Clutching a box of wriggling mice, Dale Herter descended a mossy slope and called out to America’s most infamously endangered bird: “Whooot. Hoot-hoot. Whooot.”
Herter, a wildlife biologist, has been spying for six years on a pair of northern spotted owls as they nest a hundred feet up a Douglas fir tree in this forest near Mt. Rainier. Timber companies and government agencies pay him to pinpoint nests in the Cascade Mountains to prevent the owls from being logged into extinction.
Yet his bird quest and the elaborate web of regulations for public and private forests that his search represents are failing to save the owl. A dozen years after the bird seemingly won a national debate that put environmental protection above economic need, the northern spotted owl is in dangerous decline, and no one knows how to save it.
This owl remains a potent symbol in the Pacific Northwest. Environmentalists see the species’ success–or failure–as an indicator of the health of centuries-old forests. Thousands of jobless loggers and their families have long viewed it, by contrast, as symbolic of environmental self-righteousness.
Such scrutiny has not helped the spotted owl in the real world, where it is rapidly disappearing from Washington state’s oldest, tallest trees. Scientists had predicted the bird would stabilize and eventually rebound after the Clinton administration in 1994 put 80 percent of federal forests from Washington to northern California off-limits to logging.
Instead, the owl population has shrunk by an estimated 50 percent, said Joe Buchanan, a wildlife biologist for Washington state’s Department of Fish and Wildlife who completed a study of the bird last year. There may be fewer than 1,000 spotted owls in the state today, and the numbers are dwindling by up to 10 percent annually in some regions, he said.
Herter has seen the same steep decline. Among 60 nesting sites he began tracking in 1992, about 25 still host owls. “There may be nothing we can do about it,” he said.
The spotted owl loomed large in environmental politics and the public imagination 15 years ago, when it looked out from the cover of Time magazine and, soon after, made the endangered species list.
Some environmentalists lay in front of logging trucks, while stalwarts in Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, once a thriving region for logging on federal land, posted signs declaring, “I like spotted owls–fried.”
In the end, an estimated 30,000 people in the Pacific Northwest lost jobs in the timber industry.
The public mood regionally has since coalesced in favor of environmental protection. Polls have indicated that Pacific Northwest residents–including people living amid forested land where tourism is a growing source of jobs–strongly support a ban on cutting old-growth timber.
Still, questions about the owl’s fate are brought regularly before courts in Washington and Oregon, as environmental groups, forest companies and the government skirmish about management of private and public lands where owls nest.
The state’s timber companies say they have been “proactive” on the owl’s behalf by setting aside 40 percent of harvestable trees — up to 6,000 acres — around each nest located by Herter and other surveyors, said Cindy Mitchell, a spokeswoman for the Washington Forest Protection Association, a timber industry group.
For a predatory bird with a big reputation, spotted owls are surprisingly docile. With their chocolate-brown and white feathers, adults stand about 18 inches high, weigh less than 2 pounds and have 4-foot wingspans.
Back in the Mt. Baker-Snoqualmie forest, a male owl soundlessly responded to Herter’s “hoot-hoot” call. It glided through the trees and perched cautiously near the biologist and two other visitors.
Under an evergreen canopy, Herter lured the bird closer by placing each live mouse on the end of a stick for the owl to snatch and carry to its mate and a visible nestling.
Many who have studied the owl say a century of logging old-growth forests drove the population down to a point where other, harder-to-control factors–such as bird competitors, West Nile virus and forest fires–are playing outsize roles in the bird’s future.
“Habitat issues are paramount,” but the owl now has a “habitat and invasive species problem,” said Jim Michaels, a longtime division manager for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service office in Lacey, Wash.
The worrisome invader is the barred owl, a more aggressive bird with brown stripes on its chest. Since the mid-1960s, it has migrated from its East Coast turf into northern spotted owl territory from Washington to northern California and is more flexible about food and shelter than its fussier spotted cousin. (The spotted owl nests in taller, older trees and dines mainly on flying squirrels; the barred owl willingly camps in younger forests and eats mammals, amphibians, birds and even crawfish.)
Wildlife biologists, forestry officials and timber companies are talking about removing barred owls from areas in northern California to see if that helps the spotted owls. No one knows whether it will work.
Rural timber towns, especially on the Olympic Peninsula, still have high unemployment, and budgets for schools and hospitals are under constant duress, but changes in the industry have altered the oversimplified “owls versus jobs” equation. Timber companies’ troubles now stem primarily from foreign competition and corporate consolidation, although mills have been overhauled to make “engineered wood” — think Ikea–from smaller trees, wood chips and sawdust.
It used to take two or three men with chain saws 10 minutes to cut a huge old-growth fir. Today, a track-mounted machine with a driver can sever a younger tree, cut its branches and arrange it for transport in 60 seconds, said Gerry Lane, 63, who manages Allen Logging Co. in Forks, Wash., on the Olympic Peninsula.
The irony that the northern spotted owl may yet disappear, despite epic efforts to save it, is not lost on one-time loggers who mourn a bygone way of life among the big trees.
“The owl started the tumbling effect,” said Bruce Williams, 59, of Neilton, Wash., who was laid off in 1989 and now teaches a high school shop class. “That little bird.”
