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Spotted Owls (part one)

 



Many years ago, I had a job for the US Forest Service as part of the Spotted Owl Survey. This was before the spotted owl was listed as a threatened species under the endangered species act, but there were a lot of people betting that spotted owls would be listed. A number of years before, the Forest Service selected the spotted owl as an indicator species for old growth habitat. An indicator species is like the canary in the coal mine for habitat types. There are lots of different kinds of habitats, old growth forest being one of them. With all of the different organisms living in a given habitat it becomes very difficult to tell if your actions are harming the habitat as a whole.  The idea is that if your indicator species is doing well, then the rest of the organisms in the habitat should also be doing well. Personally, I think that is a bit simplistic to think that you can tell the health of the habitat by looking at one species. There could be tens of thousands of different species living in a given habitat type, each species affects multiple other species intertwined in a complex manner that we can barely begin to understand. 

Nonetheless, the Forest Service picked the spotted owl as its indicator species and that species was not doing well. Interim plans were put in place and that meant more data was required about how many owls there were and where they were nesting. I was put on a team to survey the owls around proposed timber sales in our district. Our job was to go into these places and literally hoot for the owls. We were all well versed in owl-speak, and could make a reasonable facsimile of a spotted owl hoot. We had to learn the calls of all the various types of owls that inhabited the pacific northwest, the saw whet, the pygmy owl, the screech owl, the great horned owl, and the great grey owl. We would get to a station, hoot for ten minutes; if there was no response we would move on to the next station and start again. If we heard a great horned owl we had to stop. They prey on spotted owls. There were a lot of long cold nights with thermoses full of coffee and bags of crunchy food to help keep us awake. If we heard a spotted owl responding, we would immediately stop and take a compass bearing on the sound. We would note the information, go home and return in daylight to try to follow up and find the owl or owls. The daylight search was to determine if there was a nest.

This job was not conducive to a good sleep cycle. For one thing we worked four ten-hour days (nights). We typically worked from 7:00 at night until 5:00 in the morning. After our four nights of work, we had three days off, just enough to get back to an almost normal day rhythm when we had to go back to work and mess up our body clocks again. On top of that, as I said, if we heard an owl respond at night we would immediately go home, sleep for 8 hours (or try) and come back in the daylight to try to find the owl. So our schedule was not even consistent.

The point of all of this was to find nesting spotted owls. Single birds didn’t count. But if there was a nest, that would stop any timber sale that was within a certain radius of the nest. Finding a nest had big-time ramifications. To determine if there was a nest, we would drive to the station where we were the night before and follow our recorded azimuth. That was sometimes easier said than done. The Coast Range has steep hillsides and thick brush of blackberry, salal and sometimes an impenetrable mass of vine maple. One time I was pushing my way through the brush when, “ouch!” A devil’s club spine had gone right through my glove. I looked around and somehow had gotten myself completely surrounded by a patch of devil’s club. One of the many pleasant reminders that we are pretty clumsy trying to maneuver our way through this environment. Humans aren’t really built for this. Oh, to be an owl, and then we could just fly over it. But we are what we are. We pushed on as best we could to try to find a nest.

Finding the nests is actually a story in itself, so I will describe more about that in part 2 of this series.

Star Liner

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