Eric Forsman tramped across the spongy ground with one ear tipped to the tangled branches above. We were circling an isolated Douglas fir and cedar stand near Mary's Peak, the highest point in Oregon's Coast Range, scouring the trees for a puff of tobacco-hued feathers. I had come to see one of the planet's most-studied birds—the Northern spotted owl—with the man who brought the animal to the world's attention.
Forsman stopped. "You hear it?" he asked. I didn't. Above the twitter of winter wrens I caught only the plunk of a creek running through hollow logs. Then Forsman nodded at a scraggly hemlock. Twenty feet off the ground, a cantaloupe-size spotted owl stared back at us. "It's the male," he whispered.
Before I could speak, Forsman was gone. The 61-year-old U.S. Forest Service biologist zipped down one fern-slippery hill and up another. For years, he'd explained, this bird and its mate pumped out babies like fertile field mice, producing more offspring than other spotted owls in the range. Forsman wanted to reach their nest to see if this year's eggs had hatched—and survived.
Every chick counts, because spotted owls are vanishing faster than ever. Nearly 20 years after Forsman's research helped the federal government boot loggers off millions of acres to save the threatened owls, nature has thrown the birds a curveball. A bigger, meaner bird—the barred owl—now drives spotted owls from their turf. Some scientists and wildlife managers have called for arming crews with decoys, shotguns and recorded bird songs in an experimental effort to lure barred owls from the trees and kill them.
To Forsman and other biologists, the bizarre turn is not a refutation of past decisions but a sign of the volatility to come for endangered species in an increasingly erratic world. As climate chaos disrupts migration patterns, wind, weather, vegetation and river flows, unexpected conflicts will arise between species, confounding efforts to halt or slow extinctions. If the spotted owl is any guide, such conflicts could come on quickly, upend the way we save rare plants and animals, and create pressure to act before the science is clear. For spotted owls "we kind of put the blinders on and tried to only manage habitat, hoping things wouldn't get worse," Forsman said. "But over time the barred owl's influence became impossible to ignore."
When I finally hauled myself up to Forsman, yanking on roots for balance, I found him squatting on the ground looking at the curious female spotted owl. The bird, perched unblinking on a low branch not ten feet away, hooted a rising scale as if whistling through a slide flute. Her partner fluttered in and landed on a nearby branch.
Both creatures stared intently at Forsman, who absently picked at a clump of fur and rodent bones—an owl pellet regurgitated by one of the birds. Moments later the female launched herself to a tree crevice some 40 feet off the ground. Her head bobbed as she picked at her nest. Over the next hour, we looked through binoculars hoping to spy a chick.
It was here, not half a mile away, above a trickle of runoff called Greasy Creek, that Forsman saw his first spotted owl nest in 1970. He had grown up chasing great horned owls in the woods outside an old strawberry farm near Eugene, and as an undergraduate at Oregon State University he prowled the forests in search of rare breeds. One day he shimmied up a tree and poked his head inside a crack. He escaped with brutal talon marks on his cheek and one of the earliest recorded glimpses of a spotted owl nest. He also scooped up a sick chick—its eyes were crusted shut—planning to nurse it back to health and return it to its nest. When he came back, though, the adult birds had vanished, so Forsman raised the baby bird himself. It lived in a cage outside his home for 31 years.
Drawn by the romance of this obscure creature that hides in dark woods, Forsman became a spotted owl expert. He was the first to note that the birds nest primarily in the cavities of ancient trees or in the broken-limbed canopies of old-growth forests, where they feast on wood rats, red tree voles, flying squirrels and deer mice. Logging of the Pacific Northwest's conifers accelerated during the post-World War II housing boom and continued afterward. Forsman and a colleague, biologist Richard Reynolds, warned Congress and the U.S. Forest Service that shrinking forests threatened the owl's existence. They sent one of their first letters, to then-Senator Bob Packwood of Oregon, in 1973.
The owl population crash finally began in the 1980s, about the time the environmental movement was finding its footing. In an effort to save what remained of the old-growth forests the birds needed to survive, radical environmentalists pounded steel or ceramic spikes into firs, which threatened to destroy chain saws and mill blades. They donned tree costumes to attract attention to their cause and crawled into tree platforms to disrupt logging. Counter-protests erupted. In angry mill towns, café owners provocatively served "spotted owl soup" and shops sold T-shirts and bumper stickers ("Save a Logger, Eat an Owl"). There were lawsuits, and, in 1990, the Northern subspecies of spotted owl came under the Endangered Species Act (two subspecies in other parts of the country were not affected). A sweeping federal court ruling in 1991 closed much of the Northwest woods to logging. By the end of the century, timber harvest on 24 million acres of federal land had dropped 90 percent from its heyday. The spotted owl crystallized the power of the species-protection law. No threatened animal has done more to change how we use land.
Additional Sources
A Conservation Strategy for the Northern Spotted Owl: Report of the Interagency Scientific Committee To Address the Conservation of the Northern Spotted Owl, published by the USDA Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, Fish and Wildlife Service, National Park Service, 1990
Interesting how nature can throw us a curve ball. Great pictures too.
Posted by thelma w gannon on December 25,2008 | 03:26AM
The barred owls slowly and steadily came west along the southern edge of the boreal forest in Canada...just look up the observation records there over a series of decades. They have then progress south here on the West Coast. Why does this article again repeat the meme that they may have skipped across the Great Plains?
Posted by west on December 30,2008 | 01:07PM
As a forester I call for NSOs and love to find them even when it makes my timber harvests more complex. It saddens me to see barred owls displacing NSOs in forests where loggers and NSOs have coexisted for many decades. To elaborate on the connection between logging and the NSO, I would like to make the following points. NSOs may prefer old growth type forests and trees but this is unclear since the majority of NSO studies have been conducted in parks with old growth. Certainly, many spotted owls are thriving in second growth forests. Barred owls are much more dependent on old growth. Responsible, sustainable logging can and does happen in tandum with protection of spotted owls. With fire suppression, required foraging areas for NSOs, are less abundant. NSOs frequently move adjacent to openings created by logging for foraging oportunities. The timber industry has come a long way since the report you cited from 1990. It would be nice to see more balanced reporting in this prestigious publication.
Posted by Harlan Tranmer on December 31,2008 | 01:42PM
As humans, we have a duty to protect the enivironment from ourselves as we do our best to co-exist with it; however, when cases like this where a stronger, more "fit" animal comes along and causes the extinction of another animal it is simply natural for this to happen. To me, targeted hunts are ethically similar to the destruction of habits for timber. We need to protect habitats but also not interfere with the natural order of things even if that the extinction of some animals.
Posted by Zach Blake on January 9,2009 | 06:20PM
Of course they don't want to kill barred owls. The newcomer has provided more leverage in this "managed crisis" The plan is to keep the spotted owl at extinction levels (guess who's counting the owls?)to maintain control over federal forests. I've seen several spotted owls, and they were all in 2nd+ growth forests. These are wild animals with a built in ability to adapt. When are we going to realize that we can't freeze time in the moment when we thought it was best?
Posted by Nikole Jacoby on January 9,2009 | 09:10PM