Spotted Owl On The Brink Of Extinction In Canada; "Circling The Drain" In Captive Breeding
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Logging was halted in old-growth Pacific Northwest forests in the early 1990s after the owl was listed under the broad-reaching U.S. Endangered Species Act. But the species has continued to decline in the U.S., in large part because so much of its habitat was already destroyed and because the barred owl, an invading bigger cousin, is moving into spotted owl territories.
In Canada, a legally mandated federal recovery strategy released in 2006 has been an abysmal failure. Spotted owls are now functionally extinct in Canada’s wild, where an estimated 1,000 of the raptors once lived in southwestern B.C.’s old-growth forests of Douglas fir, western hemlock and western red cedar. For 12 years, the B.C. government has steadfastly avoided identification of the owl’s critical habitat, required by the recovery strategy. This year, a full-time B.C. government spotted owl biologist detected only three spotted owl individuals in the Canadian wild, all in the Fraser Canyon. He found no breeding pairs.
The decimation of B.C.’s spotted owl population has scientists on both sides of the border asking tough questions about how we manage the 600 species legally protected under Canada’s Species at Risk Act. From feeding and medicating an ailing orca whale near Victoria to sedating pregnant caribou and flying them in helicopters to a breeding pen high in the Misinchinka mountains in northeast B.C., substantial amounts of money are being spent on increasingly complex efforts to recover endangered species while governments quietly sanction destruction of their habitat. The B.C. government, for instance, has approved clear-cut logging in areas it set aside for spotted owl recovery, while sinking almost $1.5 million into the experimental captive breeding program since 2014. “The species is now circling the drain,” said U.S. conservation scientist Dominick DellaSala, who has worked on spotted owls as part his global work in rainforests. “We’ve got to get to the point where we’re not in the critical care unit of a hospital where the patient, in this case the owl, is on life support.”
As a postdoctoral student, DellaSala hiked through old-growth rainforests in the Pacific northwest, hooting in the hopes of getting a call back from a spotted owl, assessing the species’ habitat needs and prey base “so we could do something about the owl before it got to the situation we’re in today.” “We’ve put them in the ICU of captive breeding,” DellaSala told The Narwhal. “And when we have put a species in that situation, just like putting a person in ICU, you run the risk that it isn’t going to work. You’re down to the last few individuals and you can’t really make a mistake because [if you do] that’s it, it’s gone.”
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https://thenarwhal.ca/keepers-of-the-spotted-owl/
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