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.
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.