I could hardly believe my luck. After coming down in sheets for most of the day, the rain stopped and the clouds lifted just in time to create the landscape of my dreams. The late-September understory in Washington’s Okanagan-Wenatchee National Forest was a pixilated yellow and rust. The conifers were refreshed after the day’s soaking, raindrops still clinging to hemlock needles and wolf lichen. It was cold enough for the peaks to wear an early mantle of snow. Their crests glowed tangerine in the evening light. The kaleidoscope on display sucked me in completely. But I had other things to focus on. I pulled my eyes back to Highway 903 just in time to see the tail lights of the U.S. Geological Survey truck ahead of me turn off the pavement and head into the forest.

When I stopped on the side of the dirt road ten minutes later, Melissa Hunt was already out of her truck and setting up the equipment. “Barred owls like drainages,” Hunt said, nodding in the direction of the gully that fell away from the road a few feet from where we parked. In the fading light, she placed a speaker loaded with barred owl calls on the roof of her rig. Hunt entered the time and weather conditions on her data sheet and activated her hand-held transmitter to start the fifteen-minute cycle. The speaker began shrieking a sequence of calls designed to make nearby owls think there was an intruder in their territory. Hoots the biologists named “pair duet,” “eight note,” and “banshee” pierced the thick woods. Hunt occasionally adjusted the direction of the speaker to cover the most ground. Our job for the night was to document which of the different hexagons marked on Hunt’s GPS contained barred owls.

“We will be in areas new to me tonight,” said Hunt. “For most of this study, I was a remover, not a surveyor.”

I tried hard not to blink.

“Remover” was an accurate term for what Hunt did. But it was a euphemism. Hunt is one of the best in the business at shooting barred owls out of trees with a shotgun. The twenty-eight-year-old, slightly-built wildlife management specialist from Belmont, New York, had spent five winters tracking barred owls and systematically blasting them from the canopy with a twelve-gauge. The goal was to reduce the barred owl population enough to relieve the pressure on spotted owls. It was a divisive study generating high emotions on all sides. But Hunt loved the work. “I’m kinda sad the removal part is over,” she said.

I wanted to meet Hunt because her work prompts a difficult question hovering over a range of wildlife recoveries. How much manipulation of a system is permissible to help a species return? I assumed wildlife must survive on their own to truly count as wild. But we live in an age when many cannot. In forest environments on both sides of the Atlantic, I found owls, bears, wildcats, and vultures all highly dependent on an array of interventions. This conflicted with a strong intuition I held about the need for wildlife to live independently of us. But I was starting to wonder if the intuition was wrong. And the owl prompting Hunt to wield her shotgun was charismatic enough that it might just help change my mind.

The spotted owl is one of thirteen hundred species listed under the U.S. Endangered Species Act. Its five subspecies range from British Columbia to Central Mexico. Northern spotted owls (Strix occidentalis caurina) are chestnut-colored with a generous spackling of white spots. The medium-sized predator has a wingspan up to four feet. Spotted owls have the sharply hooked beak typical of owls and dark eyes set symmetrically on a prominent facial disk. They live mainly in coastal forests and are highly dependent on the cavities and broken tops of old-growth trees for successful nesting. They do most of their eating at night by perching on a low branch and using their sharp eyesight to detect flying squirrels, voles, and woodrats. The owl swoops silently from its vantage point and grabs the prey in its talons, a strategy known as “perch and pounce.” Northern spotted owls hate any disturbance of their forest home, something they are finding increasingly hard to avoid.

In the 1990s, the dwindling owl population was the focus of a heated debate about how to manage the northwest’s remaining old growth. Spotted owls needed the giant spruce and fir to nest. Loggers wanted the trees to prop up a struggling industry. After a testy summit attended by President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore, a new Forest Service policy reduced logging in the region by 80 percent. Logging companies packed their bags and moved to the southeast. It left a bitter taste in many mouths and turned the spotted owl into a hero or villain, depending on where on the environmental spectrum you stood.

Two decades later, despite the reduction in logging, the northern spotted owl is again in trouble. The biggest threat to their survival this time is not a logger with a chainsaw. It is a bigger, more aggressive owl from America’s East Coast that has moved into their territory. After the political battles of the 1990s, this turn of events has been a cruel blow to all involved, not least the spotted owls themselves. Biologists have wondered whether there is anything they can do about it. Hunt is at the epicenter of a highly controversial experiment in wildlife management to find out.

