Pacific Northwest: Long live Forsman’s Spotted Owls!

Every chick counts, because spotted owls are vanishing faster than
ever. Nearly 20 years after Forsman’s research helped the federal
government boot loggers off millions of acres to save the threatened
owls, nature has thrown the birds a curveball. A bigger, meaner
bird—the barred owl—now drives spotted owls from their turf. Some
scientists and wildlife managers have called for arming crews with
decoys, shotguns and recorded bird songs in an experimental effort to
lure barred owls from the trees and kill them.

To Forsman and other
biologists, the bizarre turn is not a refutation of past decisions but
a sign of the volatility to come for endangered species in an
increasingly erratic world. As climate chaos disrupts migration
patterns, wind, weather, vegetation and river flows, unexpected
conflicts will arise between species, confounding efforts to halt or
slow extinctions. If the spotted owl is any guide, such conflicts
could come on quickly, upend the way we save rare plants and animals,
and create pressure to act before the science is clear. Forsman
stopped.

“You hear it?” he asked. I didn’t. Above the twitter of
winter wrens I caught only the plunk of a creek running through hollow
logs. Then Forsman nodded at a scraggly hemlock. Twenty feet off the
ground, a cantaloupe-size spotted owl stared back at us. “It’s the
male,” he whispered. Before I could speak, Forsman was gone. The
61-year-old U.S. Forest Service biologist zipped down one
fern-slippery hill and up another. For years, he’d explained, this
bird and its mate pumped out babies like fertile field mice, producing
more offspring than other spotted owls in the range. Forsman wanted to
reach their nest to see if this year’s eggs had hatched—and survived.
Both creatures stared intently at Forsman, who absently picked at a
clump of fur and rodent bones—an owl pellet regurgitated by one of the
birds. Moments later the female launched herself to a tree crevice
some 40 feet off the ground.

Her head bobbed as she picked at her
nest. Over the next hour, we looked through binoculars hoping to spy a
chick. It was here, not half a mile away, above a trickle of runoff
called Greasy Creek, that Forsman saw his first spotted owl nest in
1970. He had grown up chasing great horned owls in the woods outside
an old strawberry farm near Eugene, and as an undergraduate at Oregon
State University he prowled the forests in search of rare breeds. One
day he shimmied up a tree and poked his head inside a crack. He
escaped with brutal talon marks on his cheek and one of the earliest
recorded glimpses of a spotted owl nest. He also scooped up a sick
chick—its eyes were crusted shut—planning to nurse it back to health
and return it to its nest. When he came back, though, the adult birds
had vanished, so Forsman raised the baby bird himself. It lived in a
cage outside his home for 31 years. Drawn by the romance of this
obscure creature that hides in dark woods, Forsman became a spotted
owl expert. He was the first to note that the birds nest primarily in
the cavities of ancient trees or in the broken-limbed canopies of
old-growth forests, where they feast on wood rats, red tree voles,
flying squirrels and deer mice.
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/The-Spotted-Owls-New-Nemesis.html#
— Posted to http://forestpolicyresearch.com via gmail to posterous and
also to forestpolicyresearch@yahoogroups.com

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