Owl War II

The administration’s routine sabotage of science and reflexive sacrifice of fish and wildlife to the appetites of extractive industry is hardly breaking news. But getting rid of the Bushies doesn’t mean we get rid of their spotted owl plan and critical habitat designation. Barack Obama can’t just disappear them. Earthjustice’s Boyles explains why: “They’ve been promulgated as final rules with notice and public comment. They’d have to go through that process again. Undoing it would still take a while. That’s the problem with having things go forward to a final rule—an administration can’t cut corners even when it wants to do the right thing.”

Even grimmer is the situation on state and private forestland, originally far better owl habitat than the federal forests, most of which the industry didn’t want because they’re at high elevations and therefore not great for growing anything, owls included. Non-federal forests have been heavily logged, and heavy cutting continues. Remarkably, however, a few birds hang on in uncut patches.

“State regs are all but nonexistent in Oregon,” reports DellaSala. And he’s distrustful of habitat conservation plans (HCPs)—a tool by which landowners can be exempted from prosecution for “take” of a listed species if they implement habitat improvements, maintenance, and/or protections prescribed by the Fish and Wildlife Service. “Some spotted owl scientists call HCPs ‘places where owls go to die,’ ” he says. “The recovery plan recommends streamlining the HCP application process, so we could see even more HCPs.”

The inbreeding accelerating the spotted owl’s decline results from the big clearcuts that, especially, scar state and private land and which spotted owls won’t cross or will die trying. “When the state and federal plans came out,” says Carter, “miraculously, there were said to be no owls on Weyerhaeuser land, a huge chunk in southwest Washington that would be a natural migratory corridor connecting birds in the Cascades to birds in the Olympic Peninsula.”

But a quick and by no means complete survey of this supposedly owl-free habitat by the Seattle and Kittitas Audubon chapters turned up four owls in separate locations where they had previously been known to nest. The chapters sued the state and Weyerhaeuser for a “take” violation of the Endangered Species Act and in August 2007 obtained a preliminary injunction on logging. Eleven months later the litigants reached a settlement by which representatives from the timber industry, the environmental community, and the state will attempt to come up with new regulations for the management of owl habitat on private and public land. Carter will be a member of this working group.

Audubon Washington has found many loopholes in state regulations and is working to get them closed. For example, private landowners have to leave 70 acres around active nest trees. But if they can demonstrate that the owls have not been seen or heard for three years, they get to hack out everything, including the nest tree. At this writing Audubon has temporarily plugged the loophole but only with a moratorium that will have expired by the time you read this.

It’s always been easy not to see owls, and it may be getting easier not to hear them, because spotted owls appear to be increasingly reluctant to answer human hoots. Presumably, they don’t want to give away their positions to the barred owls that have recently invaded their range from the East and that kill them and usurp their prey and nesting sites. The destruction of the old-growth forests has given a tremendous advantage to barred owls, which do fine in clearcuts.

For the timber industry the barred owl has been the bluebird of happiness, allowing it to argue that spotted owls are doomed with or without old-growth protections. Barred owls do appear to be having a major impact. The main body of the invasion was from British Columbia, which may explain why spotted owls are declining in Washington almost twice as fast as in Oregon and California. But habitat destruction, of which the barred owl irruption is a function, has been even more hurtful. “It’s pretty typical for a lot of endangered species to be facing multiple threats,” says DellaSala. “And some of those threats act synergistically; you’re kicking the victim when it’s down.”

Barred owl control, touted by the timber industry as a substitute for habitat protection and now under consideration by the Fish and Wildlife Service, is a fool’s errand. First, barred owls are strikingly similar in appearance to spotted owls (and so closely related that they sometimes hybridize with them). So a federal barred owl control effort might encourage people to knock off any and all black-eyed, earless owls. Second, a control program would almost certainly fail. Eric Forsman says this: “Killing a few barred owls is one thing. Systematic, ongoing control over spotted owl range is another. Places like the Olympic Peninsula are very rugged and mountainous, with no roads. I think it would be just about impossible to control barred owls.”

Right now many private and state land managers in the Northwest fear spotted owls because, even with the option of HCPs, hosting the bird can mean red tape and at least some regulation. But if the recovery plan and critical habitat designation for federal lands stand, the burden on private land will become truly onerous. “In that case,” declares Kristen Boyles, “I think everybody with an HCP should be worried, because they won’t have the federal government doing what it’s been doing for more than 10 years. Private and state lands will have to take up a lot of the slack.”