GRANTS PASS, Ore.—More than 20 years of logging cutbacks on national forests across the Northwest have yet to show much benefit for the northern spotted owl, leading to what many believe will be a double-barreled effort that includes locking up more acreage and purging thousands of a newcomer to the threatened species' survival.
The spotted owl, which has become an icon of the conflict between jobs and protected species, was declared threatened in 1990 after a century of logging wiped out too much of its habitat—old-growth forests. The broken-topped old trees provided nests for the birds, protection from swooping goshawks that prey on it, and the red tree voles, flying squirrels and wood rats that it eats.
And now an East Coast cousin called the barred owl has moved in, making federal biologists ponder whether they should start shot-gunning hundreds, if not thousands, of those owls to keep them from driving spotted owls to extinction even faster.
The Obama administration is due to offer its last-ditch plan for saving the spotted owl from extinction—called a recovery plan—this month. All indications point to an effort that would control barred owls and lock up even more old-growth forest habitat for the spotted owl. Specifics of those habitat protections are not likely to be resolved for more than a year.
"We are going to continue to have spotted owls into the future," said Eric Forsman, a U.S. Forest Service biologist who has
been studying the spotted owl's decline since 1972. "But it's going to be very difficult to recover the species—simply because the barred owl has thrown a huge monkey wrench into everything." The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service began work on a recovery plan, but never finished it. The Northwest Forest Plan, created to settle lawsuits that had locked up millions of acres of national forests to save the owl, took its place and created a network of old-growth habitats for species like the owl, key watersheds for salmon, and stands of timber for logging.
But many of the reserves were covered with young stands that would need decades to mature into owl habitat—and the logging sections had patches of old growth in which the owls were still living.
When the Bush administration took over in 2000, it tried to dismantle the Northwest Forest Plan, and created its own spotted owl recovery plan that depended more on killing barred owls than protecting habitat. Found to be tainted by political influence, the plan was tossed out in federal court. The Obama administration has been working on its own.
Some folks in timber country think it is time to start talking about whether saving the spotted owl is worth the jobs lost.
"What do we lose if the barred owl prevails in this struggle with nature?" said Doug Robertson, a Douglas County Commissioner who wants to sell off a swath of federal lands to get them out from under logging restrictions and to create a kind of trust fund for counties in timber country. "How are people, businesses, and communities affected if spotted owls are replaced with barred owls? I think we are ready to have that debate."
Dominick DellaSala, chief scientist for the conservation group GEOS Institute, said it was about much more than the owl.
"We are talking about an ecosystem that is unraveling from too much logging in the past," said DellaSala. "We may not have saved enough of the ecosystem."
Robert Anthony, a retired U.S. Geological Survey biologist and Oregon State University faculty, said if anything, the barred owl moving in means even more habitat is needed to save the spotted owl.
"If you've got two species competing closely, then for both of them to do well will require more habitat," he said.
Scientists believe barred owls migrated from eastern Canada across the Great Plains in the early 1900s, using forests that popped up as people controlled wildfires and planted trees around farms. The barred owls arrived in Washington state in 1973, and their numbers have taken off in the past decade.
Scientists once believed there were about 7,000 breeding pairs of spotted owls but since the barred owl moved in, there is no telling, said Forsman. Overall, the species is declining at a rate of 2.9 percent a year, but the decline is worst in Washington, where the barred owl has gained the strongest foothold.
The lack of hard evidence about how barred owls and spotted owl fit into the same forest makes saving the spotted owl a moving target, Anthony added.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is due to release with a draft environmental impact statement in April on a series of experiments killing barred owls, but no one is sure it will go forward. There was an uproar when Fish and Wildlife killed six barred owls in Northern California in 2005.
Forsman said it would be incredibly difficult and expensive to try to kill all the barred owls, and raises a host of ethical questions because no one is sure whether their migration was natural or the result of human actions.
Fish and Wildlife Service biologist Paul Henson will be releasing the final recovery plan in coming weeks. Then he and his staff will tackle the critical-habitat designation, a decision expected next year.
Henson said he thinks the recovery plan has a good chance of pulling the spotted owl out of its downward spiral, though not for the decades needed to grow back big old trees. He expects there will be room for logging to shape the young forests growing up.
Though he sees more common ground between competing interests, he does not expect the legal and political battles to end.
"It is always going to be contentious when you are dealing with such a wide group of stakeholders—the timber industry and environmental organizations—especially on the federal lands that belong to all Americans," said Henson.
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