Whatever you thought about the experiment, Hunt had the skills for the job. Her dad taught her to shoot when she was seven. He instilled in her how to appreciate the woods as a hunter and an outdoorswoman. There was no question she was going to study wildlife in college. Hunt graduated from the State University of New York at Cobleskill with a wildlife management degree and was hired by a contractor who specialized in the control of problem animals. She was assigned four regional airports in New York and New Jersey together with a nearby city landfill. She kept gulls, deer, foxes, and woodchucks off the runways. She caught snowy owls at Buffalo-Niagara International Airport and released them a safe distance away. She used bangers and traps to help out with the landfill’s crow problem.

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“My time was filled with lasers, paintballs, and pyrotechnics,” she told me with a smidgeon of glee. She also tried using drones to scare persistent offenders away. The wildlife were smart and quickly learned when she was bluffing. If all else failed, she stepped in with “lethal techniques” to persuade the remaining animals they needed to take her seriously.

Taking her skills to the owl project was a natural next step. She was the first female remover and the youngest on the team. Snowshoeing solo in winter through the northern Washington forest is not for the faint of heart. But Hunt is no-nonsense and is not intimidated by the woods. She had killed her first bull elk from eight yards with a bow a couple of weeks before we met and spent nineteen hours packing it out of the Idaho backcountry with her boyfriend. “I like being outside,” she said with a shrug. 

The removal part of the experiment had just finished, and now the researchers were making their way through the control areas to see how many owls lived in untreated parts of the forest. For Hunt and her coworkers, this involved night after night navigating rough forest roads and trails to survey each hexagon marked on the map. She spent long evenings with only the trees and wildlife for company. Hunt had seen tons of deer and elk, a bear or two, and even a mountain beaver—a critter that resembles a marmot more than it does a beaver. One night, a cougar ran alongside her truck for several seconds before bolting back into the woods.

She knew the project was contentious. When people asked, she usually told them she worked in wildlife research. Her friends understood the need for the study. But the terms “owl-Qaeda” and “owl terrorist” had been thrown her way and not always in jest. Shooting owls was controversial. “You never know who is going to get upset,” she said.

When I asked her how she felt about the barred owls she was removing, she replied, “I like them. . . . I just don’t like them here.” She had formed an attachment to the charismatic raptor. “I have a strong appreciation for barred owls and have spent a lot of time with them. They command a lot of respect. They are no pushovers.”

One particular owl, she told me, had avoided her assiduously. “He went through three years of me removing every mate he had.” She saw him once in the first year, but after that he never came close enough to get a shot. She felt for him. But the ecologist in Hunt saw no option. Spotted owls were smaller and more timid and needed three times the home range of barred owls. The barred owls harassed them and stole the best nesting sites. On rare occasions, they killed them. The northern spotted owl population was plummeting. One owl biologist described the species as “circling the drain.” Barred owls, in stark contrast, were exploding. Hunt felt an obligation to act. “It’s a tough pill for many to swallow,” she conceded. But the alternative was to give up on spotted owls, something Hunt dismissed as the easy way out. Every time she pulled the trigger, she felt remorse. But her commitment to the spotted owl’s survival kept her going.

It was a difficult management dilemma, one that brought the human role in the survival of wild animals into focus. A vulnerable species needed a hand if it were to stand any chance of recovering from a precarious position. But the helping hand was not benign. It was wrapped around the stock of a well-oiled firearm.

I reached the lead investigator in the study, Dave Wiens, by phone in Oregon to talk through the ethics. He shared Hunt’s dedication to the cause.

“It’s nothing that’s enjoyable to anyone — going out and shooting owls. That’s for sure. But from what I have seen, they have major ecosystem impacts.” Barred owls may be cute, but they are ruinous in the wrong environment. “They are apex predators,” said Wiens, “and they are new to the system.” As formidable opportunists, Wiens told me, they had tapped into a niche that had not been fully tapped before. “They exploit aquatic prey species: amphibians, fish, snails. There are not many nocturnal predators that have exploited that particular environment. Many of these species are naive to nocturnal predation all together. And this isn’t to mention the prey species they really focus upon—like the small mammals and flying squirrels that are also important to native predators in the Pacific Northwest. They eat basically anything that moves in the forest within a particular size range.” And barred owls were booming. Really booming.

