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.
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.
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.
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.