Plan to save spotted owl could be double-barreled

GRANTS PASS, Ore. — More than 20 years of logging cutbacks on national forests across the Northwest have yet to show much benefit for the northern spotted owl, leading to what many believe will be a double-barreled effort that includes locking up more acreage and purging thousands of a newcomer to the threatened species' survival.

The spotted owl, which has become an icon of the conflict between jobs and protected species, was declared threatened in 1990 after a century of logging wiped out too much of its habitat — old-growth forests. The broken-topped old trees provided nests for the birds, protection from swooping goshawks that prey on it, and the red tree voles, flying squirrels and wood rats that it eats.

And now an East Coast cousin called the barred owl has moved in, making federal biologists ponder whether they should start shot-gunning hundreds, if not thousands, of those owls to keep them from driving spotted owls to extinction even faster.

The Obama administration is due to offer its last-ditch plan for saving the spotted owl from extinction — called a recovery plan — this month. All indications point to an effort that would control barred owls and lock up even more old-growth forest habitat for the spotted owl. Specifics of those habitat protections are not likely to be resolved for more than a year.

"We are going to continue to have spotted owls into the future," said Eric Forsman, a U.S. Forest Service biologist who has been studying the spotted owl's decline since 1972. "But it's going to be very difficult to recover the species — simply because the barred owl has thrown a huge monkey wrench into everything."

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service began work on a recovery plan, but never finished it. The Northwest Forest Plan, created to settle lawsuits that had locked up millions of acres of national forests to save the owl, took its place and created a network of old-growth habitats for species like the owl, key watersheds for salmon, and stands of timber for logging.

But many of the reserves were covered with young stands that would need decades to mature into owl habitat — and the logging sections had patches of old growth in which the owls were still living.

When the Bush administration took over in 2000, it tried to dismantle the Northwest Forest Plan, and created its own spotted owl recovery plan that depended more on killing barred owls than protecting habitat. Found to be tainted by political influence, the plan was tossed out in federal court. The Obama administration has been working on its own.