WORKING IN L.A. / THE RANGER : Fun and Duty Mix on Angeles Forest Trail of Spotted Owl

When Ron Heinig was 11 years old, his Boy Scout troop went camping in the San Gabriel Mountains.

“It rained all night,” he recalled the other day. “I remember standing there with the water dripping off of me, thinking, ‘Boy! That’s fun!’ ”

So it’s not too surprising that now, 19 years later, he has a job requiring him to spend lots of time--often three or four days at a stretch--thrashing around in the back country of those same mountains, crawling through poison oak, sleeping on the ground and eating whatever food he can pack on his back.

“I just love it up here,” he said, gazing up at a stand of old-growth timber about 20 miles north of Saugus. “Sometimes I feel guilty because I have so much fun doing what I do.”

What he does is hoot at owls.

Once in a while, with a little luck, one of them hoots back at him.

It’s all part of a U. S. Forest Service effort to find and study the elusive spotted owl, a bird many think may soon be on the endangered species list.

“I’m the self-proclaimed spotted owl king of the Angeles National Forest,” he said. “I’m also the most eligible bachelor in the Saugus District. When you spend your nights looking for owls, you don’t meet a lot of girls.”

Heinig said that by the time he was 4, growing up in Fountain Valley, he knew that he wanted to become a forest ranger. But it took him a while to get there.

“Somehow, I started working as an accountant,” he said. “Boy, I hated that.”

Whenever he had a little time off, Heinig headed for the San Gabriels, eventually hiking most of the major trails in the forest.

“One day I called up the U. S. Forest Service to complain about the Bear Creek Trail, which was overgrown and washed out,” he said. “Well, it turned out that they needed volunteers to work on it.”

Heinig volunteered, and two years later, he became a full-fledged Forest Service employee.

He started out driving a fire engine, then became a squad boss for the Texas Canyon Hot Shots, a group of tough young men who battle forest fires at ground level, using hand tools.

“Then, in 1990, I tore up my knee playing basketball,” he said. “They put me on light duty, and that’s when I heard they needed people to do spotted owl surveys.”

The Forest Service had decided to determine where the owls were hanging out, and how many of them there were.

“The first step was aerial photographs, to determine the possible habitats,” Heinig said. “Spotted owls like the dense canopy cover of old-growth forest. You won’t find them in the brush.”

The photographs showed about 350 possible sites in the forest, which ranges for 70 miles along the mountains forming the northern border of the Los Angeles Basin. It has been up to Heinig and three other people to check these sites out.

After training, and provided with tape-recorded owl calls, the four of them--Dave Earnst, a student at Cal State Northridge, Cindy Hedlund and Mike Horn, students at Cal Poly Pomona, and Heinig--headed out into the wilderness, working both alone and in pairs.

The project has been going on for two years now. About 180 of the sites have been surveyed, and pairs or single owls have been found in 75 of them. With another 170 sites to check--most of them in the ruggedest parts of the forest--the work could take another five years.

“Most of the sites left aren’t near the roads,” Heinig said. “It’s taking a lot of hiking, most of it in places where there aren’t any trails.”

That was the case last week, when Heinig led a couple of observers up a steep, wooded canyon about 18 miles east of Gorman.

After 10 minutes or so, he stopped, cupped his hands to his mouth and coughed out a soft series of low notes that sounded something like a small dog barking.

“That’s the four-note locater call,” he said. “There was a mating couple up here the last time I checked. They’re territorial, and generally, if they hear a call, they’ll respond.”

But this time there was no answer, so Heinig continued up the gulch, pausing every two to three minutes to repeat the calls.

Still no response.

Heinig’s companions began to give each other knowing looks.

“Maybe I can spot one,” he said.

It was rapidly getting dark, and with a mottled canopy of foliage overhead, the odds seemed against it.

“Look,” Heinig said. “Up on that limb.”

There, 60 feet overhead, was the unmistakable shape of an owl.

Officials estimate that there are no more than 250 spotted owls in the entire 650,000-acre forest, and Heinig had just found one of them.

“I’m getting pretty good at it,” he admitted with a grin.

For the next half-hour, Heinig tried a variety of calls, but the owl wasn’t interested in chit-chat. It just sat up there, alternately napping and eyeing the humans below until they eventually headed back down the canyon.

Heinig said he would log the information gathered that evening, adding it to the growing body of data about the owls.

“The biologists will use the data in their studies of the owls,” Heinig said. “That’s not my job. My job is to find ‘em.”