Conservationists: Oh boy, here I go killing again!
To be fair that’s a very important part
Up until people start asking how you tell the endangered owls from the invasive owls while holding two dead owls
I don’t know what you think hunters are doing, just casually shooting every flying thing lol
Uh huh. Hey, how do you easily tell the difference between the two species?
Off the top of your head.
Rule one of hunting is to identify your target
At least statistically if you shot a bunch of random owls you’re most likely to have shot all invasive owls…
If there’s one thing I know about the hunting community, it’s how much they love rules
Are they an invasive species?
Unfortunately so. They are an Eastern US species that has been moving ever westward. And they are, in bird law terms, ‘huge dicks’. They’ve been systematically kicking Spotted Owls out of their traditional roosting spots for about a decade now. Spotted Owls are pushovers, so they’ve been losing breeding ground. And barred owls are not just dicks to other birds, they don’t like humans much either.
Have we considered that that’s their secret to success?
Being dicks sure worked for out well for humans.
Wait a second, humans are driving themselves extinct by emitting too much carbon
Were they introduced to the west by humans? If this migration is occurring without human intervention this is just evolution doing its thing.
It’s going to be hard to remove human influence on this equation considering almost everywhere the human influence is present.
Agreed, I think a lot of conservationism can even go too far in removing or preventing natural adaptation to the human presence. I was mostly referring to cases where humans can transport species between local ecosystems in a way that wouldn’t occur otherwise, which can result in an environmental imbalance that doesn’t always fix itself since such changes in range don’t usually occur naturally on a scale as large as with, say, the introduction of the brown marmorated stinkbug into North America from Asia.