The picture Wiens was painting didn’t match my basic understanding of owls. Owls have a celebrated place in children’s stories and folklore. They sit patiently on snags and hoot in front of a full moon. They revolve their heads to see what is going on behind them, while wearing monocles and dispensing wisdom. They usually perch alone. They don’t invade old growth and certainly don’t wreak havoc on forest ecology. I had never thought of them as ruthless predators with devastating effects on native species.

The reality was something different. Barred owls had spread like a blight across the Pacific Northwest over the last half century. There were now more than 3.5 million of them across the country, making them one of the most numerous U.S. owls. Some stretches of old-growth forest were coated with a feathered blanket of barred owls.

“In the Oregon Coast Range, we see incredible densities of birds,” Wiens said. “They are so thick. No matter where you go on the Coast Range, if you are in the forest, you are going to be standing in barred owl territory.” At this density, they become a devastating aerial army. “During nesting season, they will have family groups of five or six birds per territory, and you have thousands and thousands of these territories spread across the landscape. It’s not hard to envision the impacts they must be having by clearing out the forest of prey species. It triggers in my mind a whole cascade as they deplete the resources.” Listening to Wiens turned my primitive understanding of the owl dilemma on its head. The need to manage barred owls had very little to do with the political capital invested in the spotted owl. It was because barred owls were wreaking havoc on the food chain. This proliferating species needed serious management if spotted owls were to survive.

The forests around Cle Elum where Hunt operated did not have the barred owl density of Oregon’s Coast Range. “We have to work harder for our owls,” she said with a dash of pride. After five stations without any sign, I wondered if today’s rain meant we were going to get skunked. Owls don’t fly much when it is wet. They don’t like the noise made by their damp feathers. At the sixth station, just when Hunt was getting to the crux of the story about her recent elk hunt, the recording on the speaker was suddenly interrupted by a more urgent call coming from somewhere to my left. Barred owl! Hunt switched on her powerful flashlight and flicked it around the nearby trees. We craned our necks upward. She stopped it on a snag right next to the road.

“There she is,” said Hunt.

I followed the beam to the tree and saw . . . absolutely nothing. The gray wood of the fifty-foot trunk came to an end with a couple of short stobs and what looked like a rounded husk of bark.

“Where?”

“Right in the beam. Plain as day. You can see the shine in her eyes.”

I still saw nothing. I always thought of my eyesight as decent, and the longer I looked, the more embarrassed I started to feel. Then the husk leant to one side for two seconds before moving back upright. I grabbed my binoculars and scanned them up the trunk of the tree until I reached the top. The husk had transformed into an owl, its chest feathers dappled with streaks of gray. Through the binoculars I could see a pair of black eyes glistening in the light.

“That would be a near perfect shot,” said Hunt. “Twenty meters or less. No branches blocking the way.”

It was a thrill to see the owl up close. As the recorded calls kept playing from the top of the truck, the owl leaned from one side to the other, calling back, trying to work out what was going on. She wanted to know who to challenge. If there was a pair, Hunt told me, the female almost always came in first. (Hunt muttered something about “wimpy males.”) The females were noticeably bigger than the males and, as with most raptors, bolder and more aggressive. Because owls fly so quietly, the females often deliberately smack their wings into a branch when they land — Hunt called it a limb crash — to broadcast to the intruder that trouble had arrived. More than once, a female had struck Hunt’s caller with its talons. Other surveyors reported hats knocked off their heads by angry owls protecting their territory. These owls can be ornery. There is even a case in North Carolina where some experts are convinced a barred owl caused the death of a woman found in a pool of blood with frightening skull lacerations.

The trick when planning to shoot them, Hunt told me, was to keep the owls interested until they sat on a tree long enough for her to get a good shot. This meant varying the calls on the speaker, something she could do with her hand-held transmitter. The owls moved around trying to get a better view of what was going on. There was a call known as the “goodbye hoot” that meant an owl had seen enough and was about to leave. If possible, when a pair was involved, Hunt tried to shoot the male first. The female would then swoop in close, “blind with rage,” as Hunt put it, offering her a chance to get the pair. If she shot the female first, the male tended to keep its distance. I took Hunt’s word for it. She told me she had removed over 350 owls in the course of her work.

