Last month in Virginia, news reports told the story of a barred owl that shimmied down a chimney and perched on the family’s Christmas tree, displacing the star placed at its apex.

Around the same time, from Iowa to Massachusetts, there were a series of stories about kind-hearted people coming to the aid of barred owls struck by cars, handing off the injured creatures to wildlife veterinarians who did their best to put them back together.

Indeed, there are more than a few acts of human kindness to barred owls — one of 19 owl species native to North America. But the collective efforts of wildlife rehabilitators and other Good Samaritans all around the nation will collectively pale in comparison to intentional harm that our federal government plans to deliver to this species of owl.

In September, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service approved a plan to oversee the mass shooting of 450,000 barred owls over a 30-year time frame. It would be the largest raptor kill plan any government has ever undertaken. The cost estimate is a staggering $1.35 billion.

If the plan is not scuttled, we’ll see government-financed shooters taking aim at owls across 17 national forests and 14 units of the National Park Service, including Marin’s Point Reyes National Seashore, Muir Woods National Monument and Golden Gate National Recreation Area.

The plan is to protect threatened spotted owls from social competition with barred owls. But we cannot allow a good goal, such as saving the spotted owl, to obscure a deeply flawed and unworkable plan. When we examine the details, we see that it’s doomed to fail.

Barred owls are a range-expanding North American native species protected for a century by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, inhabiting much of the continental United States at least since the Pleistocene Epoch.

Former FWS biologist Kent Livezey wrote in one peer-reviewed paper that 111 North American bird species have experienced recent range expansion. Indeed, range expansion is a naturally occurring ecological phenomenon, a core behavioral characteristic of birds and mammals

Within the last hundred years, they’ve made it to the Pacific Northwest, with movements perhaps triggered by climate change and human-induced changes to forests and grasslands.

To demand that species “stay put” where they were mapped at an arbitrary moment in time ignores the dynamism of ecological principles, weather patterns and human impacts on the environment. Colonizing new habitats is what species do.

The “control area” is simply too big for Fish and Wildlife and its hired-gun shooters to cover, spanning 24 million acres from Marin to the Canadian border. By the government’s own estimates, shooters will slay barred owls on 28% of the land area inhabited by spotted owls. But what’s to stop barred owls on the other 72% of land areas from simply taking wing and reoccupying sites that were recently purged?

If the plan proceeds, the government will step onto a killing treadmill that produces forward motion but no progress.

Eric Forsman, the premier forest owl biologist in the nation, told the Seattle Times that “once you start” killing barred owls, “you can never stop.” His recommendation: “let the two species work it out.”

Indeed, wild animals compete against one another. They breed with one another. They angle for prey and space. It happens within families, within species and between species. That competition animates ecological systems. Is it realistic to think the federal government can micromanage these countless interactions among hundreds or thousands of species?

Our wildlife agency previously documented that the great horned owl may occasionally prey on spotted owls. Will that owl species be next on the hit list?

The whole plan is myopic, looking too narrowly at a single-species response and sidestepping the arduous and more complex task of confronting the decades-long acts of human commerce and settlement that have collectively put spotted owls in peril.

This is a case of the federal wildlife agency not seeing the forest for the trees.

Wayne Pacelle, president of Animal Wellness Action and the Center for a Humane Economy, is a two-time New York Times best-selling author.