiet.
On a hunch, Hofstadter shined a flashlight high into Charley’s tree. Ten meters above, a brown-and-white figure the size of a rugby ball gazed down impassively. Hofstadter paused to make sure it was the right species, then raised the gun and fired. The owl plummeted from the branch. Charley rushed into the underbrush, emerging with the lifeless bird in his jaws.
“That owl flew right in front of the wrong car,” Hofstadter remarked a few minutes later.
It’s a testament to the topsy-turvy world of owls in the Pacific Northwest that a scientist and avowed owl lover finds himself toting a gun and sounding like Clint Eastwood in a Dirty Harry movie. At the center of this turmoil are two owls. One, the threatened northern spotted owl (Strix occidentalis caurina), is revered by environmentalists for its role in halting logging of most of the Northwest’s remaining old-growth forests during the 1990s. The other is a more recent arrival.
Once restricted to eastern North America, barred owls (Strix varia) swept across Canada in the 1900s and began to push south into Washington state, Oregon, and—most recently—California. Wherever it appears, northern spotted owls vanish, marking the invader as a major threat to the federally protected subspecies.
Scientists and wildlife managers have resorted to a bloody last-ditch gambit to rescue the bird. Over the past 17 years, they have tested whether they can shoot enough barred owls to enable spotted owls to come back, or at least hang on. The U.S. government wants to scale up the effort: In 2024, a plan issued by the Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) proposed killing enough barred owls to create a series of spotted owl refuges from the Canadian border to California’s northern coast. But so far, such work has been confined to small-scale experiments.
Hofstadter is helping lead the most ambitious and largest experiment to date, one researchers hope will answer critical questions about how many barred owls will need to die, how many people it will take, and how much it will cost to give northern spotted owls a fighting chance in at least part of their original territory. Across some 13,000 square kilometers of forest, stretching from the suburbs of San Francisco north to the Oregon border, he and a handful of other scientists and technicians are spending night after sleepless night patrolling backcountry roads and luring barred owls to their deaths. In the past 5 years they have killed more than 2000.
Some conservation groups have reluctantly endorsed the effort as a necessary evil to save an imperiled bird. But others, including animal welfare groups and some bird conservation organizations, have argued it’s a bloody and ethically dubious fool’s errand. “It’s just going to be a killing treadmill,” says Wayne Pacelle, president and founder of the Washington, D.C., animal welfare group Animal Wellness Action.
One thing that is clear is what will happen if humans do nothing. “Barred owls are driving spotted owls to extinction,” says David Wiens, a U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) wildlife biologist who has led studies of interactions between the species. “If there’s not management intervention, then that’s what’s going to happen.”
The northern spotted owl was saved once before. The bird dwells almost exclusively in old forests filled with big conifers in the Pacific Northwest, and in past decades it was barreling toward extinction because of logging. But in 1990, the owl was listed as threatened under the U.S. Endangered Species Act (ESA), and courts soon halted most old-growth logging on federal lands. In response, then-President Bill Clinton’s administration adopted the 1994 Northwest Forest Plan, which put large swaths of spotted owl habitat off-limits to logging.
Those actions dealt with what many assumed to be the biggest threat to the owls: habitat loss. But around that time scientists were beginning to sound the alarm about a new problem. “Barred owls were just coming out of the woodwork,” says Eric Forsman, a U.S. Forest Service (USFS) wildlife biologist who led much of the foundational research about northern spotted owls.
Forsman recalls seeing his first barred owl in 1974, while he was looking for spotted owls in Oregon State University’s H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest. “I thought, ‘Oh man, they shouldn’t be here. This is not good,’” he recalls.
At first glance, it’s hard to see much difference between the two species. They’re about the same size. They share the same earth-brown and cream coloration. True to their names, the spotted owl has a checkerboard of dark and light splotches on its breast, whereas the barred has stripes. The two are closely related enough that they can mate and produce fertile offspring, so-called sparred owls.
But a closer look reveals why the barred owl is such a big threat. It typically outweighs the spotted owl by 20%. The female often lays two to three eggs every year, compared with one to two every other year for the spotted owl. It’s less picky about its diet and habitat, feasting on salamanders, lizards, insects, and birds in addition to the flying squirrels, red tree voles, and dusky-footed wood rats that spotted owls eat. It nests in suburban backyards as well as old-growth forests.
