Northern Spotted Owl Is Up for a Count

The late afternoon sun slants through the dense canopy of Deschutes National Forest by the time Lauri Turner reaches the spot where she last heard the harsh cry of a northern spotted owl.

Turner, a Forest Service wildlife biologist for the Sisters Ranger District, slips off her backpack and waits as her colleague, Kris Hennings, carefully deposits his carrier containing five live mice on the dirt path.

The two are here on a late spring day to make sure that Obsidian, the lone spotted owl in the area, hasn’t abandoned his home of three years. If he shows, they will feed him the mice, using the bait to buy time as they make careful observations about his behavior, feeding frequency and appearance.

Turner’s imitation hoot breaks the stillness and reverberates through the trees. “Whhhoooo-hoo-hoo-whoooo!”

Silence. A woodpecker chatters. More silence. Turner checks her watch, waits, then calls again. Fifteen minutes pass and Obsidian is nowhere in sight.

Suddenly, a vague cry drifts down the steep slope, barely audible to the human ear. Hennings grabs the mice and scrambles up the hill with Turner close behind.

The two pause for breath and are ready to dash uphill again when Obsidian swoops in on silent wings and settles on a branch just five feet away.

He blinks. His eyes are on the mice.

“It’s incredible that you can get that close to a wild animal,” Turner said in a whisper. “Not many people have gotten to see what we’ve seen.”

The northern spotted owl, a football-sized bird with brown-and-white markings and huge, inky eyes, ignited a national controversy in 1990 when it was listed as a threatened species. The decision helped lead the way to reductions of more than 80% in logging levels on national forests in the Pacific Northwest and ended the region’s timber-fueled economy.

But now, a court battle threatens the owl’s protected status and could clear the way for increased logging on 6.8 million acres of federal land in western Washington and Oregon and northwestern California, regions considered critical habitat for the northern spotted owl.

Environmentalists say the lawsuit is part of a larger attempt by the timber industry to chip away at federal protections for fish and wildlife. Timber groups say they were forced to sue to get an accurate update on spotted owl welfare using information not available 13 years ago.

“It’s a little bit of a brave new world here,” said Kristen Boyles, an attorney for the environmental law firm Earthjustice, which intervened in the lawsuit. “It could be that after all of this, we wind up with greater protections for the owl, but it could be we could wind up with none. Or things could stay the same.”

In spring 2002, the American Resource Forest Council and the Western Council of Industrial Workers sued the Fish and Wildlife Service over the agency’s management of the northern spotted owl.

The Fish and Wildlife Service recently settled the lawsuit, but only by agreeing to update critical information about spotted owls. Thirty employees will spend up to $1 million to review and synthesize scores of spotted-owl studies done since 1990 into one defining report, said Joan Jewett, agency spokeswoman. The work must be done by Dec. 31.

The settlement illustrates the importance that the diminutive owl has assumed in a political debate that pits loggers’ jobs against the survival of ancient, old-growth forests.

The timber industry contends that environmental groups have used the spotted owl as a tool to secure more protections for the old-growth forest where the owl lives and nests.

Timber groups say that data collected since 1990 will show there are many more owls than previously believed, making federal protections unnecessary and opening more prime forests to loggers.

Among the new information, they say, is evidence that spotted owls can thrive in several different habitats, including young forests.

The groups also believe that another species, the barred owl, could be contributing to the spotted owl’s demise by invading its habitat.

And they say new analysis suggests that the unlisted California spotted owl and the northern spotted owl are genetically identical.

That would increase the northern spotted owl’s population by thousands of birds overnight, said Chris West, vice president for the American Resource Forest Council.

“I think it’s widely accepted now that there’s a lot more spotted owls than were originally believed to exist, that they thrive in a lot of different habitats, not just old-growth,” West said.

But just as the timber industry accuses environmentalists of using the spotted owl to shield old-growth forests, environmentalists say logging interests timed their lawsuit to take advantage of the Bush administration’s lax environmental stance.

“We were very concerned about a pattern with this particular administration,” said Boyles, the attorney with Earthjustice, which represented 10 environmental groups in the case.

“When there have been lawsuits brought by the [timber] industry, the cases have either been settled in very favorable terms or the defense of environmental law has been tepid or nonexistent.”

Boyles also points out that the owl review could backfire on the timber industry.

Biologists who study the birds estimate that there are between 6,000 and 7,000 pairs and that the population declines by an average of 3.9% each year, said Eric Forsman, a spotted owl expert at the Forestry Sciences Laboratory in Corvallis, Ore. Some populations in Washington have dropped between 5% and 12% per year, he said.

The owls are monogamous and usually nest in pairs, fiercely guarding their territory from other birds.

Forsman acknowledged that aggressive barred owls are likely contributing to the spotted owl’s decline. But the barred owl’s presence by itself does not explain the phenomenon, he said.

“Barred owls are one factor, but habitat is another important factor. If you don’t maintain habitat, you’re not going to have spotted owls,” he said.

Forsman discounted many of the timber interests’ arguments against the spotted owl, saying those groups have misinterpreted key studies and taken others out of context by applying one case to the owl’s entire range.

“It’s a gross oversimplification to look at something in one place and conclude that things will be the same everywhere, because they’re not,” he said of claims the spotted owl thrives in young forests as well as old-growth.

Forsman said that even if the Fish and Wildlife Service decides to delist the spotted owl, it won’t change much for loggers because much of the bird’s habitat is double-protected under the Northwest Forest Plan, which spells out timber management for 24 million acres of national forest.

West, of the American Forest Resource Council, agreed that the timber industry won’t benefit from a delisting immediately, but stressed that the lawsuit’s settlement sets an important precedent.

For Turner, the Forest Service biologist, searching for the nocturnal birds has become a passion since she first saw one 13 years ago.

Obsidian, one of her favorites, gorges himself on five mice this day, and keeps Turner and Hennings on the run by flying hundreds of yards uphill before eating each one.

After checking on Obsidian, Turner’s staff visits half a dozen designated areas in prime owl habitat and hoots artificial calls to the wind as a brilliant half-moon hangs overhead.

By midnight, Turner and Hennings have finished their work. They haven’t discovered any new owls, but the excitement of the search leaves them in good spirits nonetheless.

“Unfortunately, most of the time you’re out here hooting to the trees. You’re lucky if you hear one call at one station,” Hennings said. “But when you do, it’s really something.”