Spotted owl faces new threat

On the ridgeline, thousands of feet above where he left his truck on the valley floor, Gremel points the antenna on his tracking device toward 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 Olympic National Park visitor center a few miles back, he pointed 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 11-square-mile 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 left. In the dense forests of the Olympic Peninsula last year, spotted owls were found in 19 of the 54 sites they had 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% a year -- that a growing number of scientists have come to believe the most immediate culprit is not logging, but the aggressive barred owl, which has crept into the U.S. West Coast forests from Canada over the past few decades.

Bigger, more fertile and with an appetite less finicky than its threatened cousin's, 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'd had the same male spotted owl who'd been banded in '92," Gremel said. "He was last seen the year right before [the newcomers] showed up. Then this spring, a park visitor found a dead spotted owl in the campground here."

There was no way of knowing whether the old owl had left of its own accord, had been driven out, or simply died of old age -- but it was troubling, he said.

Now, 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.