Less measurable, but no less important, the barred owl has a notable aggressive streak. As barred owls take over, they drive spotted owls away from their nesting sites, Forsman explains. “You get this population of old birds with no young coming on.”
| Northern spotted owl (Strix occidentalis caurina) | Barred owl (Strix varia) | |
|---|---|---|
| Size | Weighs 600–700 grams, with a wingspan of 1.1–1.2 meters | Weighs 470–1050 grams, with a wingspan of 1.0–1.1 meters |
| Food | Specialists: wood rats, flying squirrels, voles, and mice | Generalists: rodents, birds, insects, worms, fish, reptiles, crayfish, amphibians, etc. |
| Breeding | 1–2 young, not every year | 2–3 young, yearly |
| Habitat | Large area of trees 100 years old or more needed for nesting and hunting (13–17 square kilometers) | Small area needed for nesting and hunting (3–6 square kilometers) |
| Behavior | Less aggressive | Aggressive and territorial |
It’s not known exactly how barred owls jumped coasts. A leading theory is that it began in the 20th century after European settlers in southern Canada planted trees on farms and suppressed Indigenous fire-setting practices, creating a tree bridge across the prairie. Another idea is that their range started to shift because global warming made the boreal forest more hospitable. Whatever the reason, the first barred owl was spotted in British Columbia in 1959. From there, a feathery flood began to inexorably move south.
So few spotted owls have survived the onslaught that British Columbia has resorted to rearing nearly all its remaining known birds in captivity, planning to release their offspring in a forest reserve where officials recently shot several dozen barred owls. Washington state, where the number of spotted owls has shrunk to fewer than 150 mated pairs, is considering following suit. Oregon is only slightly better off, with estimates of fewer than 900 pairs.
Using microphones deployed in forests throughout the region, scientists have concluded the bird is currently all but doomed in Washington’s sprawling Cascade Mountains and Oregon’s Coast Range. “What we’re finding is that spotted owls are functionally extinct from huge parts of their native geographic range,” says Damon Lesmeister, a USFS wildlife biologist leading the work.
By contrast, today there are an estimated 100,000 barred owls in the western United States.
In the minds of many scientists, shooting has emerged as the only viable solution. The idea began to take shape in the early 2000s, as hopes that spotted owls could coexist with the new arrivals were waning. In 2009, Lowell Diller, a wildlife biologist with the Seattle-based Green Diamond Resource timber company, began a 5-year experiment shooting barred owls on company land in coastal Northern California. In forests where the researchers killed barred owls, spotted owl numbers stabilized.
The results prompted FWS and USGS to oversee larger experiments. In patches of forest in Washington, Oregon, and California, scientists shot 2485 barred owls in tests that ended in 2019. The results, published in 2021 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, mirrored the earlier experiment: Spotted owl numbers stabilized where shooting happened, whereas they fell by 12% per year in the untouched areas.
Following the study, FWS embraced shooting barred owls as a linchpin of its work to recover the northern spotted owl under the ESA. In 2024, it unveiled a plan that called for using specially trained teams of owl shooters to create spotted owl refuges in all three states. The plan is voluntary for landowners and public land managers, and the shooting has been limited. But if done at the maximum scale, gunfire would echo across more than 50,000 square kilometers and claim 450,000 barred owls over 30 years. The killing would continue indefinitely. “Right now, that’s the only tool we have,” says Kessina Lee, state supervisor of FWS’s Oregon office.
Joe Liebezeit, a wildlife biologist and statewide conservation director for the Bird Alliance of Oregon, which has expressed support for the effort, says, “We need to do everything we can to protect the northern spotted owl.”
Forsman sounds a more resigned note. Because there are so few spotted owls and so many barred owls in much of Oregon and Washington, “up here, at least, I think you could shoot barred owls forever and it’s not going to make a difference,” says the biologist, who lives in Corvallis, Oregon.
As for the current campaign in California: “I wish them luck,” he says.
Hofstadter seems an unlikely marksman: a onetime vegetarian whose hobbies include wildlife photography and bonsai. His grandfather, Robert Hofstadter, was a celebrated midcentury physicist; his father, Douglas Hofstadter, is a cognitive scientist and author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning book Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid. Danny Hofstadter graduated from Indiana University Bloomington with plans to be a wildlife veterinarian, before deciding he preferred working outdoors with populations of wild animals.
He took a job counting raptors in northern Arizona. That’s where his fascination with spotted owls was kindled. When he first saw a Mexican spotted owl (Strix occidentalis lucida) silently glide through a grove of ancient Douglas firs in the mountains near Flagstaff, he was “totally smitten,” he recalls.