Three stations later, the dynamic played out exactly as Hunt had described. With the caller shrieking on top of the truck, a pair of owls came in to investigate the potential intruder, with the female leading the way. The female’s calling was noticeably more aggressive. She kept moving from tree to tree in the glade where we stood. Her calls became louder and more urgent until she sounded like an enraged chimpanzee. The male, smaller and with a more muffled voice, followed behind at a distance. As the calls continued, the female became increasingly incensed. But even after ten minutes, neither owl had come very close. Removing owls was not an easy business.

Weeks after returning home, I still wondered about the ethics of shooting something as charismatic as an owl. It seemed like an extreme form of wildlife management. The previous summer at a Forest Service research station in Oregon’s Willamette National Forest, I had been on a guided walk with a veteran of eight years of fieldwork with northern spotted owls. Tim Fox had explained how he located spotted owl nesting sites. He spent hours stumbling across damp logs with a bucket full of white mice in his hand. The mice were the key to getting the owls to reveal their nests.

Fox had taught himself a pitch-perfect spotted owl call, which he sounded out into the forest as he walked through suspected nesting territory. If he heard an owl, he would hurry in the direction of the call. Spotted owls are hard to find, but when you do, they are not shy. Fox would often arrive to find an owl looking curiously at him from a nearby branch only ten or fifteen feet away.

The next part of the game was to set a mouse on the forest floor or on top of a log. The spotted owl, always looking for easy prey, would swoop down and grab the mouse in its talons before flying back in the direction of its nest. Fox now needed the nimbleness of a cat. He hurried through the undergrowth, keeping his eyes on the owl as it flew high into the canopy and disappeared into a hole or a crack in a giant Douglas fir or cedar. Fox would mark the spot on his GPS as he caught his breath. Sometimes, he would put another mouse at the foot of the nest tree just to be sure he had the right one. The spotted owl would step out of its nest and drop vertically, feet first, down the front of a 120-foot tree, plunging like a stone. As it neared the ground, it would puff out a few feathers to slow its descent, before landing right on top of the mouse. The owl wasn’t flying. It was parachuting.

Fox had given several years of his life to the spotted owl. He clearly loved them. So when we asked him whether he agreed with killing barred owls to save the spotteds, it was a surprise to hear him say no. It was too high a level of intervention, he said. He thought it unlikely to work. And he wasn’t too keen on the idea of killing a bird for doing what it was hardwired to do. Barred owls were simply exploiting a new niche. Despite all his work for spotted owls, Fox was ready to accept their fate at the hands of the barred owl.

A former employee at Montana’s Owl Research Institute I spoke with was also dubious about lethal management. “I don’t necessarily buy the argument that barred owls are not supposed to be there,” he said. “I certainly get the sentiment to aid the recovery of the spotted owl, but I tend to err on letting things play out more naturally than that. It doesn’t seem that removing one species to save another is an effective long-term solution.” Barred owls and spotted owls, he pointed out, are also closely related. When the first few barred owls arrive in spotted owl territory, they tend to hybridize with the spotteds to create “sparred owls.” The hybridization usually stops as more barred owls arrive in the territory. If the owls are that similar, how much does it matter if one replaces the other?

The two specialists may have had a point. In an ideal world, wild animals live wild. But here was a case where a heavy dose of management appeared necessary to keep a vulnerable species alive. The spotted owl was now, in today’s lingo, “conservation-reliant.” It was clear it needed help. But did this justify taking a shotgun to the barred owls? If so, wouldn’t this sort of management threaten to take the wild out of the wildlife?

The ethicist in me took a step back to consider how the case stacked up. There are several conditions to meet if the argument for shooting one owl to save another is to hold water. First, you needed to be extremely confident the villainous owl is responsible for the decline. The experts at the Owl Research Center had warned me owl populations are notoriously difficult to track. Owls are mostly nocturnal and often live in hard-to-reach places. Specialist owls such as northern spotted owls or snowy owls can fluctuate wildly alongside booms and busts in their prey species. Getting a good count requires consistent and accurate fieldwork over many seasons.

When I put the counting question to Dave Wiens, he acknowledged there were challenges but said the barred owl case was clear. “We are extremely confident about their growth rate as a species. The range expansion is a huge, powerful event on a continental scale, expanding from eastern North America, across the Great Plains, into western North America. We are able to monitor their populations there very well.” Ironically, many of the most convincing studies about barred owl numbers come from long-term spotted owl studies. The spotted owl is one of the most well-researched birds on the planet. Biologists looking for spotted owls always made a note when they encountered a barred owl.

