The vast majority of wildlife biologists want to protect animals, as does Rocky Gutierrez, a University of Minnesota researcher who studies barred and spotted owls. Part of his next experiment, however, could involve killing barred owls.
Barred owls are often blamed for out-competing and possibly even preying on their threatened relatives, the spotted owls. The barred owls' movement across the Rocky Mountains and down the west coast of the United States has coincided with a dramatic drop in the numbers of native spotted owls. "There's a lot of concern that the barred owl is having a negative impact," says Gutierrez, who was the senior author of a recent white paper on the options for researching the owls' interactions (see www.sei.org/owl/Buchananetal.pdf). "But in order to understand whether or not they really are doing it, you need to do an experiment."
The experiment Gutierrez is proposing would involve removing barred owls, either ...