Eventually, that passion brought him into contact with Zach Peery, a UW wildlife ecologist. Peery had been studying another spotted owl subspecies, the California spotted owl (Strix occidentalis occidentalis), which lives primarily in forests of the Sierra Nevada mountains, south and east of the northern spotted owl’s range. Barred owls had started to show up in the territory of this bird as well, which is currently being considered by FWS for endangered species protection. (Federal law allows for subspecies to be listed.)
Peery recruited Hofstadter, then 30 years old, to pursue an ambitious master’s project: Try to shoot every barred owl in the Sierras, and see what happens. Hofstadter had never picked up a gun. He spent weeks shooting targets in the woods before heading to the mountains.
From 2018 to ’20, he and three others killed 76 birds. The number of sites with barred owl detections shrank from 45 to seven. At the same time, California spotted owls showed signs of filling the new voids, returning to 15 of 27 former territories after the barred owls were shot, Hofstadter reported in a 2022 paper in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment.
“It’s been a difficult thing,” Hofstadter says of the killings. But for him, it comes down to a relatively simple calculus. Refusing to shoot barred owls means accepting that the region’s spotted owls are doomed. When viewed in that light, the results in the Sierras were “a resounding success,” he says.
Today, UW staff continue to monitor the area with a network of 1500 audio recorders. If software detects a barred owl, someone with a shotgun returns the following year to see whether the owl is still there. In 2025, they killed 16 birds.
Meanwhile, Peery, Hofstadter, and their team have turned their attention to the forests of Northern California—the home of northern spotted owls. The situation there is far more daunting. An estimated 11,000 barred owls already occupy much of the territory, outnumbering the spotted owls by more than two to one. As the federal plan to save spotted owls slowly took shape, Peery says they decided to act. “I grew impatient and Danny grew impatient.”
With money chiefly from state cannabis taxes and the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, they launched a large-scale effort that expanded across the region in 2023. Their goal was to tackle questions left unanswered by the smaller experiments: What would it really take, both in dollars and dead owls, to remove barred owls for a long time at a regional scale? Would spotted owls eventually bounce back?
Since then, Hofstadter and a group of four technicians, coupled with a handful of people from two timber companies and the Hoopa Valley and Yurok tribes, have been patrolling forests nearly the size of Connecticut. Each year they visit about 6500 patches of forest three or four times to find and kill any barred owls.
“We just decided we were going to act, not knowing what we were getting ourselves into,” Peery says.
Despite his distaste for shooting owls, Hofstadter has taken to the work. On forays that can last much of the night, he pursues his quarry with a quiet intensity that belies his easygoing, friendly demeanor, a sort of Captain Ahab in Carhartts. “This is what I want to be doing,” says Hofstadter, who lives in Arcata, California, and now works for UW, managing the barred owl removal operation. “I want to be straddling the research and boots on the ground.”
That’s how he came to be inspecting the carcasses of two barred owls lying on the truck’s tailgate that night in the Klamath National Forest. One was the female that flew in front of his windshield. The other, a male, had come within range a few minutes later at the same spot. He inspected the coloring on their flight feathers to determine their ages, weighed them, and measured the span of their feet, each toe ending in a needle-sharp curved talon. There was remarkably little blood, given their violent demise.
After noticing an unusual smell, he sniffed one of the birds and reared back. “That one definitely ate a skunk,” he said.
Hofstadter stuffed each one in a plastic bag. Tissue samples from the birds would eventually go to a UW lab for further study. Then he called Charley back to the car and checked a map on his phone to figure out where to go next.
The work is beginning to have an effect. The killings of nearly 3400 barred owls in Northern California, mostly between the years 2020 and ’24, appear to have stabilized spotted owl numbers, scientists reported in 2025.
The work is also telling researchers more about how the burgeoning barred owl populations are reshaping ecosystems. Analysis of their stomach contents revealed DNA from 162 species, according to a bioRxiv preprint posted in 2025. Among them were 29 species with at-risk populations, such as the northern leopard frog, the western gray squirrel, and the California mountain kingsnake. “If it’s there and it moves, they will consume it,” says Emily Fountain, a UW geneticist leading the work.
Other research has found that two smaller owl species—the western screech owl and northern saw-whet owl—both increased in numbers in places where barred owls were removed. “It’s not just spotted owls they are having an effect on,” Peery says of the barred owls.
