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.
while not addressing climate change or forest destruction,
Shifting the blame. As politicians are used to. It will not end with the owls. The real problems will get to humans as well.
It’s very frustrating, because they sometimes do things to make it look like they are doing something, but there are either fairly obvious loopholes, or they do things counter to what they need to do.
There have been limits put to supposedly limit access to old growth forest, but if there happens to be a forest fire, timber companies of course need to be sent in there to “clear out all that damage” that just happens to require cutting down all those valuable ($) old trees that are blocking where the fire was.
Canada was also trying to build some ski resort where there last single digit count of Spotted Owls was possibly still living, so they either planned to build over them anyway or just wait until they died because the Canadian government never followed through with the protections they passed.
Pro and anti spotted owl protests have been going on for about a hundred years, so nobody can claim they didn’t see this coming.
“First, strangely, the owls had died. At the time it had seemed almost funny, the fat, fluffy white birds lying here and there, in yards and on streets; coming out no earlier than twilight as they had while alive the owls escaped notice. Medieval plagues had manifested themselves in a similar way, in the form of many dead rats.”
- Phillip K Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
I am not enjoying how close dystopian fiction is feeling to our current reality… 😬
I would enjoy an uber realistic owldroid…
🦉 beep boop
Things like this are why I support sabotage of equipment and straight up arson on the dwellings and businesses that are actively killing off the planet.
These animals do not understand what is happening to the world, they have no way to prepare, and when humanity shows no interest in protecting the things we ourselves have endangered, refuse to clean our own messes, and actively try to make the world shittier for a quick buck, the ones responsible don’t deserve to be with the rest of us.
I’m ambivalent on the idea, as I feel it cuts deeply in both directions. I don’t want to see people that could be helping in a continuing fashion get hurt, killed, or arrested, it can inspire backlash by people that would otherwise be neutral or supportive of a movement, and the potential to have unintended environmental fallout or to hurt someone who is stuck in an occupation they may not totally support, at least not to the extent of the owners/management making the bad decisions that probably aren’t anywhere near things being sabotaged.
At the same time, I’m not going to outright condemn willing parties that are going to engage those either violating the law, the spirit of the law, or just basic decency to our environment. I agree with you somebody stepping up when legal means fails is sometimes necessary. Basically the four boxes of liberty…
I don’t think anyone should be killed though, that’s a step too far for me. Get them arrested, bankrupt them, but I’m not really about the vengeance thing, because that ends up perpetuating in nasty ways and it doesn’t bring back anything we’ve already lost anyway.
It’s the batman vs joker “no killing bad guys” thing
Batman KNOWS joker will kill people when he gets out of Arkham. He does it every time he escapes.
But instead of doing something to stop it, Batman just keeps “arresting” him and tossing him back into Arkham, so the cycle can repeat in a few weeks.
Joker has proven he doesn’t care about authority, laws, or basic decency. He WILL escape since the prison and police are too inept to hold him indefinitely. He WILL kill anyone for any or no reason, but especially if he feels like they’re in the way.
By continuing to simply capture and cage joker, knowing he will probably escape soon, batman is 100% okay with all the people joker killed and will kill in the future. Batman could easily put a stop to that. He could even do it in a way where he can lie to himself and say it was an accident, and nobody would question it because it’s batman.
Anyone with the ability to make positive change has the responsibility to make positive change.
<a little rambly, I think...>
And in some cases, “the greater good” (the greater good), yes it is justified to prevent further deaths.
In environmental cases, it’s not just the animals that get hurt. We all suffer for it.
Just look around. I’m willing to bet if you thought about it for a second, you could identify 3 things you can see or feel that tell you the environment is not okay. For me, although I am inside, I can see the dying trees outside my house that need cooler average temperatures that only exist farther north now. I can see the withering grass where the rain has been scarce. I can see the forest in the background, much lower than usual since the downbursts of rain we have been having are damaging them. In the high winds, some are being toppled even though they’re healthy.
When you have the ability to stop further destruction, I believe you have to do whatever you can.
If that’s protesting in your opinion, that’s okay. We need protesting.
But I also think protesting is not enough, and will never be again.
Breaking equipment is the least you can do when you know where it is. It’s not going to stop them, but it will at least delay them.
I’m also sane enough to recognize that that isn’t a palatable solution for most people. I’m okay with that. When a person dies, yes it’s sad that it happened, some people will be more sad than others. But we can all agree, I think, that some people just should not be allowed to continue existing with everyone else. The people who are unapologetically evil. Not crazy, evil. The ones who truly believe they should be allowed to do what they do, which gets people killed.
And I think most people have at least one person who they’ll celebrate, if just a tiny bit, a sigh of relief, when they hear the news that person is no longer living.
I don’t think too many people in the world are comparable to The Joker. And I also think a lot of society has failed if we’re to the point we’d need a literal Batman type.
The closest parallel I can think of is Luigi, and I don’t enjoy when people glorify his actions also. Maybe he has found closure, but has it moved the needle on anything? It’s hard to tell in the present moment. That’s the tricky thing about violent action, is it takes a long time for the ripples to settle and we can tell if it was for the best or not.
But we can all agree, I think, that some people just should not be allowed to continue existing with everyone else. The people who are unapologetically evil. Not crazy, evil.
Nobody can agree who those “worthy” of dying for the good of mankind are. That’s why it’s a dangerous cycle. I didn’t feel bad the United Healthcare guy got shot, but I also don’t feel it should have come to that, or that it’s done any good so far. And now there’s a greater than 0 number of people that want some guy named Luigi dead than there was before.
I won’t call you wrong in you beliefs, but they’re different than mine, which I also don’t think are right for everybody.
