In a spot of bother, this owl!

It has been two decades since the fate of a bashful bird that most people had never seen came to symbolise the bitter divide over whether to save or saw down the ancient forests of the Pacific Northwest. Yet it was not until recently that the US federal government offered its final plan to prevent the bird, the northern spotted owl, from going extinct.

After repeated revisions, constant court fights and shifting science, the Fish and Wildlife Service presented a plan that addresses a range of threats to the owl, including some that few imagined when it was listed as a threatened species in 1990.

The newer threats include climate change and the arrival of a formidable feathered competitor, the barred owl, in the soaring old-growth evergreens of Washington, Oregon and California where spotted owls nest and hunt.

One experiment included in the plan: shooting hundreds of barred owls in certain areas to see whether that helps spotted owls recover.

Even after all these years since the spotted owl became the cause celebre of the environmental movement, it is far from clear that the plan is a solution. Advocates on both sides, conservationists and timber executives, say it will inevitably be challenged, and both sides have expressed frustration with the Obama administration on the issue.

Some contentious points have still not been addressed, including precisely mapping the so-called critical habitat to be protected. And some experts say that while two decades of protections for the owl have helped preserve forest ecosystems, they are less certain that the bird itself can still be saved.

“I’ve certainly become much less confident as the years have gone by,” said Eric Forsman, a research biologist with the US Forest Service in Corvallis, Ore., whose work in the 1970s first drew attention to the owl. “If you’d asked me in 1975, ‘Can we fix this problem?’, I’d have said, ‘Oh yeah, this problem will go away.”’

Decline in spotted owl population

The spotted owl is declining by an average of three per cent per year across its range. While some populations in Southern Oregon and Northern California are more stable, some of the steepest rates of decline are in Washington. Some study areas in the Olympic and Cascade ranges show annual declines as high as 9 per cent.

The listing of the spotted owl as a threatened species led to a virtual ban on logging in many older federal forests, inspiring angry lawsuits and threats of violence by rural loggers against owl advocates, who often came from urban areas.

“We were trained not to tell people in the local towns that we were surveying spotted owls,” said Paula Sweeden, a government owl surveyor in the early 1990s who now works for a nonprofit group that develops incentives for private forest owners to retain and restore owl habitat. Yet over time, the public passion and the owl both faded.

“Nothing against the bird, but it’s wreaked a lot of havoc in the Pacific Northwest for the past 20 years,” said Ray Wilkeson, president of the Oregon Forest Industries Council, which represents loggers, sawmills and others in the industry. “A lot of human suffering has resulted from this. Now there’s new threats to the owl that may be beyond anybody’s ability to control.”

The barred owl, a bigger, more adaptable bird with a broader diet than the flying squirrels and the wood rats that spotted owls prefer, has expanded its range westward in the past century, and it is now a more common resident than spotted owls in many Northwest forests. Sometimes barred owls even kill male spotted owls and mate with females.

“The barred owl is the most imminent challenge,” said Paul Henson, the Fish and Wildlife Service’s team leader for the spotted owl recovery plan. “We believe there is a very good chance of recovering the spotted owl in the long term if we can manage the barred owl issue in the short term.”

Others are less sure. While some early experiments showed success, Forsman, the Forest Service biologist, questions whether barred owls could be managed on a broad scale, if it came to that.

“You would have to shoot barred owls forever to do that,” he said, “and I don’t think that’s likely to happen.” The plan’s supporters say it provides for studies that may reveal ways to manage forests to create space for both birds.

Mapping habitat & other proposals

Although the plan does not map critical habitat – the mapping process is more than a year away from completion, a fact that frustrates conservationists – it proposes expanding protections for owls beyond areas currently set aside.

The existing areas were outlined by the Northwest Forest Plan, which was approved a year after Clinton’s Timber Conference, revised under President George W Bush to allow more logging and reinstated by the Obama administration.

Supporters say it will provide more wood for mills by increasing forest thinning and restoration work to battle threats like disease and fire that could increase with climate change.

The plan would provide timber companies incentives to create potential spotted owl habitat. Officials from the Forest Service and from the Bureau of Land Management, which oversee logging on federal land, expressed support for the plan.

“Thinning opportunity, that’s what’s always offered up to us as an alleged middle ground,” said Wilkeson of the Oregon Forest Industries Council. “But it’s pretty limited.”

While timber advocates question protections for a bird that some say may be bound for extinction, conservationists say that it is too soon to give up on the spotted owl, and that the fight to save it has served broader benefits of the forest, from cleaner water and air to habitat for hundreds of other species, including streams for endangered salmon.

“The spotted owl is the icon,” Forsman said, “but there are a lot of other players in terms of species and protecting biodiversity in these forests.”