Meanwhile, the hunters are honing their tactics. Hofstadter strategizes about where to concentrate their efforts, inspecting maps, records of past owl shootings, and his own experience of killing more than 400 of the birds.
- Danny Hofstadter
- University of Wisconsin–Madison
They are also trying to use technology to gain the upper hand. University researchers are testing satellite-connected audio recorders that send real-time alerts if a barred owl hoots nearby, enabling a shooter to respond right away. The military metaphors are unavoidable. Hofstadter at one point referred to the team of four he supervises as “my little army.”
The federal plan calls for shooting barred owls throughout much of the Northwest. But even some proponents of the effort say Hofstadter is right to focus on California, where spotted owls still number in the thousands. A new computer model being developed by UW and federal scientists suggests Washington and much of Oregon aren’t the most cost-effective places to rescue spotted owls because there are too few of the birds left.
“I think it shows pretty definitively that if your goal is protecting spotted owls where they currently occur, the place to do it is California and to some degree southern Oregon,” says Brendan Hobart, a UW conservation ecologist leading the work.
Nestled along the fast-flowing Trinity River in a valley framed by forested hills, the Hoopa Valley Indian Reservation offers perhaps the best glimpse of what the future might look like if the battle against the barred owl is won in California.
There, tribal wildlife biologist Mark Higley has spent the past 13 years waging a lonely battle to save the spotted owls that dwell in the Douglas firs and oaks on this 373-square-kilometer reservation. It’s the longest continuous campaign against barred owls.
In his office, cluttered by the mementos of a decadeslong career, Higley pulled up a map speckled with more than 900 blue dots, each representing a spot where he or someone working for him had shot a barred owl. Spotted owl numbers stopped plummeting once the shooting began, rising from a low of 12 pairs of birds to about 20. That’s still well below the 35-pair high of the mid-1990s, and Higley is impatient for further signs of recovery. “It’s too fricking slow,” he remarked.
A few minutes later Higley steered his white pickup truck down a dirt road. After pulling over to park, he and Hofstadter started to clamber up a steep hillside, dodging fallen trees and poison oak. The duo was trying to find this year’s nest site for a pair of spotted owls.
After 20 minutes crashing through the underbrush, they paused and Higley let out a call, “Hoo … hoo-hoo … hooo”—mimicking a northern spotted owl. A distant reply sifted through the trees like an echo.
They gazed into the forest, looking for signs of movement. Higley suddenly spotted a small, dark-brown figure perched in a nearby tree as if it had just materialized. It stared intently at the intruders. “There we go,” he said.
Higley removed a white mouse from a plastic tube and deposited it on the branch of a fallen tree. Within seconds it was gone in a flurry of feathers and talons. Bearing its prize, the owl winged toward a towering tan oak. It landed on a thick branch some 10 meters up, meeting another owl, which grasped the mouse and flew into the forest. A pair of spotted owls was nesting there for another year.
As they headed downhill, Higley paused to consider what he would have found if he hadn’t started to shoot barred owls. “We wouldn’t have any spotted owls,” he said with certainty. “None.”
A few years ago Higley considered quitting. The seeming nonstop deluge of barred owls left him demoralized. But Hofstadter and Peery’s expanded campaign has revived his hopes. Done at a large enough scale for long enough, he thinks it could stanch the flood and create more room for spotted owls to move across the landscape, recolonizing territory like his own. But he notes that will require stable, long-term funding. Much of the work in California is now bankrolled by a patchwork of research grants. The newest and largest, $4.5 million, only lasts until 2028.
Meanwhile, Hofstadter and his crew continue their single-minded pursuit of barred owls. A week after the foray in the Klamath National Forest, he traveled to Stanford University for an annual lecture named after his grandfather. He brought along his owl-catching gear—speakers, nets, and snares—stowed in the back of his truck. On his way home, he intended to pursue barred owls in nearby Marin and San Mateo counties. Because so many people visit the parks there, he left his shotgun behind.
A barred owl had been sighted in Marin, the southernmost end of the northern spotted owl’s range, with a relatively healthy population of at least 100 pairs. A bird in San Mateo was the first known to have crossed the Golden Gate, the strait separating Marin from San Francisco. That brought it one step closer to a patch of coastal forest occupied by California spotted owls.
Hofstadter snared both birds and killed them with a handheld device that delivers a blow to the head. Two more owls down. Thousands to go.