I’ve seen and photographed Barred Owls only in Minnesota where I photographed this Barred Owl late one very chilly afternoon in January, at about -4°F up from negative 15 when we started our shooting that day. Barred Owls have been in the news in California lately, the subject of a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service plan to kill about 450,000 of them in California, Oregon, and Washington over the next 30 years because they have been migrating steadily west for about a hundred and twenty five years and now compete with the endangered Spotted Owls. Spotted Owl populations have already been decimated by logging and human expansion into their territories for decades but somehow because another similar species is now competing with it, last year, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service decided to implement this plan. As the Los Angeles Times so succinctly stated yesterday, the purpose of this plan is “to protect one threatened owl by killing a more common one.” Fortunately, there is a move afoot to stop this and ironically, it is a bi-partisan effort probably for different reasons but if it gets the project stopped, that’s a good thing. Cost cutting measures will likely be the reason the effort is killed, not that the plan cruelly prioritizes one species over another. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that the Barred Owl gets a reprieve, and not a temporary one, from this threat.