Despite recovery efforts, spotted owls are in decline

OLYMPIA — Washington’s population of northern spotted owls has declined sharply, despite a 15-year recovery effort that reshaped forest management at a cost of thousands of timber industry jobs

In 1990, the owl was listed as a threatened species under the federal Endangered Species Act, prompting the Clinton administration to declare millions of acres of federal forest land — including 2.4 million acres of old-growth forest in Washington state — off limits under the Northwest Forest Plan.

But the latest population studies on the Olympic Peninsula and in the central Cascade Mountains show owl numbers down 50 percent to 60 percent over the past 10 years.

"There has been a precipitous decline in the owl population in areas of Washington state, including the Olympic Peninsula and Cle Elum study areas," Martin Raphael, chief research wildlife biologist at the U.S. Forest Service’s Pacific Northwest Research Station, told The Olympian newspaper.

On the Olympic Peninsula, severe winter storms in 1998-99 apparently wiped out a number of the owls. In the following two years, almost none of the owls had chicks, according to research led by Oregon State University biologist Eric Forsman, whose work since the 1970s makes him the owl expert of the Northwest.

"There’s no place the owl population is doing worse than in Washington state," said Dave Werntz, science director for the Northwest Ecosystem Alliance. "It’s teetering on the brink."

The studies Forsman led in 2002 showed that 38 percent of the 92 owl territories surveyed on the Olympic Peninsula supported owl pairs — about half as many as were occupied from 1987 to 1992.

In the Cle Elum area, a mixture of federal, state and private forest land, the number of spotted owls found has dropped from 120 in 1992 to 44 last year.

Forest activists argue that owl protection on 10 million acres of state and private land is inadequate, and too much timber is being cut.

"It’s very, very well known that state wildlife rules are behind the times," said Peter Goldman of the Washington Forest Law Center in Seattle, a nonprofit public interest law firm. "They are in desperate need of revision."

But habitat isn’t the only issue. The barred owl, a relative newcomer to the forests of the Northwest, also appears to be raising havoc with the spotted owl, competing for its habit, eating some of the same prey, and perhaps even killing spotted owls.

Field researchers reported seeing 62 barred owls in the 2002 study, which suggests they now might outnumber spotted owls.

"It’s habitat loss that drove the spotted owl population down," said state Department of Fish and Wildlife biologist Joe Buchanan. "Now other factors are kicking in — the barred owl, forest fires, insects and diseases in forest stands, maybe even the West Nile virus."

When a species already is in decline, it is less capable of withstanding other types of assaults, Buchanan said.

The owl has fallen off the public’s radar screen, compared with 15 years ago when the Northwest was embroiled in a natural resources battle between preserving the owl and preserving the timber industry.

Even some of the conservation groups at the forefront of the save-the-ancient-forest campaign in the late 1980s are just now turning their attention back to the owl.

"We haven’t actively focused on the spotted owl for several years," said Heath Packard, a field director with the Audubon Society’s state office.

But an upcoming state-of-the-birds report from Audubon places the spotted owl and marbled murrelet among the 20 most threatened birds among 400 bird species that reside or migrate through the state, Packard said.

"The focus of our conservation efforts the next several years will be those 20 bird species," Packard said.

Setting aside so much U.S. Forest Service land as critical habitat for the owl caused widespread pain in the timber industry and the communities that depended on it. As federal timber harvests were slashed 80 percent from the heyday of the 1980s, thousands of jobs were lost and dozens of mills closed.

Forest-related jobs in Washington and Oregon declined almost 25 percent, from 137,200 in 1986 to 104,600 in 2000, although not all the job losses can be traced to the owl.

But the flow of logs from the region’s federal forests has slowed to a trickle since the owl was listed, a big blow to timber companies and mills that needed access to federal timber to survive.

The Northwest Forest Plan pegged the probable sale of federal timber at about 1.1 billion board-feet a year. But timber sales have averaged only about 60 percent of that amount.

In 2000, the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management offered only 148 million board-feet for sale, prompting lawsuits by the American Forest Resources Council and Western Council of Industrial Workers that call for a full-blown review of the status of the northern spotted owl and marbled murrelet, another old-growth dependent species listed as threatened in 1992.

The groups argue that new scientific information, much of it from the redwood forests of northern California, suggests the spotted owl may not need ancient forests to nest, roost and forage.

"We saw thousands of jobs lost and millions of acres taken out of production," said Bob Dick, state office manager for the American Forest Resources Council. "If the science shows that we can have owls and productive forests, then we should pursue it."

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service settled the lawsuits by agreeing to report on the status of the two species by April 2004.

However, certain segments of the timber industry — especially private landowners who have made peace with the owl and the murrelet — were not pleased to see the lawsuits filed.

"This is an old wound that most of my members had no interest in reopening," said Bill Wilkerson, executive director of the Washington Forest Protection Association, which represents most of the large and medium-sized timber companies in the state. "Who knows which way a status review is going to cut?"