Broadcast version by Suzanne Potter for California News Service reporting for the Pulitzer Center-Public News Service Collaboration.
Wildlife biologist David Wiens was extremely nervous the first time he shot an owl. He steadied himself in the evening darkness of an Oregon fire road, pointed his shotgun at a big barred owl perched on a stump, and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened; the gun’s safety was still on. “I had to completely recollect myself,” he recalls. “The bird just stayed there.” Wiens thought back to the months of firearm training preparing him for this moment, resettled the gun’s viewfinder on the owl, then pulled the trigger.
Wiens, who works for the US Geological Survey (USGS) in Corvallis, is head biologist of a six-year experiment culling barred owls from areas of Oregon, Washington, and Northern California. Researchers wanted to know if removing barred owls would help another species, the threatened spotted owl, survive…