“When first detected in the mid-sixties to mid-seventies in the Pacific Northwest,” Wiens said, “barred owls remained at low populations. As these long-term spotted owl studies continued, they really saw an increase in the number of barred owls. They had an exponential growth rate in the Pacific Northwest.” The bigger, feistier barred owls chased away the spotteds. The rise and fall of the two populations overlap perfectly. So the first condition about the barred owl’s responsibility for the problem seemed satisfied.

The next condition for the ethics to work is to have confidence the barred owls arrived in the Pacific Northwest as a result of human influence. If they made their own way, it would be hard to justify intervening in the natural expansion of a species. It would be nature at work. Barred owls were originally confined to the East Coast because the Great Plains formed a barrier to their westward movement. There weren’t enough trees to provide nesting sites for the several generations of owls it would take to expand across the country.

There are two candidate explanations for how barred owls overcame this barrier. The first is that natural swings in climate during the Pleistocene moved the Canadian forests far enough south for barred owls to do an end run around the Great Plains. A northern arc could have given them the trees they needed to move cross-country before dropping them back into Washington and Idaho after they passed the Rockies.

The problem with this explanation, says Wiens, is that the two species had a couple of million years to take advantage of fluctuations in forest cover throughout the Pleistocene. Despite the available windows, they didn’t do it. “We know that these two species have been separate for a long, long time,” Wiens said. “If it was climate change, barred owls would have had the opportunity to move earlier.”

The alternative explanation for their migration is that human settlement of the Great Plains created the conditions for barred owls to hopscotch their way across the country. “As the settlers were moving across Great Plains,” Wiens said, “they were planting tree belts.” They also trapped beavers along rivers and creeks. With fewer beavers, streamside willows, cottonwoods, and other vegetation grew thick enough to support an owl migration. Fire suppression also allowed trees to grow taller. The barred owls could ride the settlers’ coat tails across the Great Plains. “It is a pretty big coincidence that the migration happened at time of settlement,” said Wiens. “You look at the range expansion and when it occurred, and it is pretty telling.”

The science was not airtight, but it seemed to favor Wiens’s account. The human influence was part of what made Hunt, Wiens’s star remover, feel such remorse during her work. “All the evidence shows they are here because of human causes. It’s more our fault than theirs,” she told me. “They are just doing what they have always done. It’s too bad for the spotted owl they are so good at what they do.”

So we know barred owls are booming and causing a decline in spotted owls. It is also highly likely humans are responsible for their arrival. The remaining piece of the puzzle is whether killing them can actually solve the problem. This is what Wiens’s study was designed to find out.

In the Wenatchee-Okanagan Forest, Hunt had no doubt. “It works,” she told me without hesitation. She had seen barred owl numbers decline in her treatment areas. The evidence from her perspective was clear. Hunt’s biggest concern was that five years of hard work would be undone if a long-term management policy was not implemented soon. She knew firsthand the barred owls came back immediately if you stopped shooting them. “It will be like the removals never happened,” she said.

Wiens’s report, filed six months after the experiment finished, supports Hunt’s anecdotal account. The report concluded that shooting invasive barred owls “had a strong, positive effect on survival of native spotted owls.” They found spotted owls stabilizing where there was barred owl removal and continuing to decline in control areas where they did nothing. In the areas Hunt staked out in Washington, barred owl populations at one point in the study had declined by 60 percent. Wiens told me the next step was to brainstorm a long-term policy for barred owl management with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

“Are there any options that don’t involve killing?” I asked.

“There’s a few,” Wiens replied without enthusiasm. You could shoot birds with a drug to sterilize them. But that’s even harder than shooting them with a twelve gauge. Some people talk about oiling barred owl eggs. “But to do that, you have to find the nest, which is exceedingly difficult,” Wiens said. “Habitat management is also an option,” he continued. “We have found subtle differences in how spotted owls and barred owls use the forest. One of the more interesting things is the vertical structure. Spotted owls tend to use the canopy layer and focus on canopy prey species like flying squirrels. Barred owls are more focused on the lower layers of the forest. Barred owls don’t like areas with really dense understory. Spotted owls are more indifferent because they spend more of their time in the canopy.” If you kept the understory thick, you could give spotted owls an advantage. But Wiens was also doubtful whether this strategy was practical. It would mean an awful lot of habitat management to marginally improve the odds. And the odds weren’t good. “In reality,” Wiens said, “maybe that would work if their population sizes were more equal, but now barred owls simply swamp out spotted owls.”

