The spotted owl146;s disappearing act

The barred owl has aggressively taken over the habitat of its threatened cousin

The barred owl has aggressively taken over the habitat of its threatened cousin
Scott Gremel makes his way swiftly and surely up the steep trail, across a frigid stream, through the colossal stands of hemlock and Douglas fir. On the ridgeline, thousands of feet above where he left his truck on the valley floor, Gremel points the antenna on his tracking device toward the next valley. A faint ping responds, the radio tag of a single barred owl that has laid claim to two entire valleys.

As Gremel made his way from the Olympic National Park visitor centre a few miles back, he pointed at several locations where a much more famous8212;and more reclusive8212;bird once nested. Nothing.
Gremel has traipsed through these trees since spring, calling out the telltale whoop-woo-hoo-hoooo of the northern spotted owl. He hasn8217;t been able to find more than two mating pairs in this 11-square-mile region. Once, there were five.

Across their entire range in Washington, Oregon, Northern California and British Columbia, there are thought to be fewer than 5,000 northern spotted owls. In the dense forests of the Olympic Peninsula last year, spotted owls were found in 19 of the 54 sites they once had populated. Their numbers have declined by one-third since the 1990s, when old-growth logging across the Pacific Northwest came to a virtual halt in an effort to protect their habitat.

The declines have been so persistent8212;averaging 4 per cent a year8212;that a growing number of scientists have come to think the immediate culprit is not logging but the aggressive barred owl, which has crept into the West Coast forests from Canada over the last few decades.
Bigger, more fertile and with an appetite less finicky than its threatened cousin, the barred owl has taken over in forest after forest, experts say8212;claiming spotted owls8217; nests in the warmer, lower elevations.

8220;This barred owl pair showed up right at a nest tree where we8217;d had the same male spotted owl who8217;d been banded in 8216;92,8221; Gremel said. 8220;He was last seen the year right before the newcomers showed up. Then this spring, a park visitor found a dead spotted owl in the campground here.8221;
Now, as the spotted owl continues to decline, the federal government is taking what conservationists say is the worst step possible: reopening more of the bird8217;s forests to logging.

Gremel recalled the first time he and his colleagues took a decoy out and began making barred owl sounds. Almost immediately, a barred owl swooped down and 8220;literally ripped the head off the decoy,8221; Gremel said. 8220;It was so busy ripping up the thing, it didn8217;t even care about us approaching.8221;
What chance, he wondered, would a spotted owl have against such an adversary? 8220;At this point,8221; he said, 8220;you look at all the sites where we still have spotted owls, and I can pretty much see barred owls occupying all of them.8221;
_Kim Murphy,LATWP