In January the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service published a call for proposals for development of a recovery plan for the northern spotted owl. It’s about time. The owl was added to the nation’s burgeoning list of threatened and endangered species nearly 16 years ago. That it took so long helps explain why only ten of 1,264 species listed under the 32-year-old federal Endangered Species Act (ESA) have ever recovered.

If my gut reading is correct, the owl won’t be No. 11. It is already doomed across much of its range, and the reasons why are well known among field biologists who have been observing the bird for some 20 years. More aggressive barred owls are pushing them out of their 21 million-acre home range, or killing them, or both. Worse, increasingly frequent, uncharacteristically destructive wildfires are destroying spotted owl habitat in fire-prone forests, most notably in southwest
Oregon and northern California. Put simply, spotted owls are fighting a losing battle, a fact that has me wondering if the US Fish & Wildlife Service isn’t whistling past the graveyard.

Barred owls, not to be confused with common barn owls, migrated west from their native East Coast environs a century or more ago. No one knows why, and until they started killing alreadythreatened spotted owls, no one cared. Now they do. Just how long it will take the barreds to finish off their brethren isn’t known, but the situation has become so precarious that a federal biologist recently opined that shooting barred owls might be the only way to save spotted owls.

Some biologists believe spotted owls still have a fighting chance in so-called “dry-site” forests east of the Cascades in Oregon and Washington. But there is a problem here too: absent are the lowintensity ground fires that kept these forests open for eons, shade tolerant grand fir is pushing Douglas fir aside just as barred owls are pushing spotted owls out of their home range. And it is stagnating grand fir that is fueling most of the stand replacing wildfires in this region. So, minus a long-term thinning program, opposed by the same environmental groups that pushed the 1990 threatened species listing, the habitat potential these forests still hold will soon be lost.

Astonishingly, the US Fish & Wildlife Service acknowledged this threat in their November 2004 Spotted Owl Status Review—a review in which the agency admitted that uncharacteristic wildfire has been the leading cause of owl habitat loss since 1994. What remains a mystery is why the agency continues to oppose the quite manageable low-level risk associated with thinning, while accepting the quite unmanageable, high level risk associated with catastrophic wildfire.

How and why the government failed so miserably in its costly attempt to protect spotted owls is a sordid tale that illustrates what happens when science is politicized. Begin with the fact that protecting owls was never the objective. Saving old growth forests from chainsaws was. The owl was simply a surrogate—a stand-in for forests that do not themselves qualify for ESA protection. But if a link could be established between harvesting in old growth forests and declining spotted owl numbers, the bird might well qualify for listing—a line of thinking that in 1988 led Andy Stahl, then a resource analyst with the Sierra Club Legal
Defense Fund, to famously declare, “Thank goodness the spotted owl evolved in the Northwest, for if it hadn’t, we’d have to genetically engineer it. It’s the perfect species for use as a surrogate.”