The Hidden Lives of Owls by Leigh Calvez

Author:Leigh Calvez [Calvez, Leigh]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-63217-026-2
Publisher: Sasquatch Books
Published: 2016-08-15T16:00:00+00:00

Now we in the Pacific Northwest are faced with a complicated dilemma. Some biologists have proposed the systematic removal of the invasive Barred Owl from the land we have set aside for the recovery of the Northern Spotted Owl. Currently, the US Forest Service is conducting a five-year pilot study to determine if removing the Barred Owls from this territory will make a difference in the recovery of the Spotted Owl. In September and October 2015, sharpshooters killed seventy Barred Owls in an experimental territory near Cle Elum. In another separate territory, designated as the control area for the study, Barred Owls remain undisturbed. Upon completion in 2020, the results will be analyzed to see if the Northern Spotted Owl benefited from removal of the Barred Owls. The Forest Service will take public comments, and a determination will be made about how to proceed. This study will provide the framework for future management decisions.

Some lucky people remember the call of the gentle Spotted Owl while camping or hiking in the old-growth forests of the Olympics and the eastern slopes of the North Cascades. Those people understand on a primal level that it would be tragic to lose this species forever from our forests—the very forests that help to provide the oxygen we breathe. But because humans may have played a role, however unwittingly, in the demise of the Spotted Owl by destroying its forest homes, we have a responsibility for the owl’s recovery.

Spotted Owls have an important role, helping to sustain the forests by doing what they were designed to do, playing their part in the scenes of forest predator and prey. What will happen to the forest cycle if it loses one of its supporting players?

Human actions, as unconscious and unintentional as they were at the time, may have caused the Barred Owls to follow us out west. The irony of the Spotted Owl/Barred Owl situation is not lost on me, as a white person living on land held by the Suquamish Tribe. I listen to and love these Barred invaders in the homeland of Chief Sealth, better known as Chief Seattle, who famously called for all humans to remember to live with the land, because each strand in the tapestry of life is as important as the next to the whole.

Only now, in these early years of the twenty-first century, are we beginning to understand through careful study of natural systems how these threads in the tapestry are interrelated. Miraculous ways, like how the nutrients in decaying salmon, scattered throughout the forest by the animals that eat the fish, are as important to the trees as the rain that blesses our Northwest forests. Because we are studying the broken remains of a once-stable system thousands of years old, now, in an ever-changing state of flux, we can never know how many strands are safe to pull or remove altogether.

Some have intuited an answer from their own thorough observations of what they noticed around them. Nearly sixty years after

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