Owl Really?

In the 1980s and '90s, the northern spotted owl was the favorite blunt instrument which the environmentalists used to beat up and severely cripple the northeastern logging industry, eventually resulting in the loss of tens of thousands of jobs. Well, the little bastards are back in the news:

An experiment to see if killing invasive barred owls will help the threatened northern spotted owl reverse its decline toward extinction is underway in the forests of Northern California.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said Friday that specially trained biologists have shot 26 barred owls in a study area on the Hoopa Valley Indian Reservation northeast of Arcata, Calif.

They plan to remove as many as 118 barred owls from the area, keeping the 55 known barred owl nesting sites open over the next five years to see if spotted owls increase, said Fish and Wildlife Service biologist Robin Bown. Contractors go to an area that barred owls are known to be in, play a digital caller to attract them, and shoot the birds with a shotgun.

Well, that's certainly one way to "remove" them. So the enviro-nazis are playing God again. Spotted owls, you see, are more important than barred owls because there are fewer of them. Until, of course, the nascent deities with shotguns kill enough barred owls, then the barred owls will become more important than the spotted owls. I suspect that at some point Laurel and Hardy and the Keystone Kops will arrive on scene.