Wiens had obviously thought through all the angles. Both he and Hunt had come to the same reluctant conclusion. It was ethically justified to kill one owl to save another. But it still didn’t sound like fun leading such a controversial study. I asked Wiens how it felt to be the flagbearer for this work. “Certainly, there are a lot of people who don’t hesitate to tell me what I’m doing is wrong. This includes scientists who say any kind of killing is not going to be the answer to anything,” he said. After a pause, Wiens explained how he rationalized taking up the role of assassin in an ecosystem.

“Being an ecologist and studying predator populations for most of my career, in nature things work a little differently. Predation and apex predators have a large control over what’s going on in these natural communities. What I see is humans using predation within a management context to maintain biodiversity. What we have is quite a powerful tool. The effects are immediate.” Speed is important because northern spotted owls don’t have much time. The situation is becoming desperate. The government in British Columbia has started to discuss capturing the province’s last few northern spotted owls to breed them in captivity.

So humans, I put to him, study the situation and try to make a difference by behaving as if they were part of the ecological system. “It’s not quite like predators,” Wiens conceded. “We are not eating any barred owls. But the effects we are attempting to achieve are quite similar. Humans play that role with all kinds of other species. It’s just not in our face like shooting barred owls is.” When I raised this with Hunt, she pointed out the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service conducted lethal management all the time. They have been killing cormorants for years to protect struggling salmon. Arctic foxes are culled for the benefit of a rare duck known as a Stellar’s eider. Oregon, Washington, and Idaho have all received permits to kill sea lions preying on salmon congregating beneath the region’s dams.

The obvious flaw in Wiens’s analogy is that nature’s predators don’t have shotguns and tend not to kill things they have no plans to eat. Even if the analogy was ecologically grounded, it risked making the person who offered it sound a bit cold-hearted. But you don’t have to talk to Wiens or Hunt for very long to realize this clearly isn’t the case. “I really want to emphasize that I do truly grapple with the ethical side,” Wiens said. “I think there are a lot of arguments that stepping back and putting your hands up and saying, ‘Well, we can’t do anything about this’ has ethical consequences that in my mind could be a lot bigger.” Doing nothing and watching spotted owls disappear could be at least as callous. Emma Marris, author of Wild Souls: Freedom and Flourishing in the Non-Human World and a well-known environmental science writer who wrestles with these dilemmas, has warned that doing nothing while watching a species slide to extinction leaves “blood on our hands.” This was blood that Melissa Hunt and Dave Wiens, by killing barred owls, were both trying to avoid.

The conundrum in the Okanagan-Wenatchee Forest is becoming more and more common in recovery contexts. Human activities are implicated in the decline of so many species. Given this culpability, isn’t there a strong obligation to help them make a return? And doesn’t this obligation sometimes involve interventions that seem highly unnatural? Perhaps there was a time when leaving animals alone was their best option. Perhaps that time may return. But in the interim, for some species, it might be necessary to wade into the system to help them survive.

I checked in with Melissa Hunt a few months later when her field season had wrapped up for the last time. She was getting ready to interview with Idaho Fish and Game for a more permanent job. She missed the owl project. She worried again about the time it was taking to reach a decision on how to manage the barred owls. All her hard work would be erased if nothing else was done. The barred owls were still reproducing and pouring into spotted owl territory.

I asked if she had any reflections on the ethical dilemma she had lived every night for five years now that she had a few months’ distance from it. She looked up and spoke as earnestly as I had heard her speak. “This isn’t something we are doing just because we want to,” she said. “It is something we are doing because all the data is pointing to the fact these barred owls are a huge problem.” 

Hunt knew how the project looked from the outside. “It is important for people to take their emotions out of it and look at the data,” she said, glancing down to the ground as she put her case together. I might have been overinterpreting, but I thought I detected a moment of hesitation. Science and her empathy for one of the forest’s most successful inhabitants collided for a moment. But then science won out, and she looked back up.

“If we want spotted owls, it is something that is going to have to take place. It’s not pretty . . . but one of those necessary things.”

Excerpted from “Tenacious Beasts: Wildlife Recoveries That Change How We Think About Animals“ by Christopher J. Preston. Reprinted with permission from The MIT Press. Copyright 2023.