Scott Gremel makes his way swiftly and surely up the steep trail, across a frigid stream, through the colossal stands of hemlock and Douglas fir.
On the ridgeline, thousands of feet above, Gremel points the antenna on his tracking device towards the next valley. A faint ping responds, the radio tag of a single barred owl that has laid claim to two entire valleys.
As Gremel made his way from the visitor centre of Washington's Olympic National Park, he pointed the antenna at several locations where a much more famous — and more reclusive — bird once nested.
Nothing. Gremel has traipsed through these trees since the spring snow melt, calling out the telltale whoop-woo-hoo-hoooo of the northern spotted owl.
He hasn't been able to find more than two mating pairs in this 28-square-kilometre region. Once, there were five.
Across their entire range in Washington, Oregon, Northern California and British Columbia, there are thought to be fewer than 5,000 northern spotted owls.
In the dense forests of the Olympic Peninsula last year, spotted owls were found in 19 of the 54 sites they once populated.
Their numbers have declined by one 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 per cent 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 past 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 had a male spotted owl banded in 1992,'' Gremel said.
“He was last seen the year before [the newcomers] showed up. This spring, a visitor found a dead spotted owl in the campground.''
Rubbing salt in a wound
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 probably will be one of the final environmental battles of the Bush administration, 18 environmental groups have filed motions in federal courts to block a massive remapping of federal lands in the Pacific Northwest.
Proposals by the United States Bureau of Land Management and the Fish and Wildlife Service would open up for logging nearly 2 million acres set aside as breathing space for the owls.
The moves amount to a wholesale reworking of the Northwest Forest Plan. The 1994 compromise — brokered to end the timber wars of the Pacific Northwest — set up a system of protections for the region's old-growth forests, allowing them to be thinned but not cut down.
Those classic groves are essential not only for the spotted owl but the marbled murrelet (a threatened small seabird) and a host of other plants and animals whose survival is considered a barometer of the planet's ecological health.
Timber industry officials say the compromise never worked. A combination of environmental lawsuits and inadequate federal appropriations for timber management, they said, resulted in lumber mills getting little more than a quarter of the 1.1-billion board feet a year of timber they had been promised, and the Northwest's forests were left overgrown, bug-infested and dangerously prone to fires.
But conservationists say the latest attempt by the Bush administration to dole out owl habitat to the timber industry marks a blatant power play by the government's top political advisers.
“Saying the Northwest Forest Plan hasn't done much for owls by protecting all that habitat, so we should protect less habitat, doesn't make any sense at all,'' said Kristen Boyles, an attorney for Earthjustice.
“The science has said we need as much habitat protected as we possibly can and we likely need to protect much more habitat in light of the uncertainties of climate change.''
The industry group has charged that past federal management plans set aside unreasonably large areas of the Northwest that should never have been considered classic spotted owl habitat.
Bird of prey
Michael Campbell, a BLM official in Oregon, said the agency spent five years producing its latest plan — one that would put the lumber mills back to work and protect the owls.
What many people don't realise, Campbell said, is that Pacific Northwest forests are amazingly productive and can quickly regenerate “old growth'' habitat for the owls to replace whatever large trees are lost to logging.
Habitat aside, Gremel said, there is still the problem of the barred owl. The spotted owl has proved unable to defend its territory against the invaders.
“At this point,'' he said, “you look at all the sites where we still have spotted owls and I can pretty much see barred owls occupying all of them.''
