LETTER: Keeping score on Sanders, Welch votes on federal bills affecting owl species

December 5, 2025

To the Community:

Hats off to Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., who supported efforts to nix a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service plan to kill as many as 500,000 barred owls in California, Oregon, and Washington, in a vain attempt to reduce competition with the rarer Northern spotted owls. 

But demerits to Sen. Peter Welch, D-Vt., who voted to kill North American forest owls who have been federally protected for over a century under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act.

Barred owls are a native species and have had a modest range expansion over hundreds of years, not unlike movements of blue jays, bald eagles, red-shouldered hawks, and dozens of other birds. The whole plan is doomed to fail. 

Shooting barred owls will have only the most fleeting effect in keeping barred owls and spotted owls apart, with surrounding barred owls replacing them and filling the void in short order. 

Rather than saving Northern spotted owls, the barred owl kill plan is poised to have the opposite effect. The plan, backed by Trump's Interior Department, will have the effect of pairing “incidental take permits” for spotted owls with corresponding shooting of barred owls as a “mitigation” strategy. The plan is now being used by the Interior and Agriculture departments to vastly expand logging in spotted owl habitat.   

To fully implement the plan may cost $1.35 billion over 30 years — perhaps as much as a third of the annual Fish and Wildlife Service’s endangered species recovery budget, which exists to protect over 1,300 species. Those funds should be used to preserve native species, not to kill them.

Finally, the plan explicitly allows shooting in 14 National Park Service units, including iconic sites like Yosemite, Olympic, Mount Rainier, and Sequoia. This conduct is at odds with the wildlife protection values of the National Park Service and its management of national parks. 

Please consider dropping Sen. Welch a line, sharing your disappointment. It is up to us to hold powerful politicians accountable for how wildlife—too often used as a political bargaining chip—is treated.

Brenna Galdenzi

Stowe

Brenna Galdenzi is president of Protect Our Wildlife.