Immature Northern Spotted Owl (Strix occidentalis caurina) - WA
Today I am grateful for and want to shine a spotlight on Northern Spotted Owls who are sadly just about extirpated in BC. I had a magic moment with a beautiful endangered Spotted Owl family in WA this summer. It's always a privilege for me to see them. I never know each year if I will find them again. This year one of the pairs I had seen the year before had Barred Owls in their territory and they were nowhere to be found. It's heartbreaking when that happens. These owls have been through hell and back due to habitat loss and logging of old growth forests, climate change, Barred Owl expansion (that we orchestrated) and recently believe it or not, rat poison is affecting them. Rat poison needs to be banned it is killing so many owls of all species especially recently here in the lower mainland.
So much...too much pressure on a beautiful owl.
Well on top of this in the US, The Trump administration is proposing rolling back protections for close to 300 threatened animal and plant species and guess what?.. the Northern Spotted Owl is one of those birds.
The new proposal would ease restrictions for companies that operate in wildlife habitats. “Removal of Blanket Section 4(d) Rule” and was posted Monday by the Department of the Interior.
Due to extreme mismanagement. BC has less than a dozen birds left in the wild and extirpation in Canada is looming. Once old growth forests are logged and gone, the captive breeding program can do little to recover the population. So far no birds have been released but 2 adult Spotted Owls need a huge area of old growth forest to hunt and raise their young in. These species and their prey (mostly flying squirrels and wood rats) are so habitat specific that it's really too little to late for any captive breeding program to be of any success here. Because once the old growth forest is cut down it takes 100-200 years to mature.
WA, OR and CA still has these owls in low numbers and we need to do all we can to protect them in the Pacific Northwest. A world without them would be very bleak indeed.
These guys continue to have a tough road ahead of them. We really have to protect intact old growth forests and fight for increased legislation, so that they aren't continually fragmented.
If we only saw the bigger picture way back then, but now that we are so fully informed why do we continue down the same destructive paths? This I'll never know...
Immature Northern Spotted Owl (Strix occidentalis caurina) - WA
Today I am grateful for and want to shine a spotlight on Northern Spotted Owls who are sadly just about extirpated in BC. I had a magic moment with a beautiful endangered Spotted Owl family in WA this summer. It's always a privilege for me to see them. I never know each year if I will find them again. This year one of the pairs I had seen the year before had Barred Owls in their territory and they were nowhere to be found. It's heartbreaking when that happens. These owls have been through hell and back due to habitat loss and logging of old growth forests, climate change, Barred Owl expansion (that we orchestrated) and recently believe it or not, rat poison is affecting them. Rat poison needs to be banned it is killing so many owls of all species especially recently here in the lower mainland.
So much...too much pressure on a beautiful owl.
Well on top of this in the US, The Trump administration is proposing rolling back protections for close to 300 threatened animal and plant species and guess what?.. the Northern Spotted Owl is one of those birds.
The new proposal would ease restrictions for companies that operate in wildlife habitats. “Removal of Blanket Section 4(d) Rule” and was posted Monday by the Department of the Interior.
Due to extreme mismanagement. BC has less than a dozen birds left in the wild and extirpation in Canada is looming. Once old growth forests are logged and gone, the captive breeding program can do little to recover the population. So far no birds have been released but 2 adult Spotted Owls need a huge area of old growth forest to hunt and raise their young in. These species and their prey (mostly flying squirrels and wood rats) are so habitat specific that it's really too little to late for any captive breeding program to be of any success here. Because once the old growth forest is cut down it takes 100-200 years to mature.
WA, OR and CA still has these owls in low numbers and we need to do all we can to protect them in the Pacific Northwest. A world without them would be very bleak indeed.
These guys continue to have a tough road ahead of them. We really have to protect intact old growth forests and fight for increased legislation, so that they aren't continually fragmented.
If we only saw the bigger picture way back then, but now that we are so fully informed why do we continue down the same destructive paths? This I'll never know...