Northern spotted owls are becoming functionally extinct across large swaths of the Pacific Northwest, a new study said.
The owl, which became the symbol for Oregon’s logging decline during the 1990, have reached populations “so low that they no longer play a meaningful ecological role or cannot reproduce enough to persist,” the study concluded.
Longtime spotted owl researcher Damon Lesmeister, of the U.S. Forest Service’s Pacific Northwest Research Station and Oregon State University, used advanced monitoring and artificial intelligence to assess long-term trends.
“Northern spotted owls are already functionally extinct in large swaths of their range,” Lesmeister said in a news release from OSU. “It’s not a thing that’s happening in the future, it has happened.”
Lesmeister said he hoped the study “could help shape conservation strategies and improve conservation outcomes for the northern spotted owl,” he said.
Conservation of spotted owls has been one of the most controversial efforts in United State history. Their protection under the Endangered Species Act in 1990 led to federal old-growth forest being put off limits to logging, marking a major decline in an industry that had dominated the state for a century.
Despite those efforts, “spotted owl populations have continued to decline due to continued habitat loss from logging and wildfire and competition from barred owls, whose range in recent decades has increasingly intersected with spotted owl territory,” the news release said.
The study also provided population data on barred owls, which outcompete northern spotted owls for prey and habitat — a major reason for their decline.
The study used acoustic recording devices to listen for owl calls in September 2023 and recorded 2.1 million hours of recordings. It found that:
Barred owl calls were heard eight times more often compared to spotted owls across the entire study area in Oregon, Washington and northwestern California.
Northern spotted owls are approaching functional extinction thresholds in Washington and on the Oregon Coast.
Northern spotted owls were not detected in the Washington Cascades at latitudes north of Seattle.
In the study, a team of scientists divided more than 38,000 square miles of federally managed spotted owl habitat into 5-kilometer hexagon sampling units “meant to replicate the typical territory of a northern spotted owl,” the news release said.
The team randomly selected 1,027 of those hexagons and used four passive acoustic recording devices in each area for a six-to-eight-week period between February and September 2023.
With that data, the teams used “machine learning models” at Oregon State’s Center for Quantitative Life Sciences. Among the findings from that analysis:
Northern spotted owl calls were confirmed in 261 of the 1,027 hexagon sampling areas and barred owl calls were confirmed in 891 of the sampling areas.
A total of 34,341 northern spotted owl and 279,439 barred owl clips were recorded, meaning barred owls were heard more than eight times more than northern spotted owls.
More northern spotted owls were observed in sampling in the southern portions of the range. Levels ranged from 13% to 17% in Washington and the Oregon Coast to 44% in the Oregon and California Klamath Mountains to 91% on the California coast.
Barred owls were heard more frequently in northern sampling areas. They were heard in 100% of samples areas in the Oregon Coast, 94% on the Washington coast and Western Cascades, 72% in Oregon and California Klamath Mountains and 45% at the California coast.
Similar monitoring has continued since the 2023 period and “preliminary findings from the additional monitoring mirror those outlined in this paper,” Lesmeister said. What can be done to help northern spotted owls?
In terms of solutions, Lesmeister said the findings can help focus northern spotted owl conservation strategies to specific geographic areas. The authors cited several conservation strategies, including ongoing and deeply controversial removal of barred owls. They also highlighted conserving landscapes well-suited for spotted owl nesting and bringing northern spotted owls into captivity for breeding, a strategy that has been adopted in Canada.
The sharp declines “doesn’t mean we can’t do anything,” Lesmeister said. “There is still an opportunity for carefully considered management actions.”
Last year they also most likely completely disappeared from BC Canada as well.
Attempts are still ongoing, despite bipartisan protest, to kill 500,000 Barred Owls while not addressing climate change or forest destruction, the things that allowed the Barred Owls to go west of the Mississippi River.
I want to point out that the spotted owl had very little to do with the decline of the Oregon timber industry. It was just a convenient excuse for why the mills were closing. In reality the mills were closing because they could no longer handle the size of trees being harvested. Due to unsustainable logging practices the size of trees had been and continues to decline. Rather than invest into retrofitting the mills the logging towns depended on, the capitalists that owned the mills shut them down.
It never seemed like there were all that many Spotteds to begin with. They sound like they had a very narrow ecological niche before industry got to the PNW in the first place. I don’t know anything really about the industry, but I wonder if they would have actively been renewing the resource they were harvesting all along, how much better things might be now. Replanting now, especially with quick growing, low quality trees, especially planted as a monoculture, really does nothing to bring back the old growth trees that have had hundreds of years to become what they were.
My understanding is not replacing those trees they took is what opened a corridor along the US-Canada border, allowing the very adaptable Barred Owls to migrate west of the Mississippi River that had been a natural border of their range. The Barreds are similar enough to the Spotteds that they can create hybrid offspring (sometimes called Sparred Owls, which are also being actively killed in the name of saving the Spotted), and now they are able to outcompete and succeed in a way the Spotted never could, even before industry showed up.
It seems sad that an industry would, if nothing else, not want to shoot itself in the foot by exhausting their source of income, and then not retrofit to adjust to their mistakes, and then finally not even taking ownership of their mistake but scapegoating a creature with an already low population to the point where people are killing them out of spite for decades. It feels like the peak of human dirtiness.