The spotted owl has occupied a near mythic space in the environmental battles of the last several decades to save old growth forests from logging, and to protect them, environmental groups have virtually shut down all old growth logging in the west.
In an astounding revelation though, according to this article from the LA Times, it appears that the cause of the spotted owls demise may not be logging, but the rapacious behavior of its cousin, the barred owl.
An excerpt.
“Across their entire range in Washington, Oregon, Northern California and British Columbia, there are thought to be fewer than 5,000 northern spotted owls left. In the dense forests of the Olympic Peninsula last year, spotted owls were found in 19 of the 54 sites they had once populated. Their numbers have declined by a 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 persistent -- averaging 4% a year -- that a growing number of scientists have come to think the most 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 say -- claiming spotted owls' nests in the warmer, lower elevations.
"This barred owl pair showed up right at a nest tree where we'd had the same male spotted owl who'd been banded in '92," Gremel said. "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."
“There was no way of knowing whether the old owl had left of its own accord, had been driven out or simply died of old age -- but it was troubling, he said.
“Now, as the spotted owl continues to decline, the federal government is taking what many conservationists say is the worst step possible: reopening more of the bird's forests to logging.
“In what is likely to be one of the final environmental battles of the Bush administration, 18 environmental groups filed motions in federal court last week to block a massive remapping of federal lands in the Pacific Northwest. Proposals by the Bureau of Land Management and the Fish and Wildlife Service, which officials hope to have in place by the end of the year, would open up for logging large tracts that had been set aside as breathing space for the owls -- nearly 1.8 million acres.”
