The federal government has a plan to kill up to 450,000 barred owls across California, Oregon, Washington, and Idaho over the next 30 years, at a cost that could reach $1.35 billion in taxpayer money. Officials say the mass shooting is necessary to protect the threatened northern spotted owl, whose range overlaps with barred owls in the region's old-growth forests.

But this plan doesn't stand alone. At the same time agencies are moving forward with the owl-killing program, they're also rolling back the definition of "harm" under the Endangered Species Act and pushing to increase logging on public lands by 60%, opening up to 58 million acres of protected forest to new roadbuilding and timber cutting. Those are the very old-growth Douglas fir forests that both barred owls and spotted owls need to survive.

Killing hundreds of thousands of wild birds while stripping away the forest protections that could actually help an endangered species doesn't add up to a genuine conservation plan. It looks more like a justification for opening public forest to industrial logging, with owls caught in the middle.

Real protection for spotted owls means protecting the old-growth forests they call home, not shooting one native species to clear political cover for cutting down the trees both depend on. A coalition of more than 450 organizations is already fighting this plan in court and in Congress.

Sign this petition to demand that federal wildlife agencies abandon the barred owl kill plan and the forest-protection rollback that came with it, before hundreds of thousands of owls are killed and irreplaceable old-growth forest is lost for good.