Owl War II

Last August Audubon Washington director Nina Carter and I hired Robert Pearson of Packwood, Washington—a.k.a. “Hooter Bob”—to guide us on a spotted owl search high in the Gifford Pinchot National Forest’s Cowlitz Valley Ranger District. With us were Shawn Cantrell, director of the Seattle Audubon Society; Denis DeSilvis, a Seattle Audubon volunteer; and Paul Bannick, noted wildlife photographer and director of development for Conservation Northwest.

Hooter Bob speaks spotted owl without a trace of accent, having studied the language from cassettes played endlessly on his truck’s tape deck. He had been on a fire crew when, in 1991, the U.S. Forest Service asked him to help map spotted owl habitat. Since then he has honed survey protocols, finding new nest sites.

Because the biggest trees in the Pacific Northwest grow in the low-lying forests, most have been clearcut and planted to Douglas fir monoculture, thereby destroying the habitat of spotted owls and other wildlife. Only about 20 percent of the old growth remains, predominantly on Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management (BLM) lands in Washington, Oregon, and California, so we had to drive to a high ridge. Above us silver fir marched up the slope. To our southeast, across the wide, emerald-green valley, Mount Adams arched into the cloudless sky, its snowfields and glacier gleaming. The woods here aren’t classic old growth, but there are plenty of older trees, mostly Douglas fir, hemlock, western red cedar, slide alder, and red alder. Northern spotted owls are highly dependent on cavities for nest sites, and because they’re sensitive to temperature fluctuations, they need a high canopy so they can move to lower branches when it’s hot and to high ones when it’s cold (because warm air rises).

When spotted owls were found inhabiting much younger second growth, mostly in California, the timber industry made a lot of noise about how the old-growth forests that remain supposedly aren’t necessary to keep the species on the planet. But the preeminent spotted owl scientist, Eric Forsman of the Forest Service’s Pacific Northwest Research Station in Corvallis, Oregon, explains that the picture isn’t that simple: “As you go south you find spotted owls in some fairly young forests—40, 50, 60 years old. But those forests have lots of redwoods sprouting from stumps. In these lower elevations those redwoods grow very quickly; they might be four feet in diameter; and they develop layered, diverse structure, whereas in the north that multi-layered structure takes much longer to come back. Spotted owls need these layers, and they need big trees with nesting cavities. In Oregon and Washington trees usually don’t get these cavities before they’re 150 years old. And in the south there are other kinds of nest structures—platforms of dead sticks and debris, for instance.”

A feature common to older forests, and vital to the owl’s rodent prey base, is a healthy, diverse understory. Our party hiked through one of wild huckleberry, rattlesnake plantain, Oregon grape, coralroot, ocean spray, Indian paintbrush, thistle, fireweed, tiger lily, twin flower, strawberry, wood rose, and bear grass. For almost an hour we listened, and marveled, at Hooter Bob’s mellow whoop wu-hu hoo rendition of the male spotted owl’s vocalization. When I heard him on the slope above us I also marveled at his agility, because only a minute earlier he’d been well downslope. Then I turned and saw him climbing toward us. He’d been answered.

We clawed our way up the ridge, Carter carrying the most important tool used by owl researchers: pet-store mice. When Hooter Bob judged we were more or less under the owl, Carter reached into the cage, picked up a mouse by the tail, and deposited it on a log, where it trustingly preened. To effectively converse with northern spotted owls you need major training, but anyone, even an Audubon columnist, can talk mouse. I call in eastern owls, not by hooting but by sucking air through my front teeth and lower lip. “Squeak,” ordered Hooter Bob. Before I could start my second squeak the owl dropped soundlessly from his invisible perch, nearly making contact with my right shoulder, snatched up the mouse, and sailed off through the dark canopy. This close encounter with the most revered, most reviled, and most intensely studied raptor on earth astonished me more than it did Audubon’s editor-in-chief when I excitedly reported it to him. He informed me that spotted owls are naturally curious, responding to sounds like slamming car doors; that they may not fear humans because they rarely see them; and that, after a biologist put a mouse on it, he’d had one land on his head.

Over the next two hours we fed our owl four more mice, and he posed cooperatively for Bannick’s camera. He closely resembled the barred owls that haunt my Yankee woods—the same earless, rounded facial disk and obsidian eyes, but slightly smaller and darker, with white spots and streaks. The fact that he hadn’t swallowed or cached any of the mice was a good sign, explained Hooter Bob. It probably meant his mate was still with him; the fact that there was no vocal response from the juvenile, which Hooter Bob had been monitoring, or from the female (which usually answers the male with a co-weeep) probably meant both were well fed.

As pumped as I was, I couldn’t shake the feeling that we’d had a visitation from the ghost of old-growth past.

Who won the Spotted-owl War?” asked environmental writer William Dietrich in the Winter 2003 Forest Magazine.“Democracy.”

It sure seemed that way back then. In 1990, after a prolonged and vicious battle between the timber industry and wildlife advocates, the Seattle Audubon Society had prevailed in a federal court case that forced the Fish and Wildlife Service to list the spotted owl as threatened. Then, in 1994—after even nastier conflict—the Clinton administration released its Northwest Forest Plan, a de facto recovery plan for the spotted owl. This protected from unsustainable logging 24.5 million acres in Oregon, Washington, and California, not just for spotted owls but for salmon, steelhead trout, marbled murrelets, and at least 600 other species that depend on old-growth forests. The environmental community declared victory in the spotted owl war and turned to other crusades.