Cry, They Are Called

In old-growth forest, a more-than-human mythology finds refuge

If you want to meet the spotted owl, it turns out, you’re going to need a few mice.

Steve Ackers, the wildlife scientist who leads the owl demography study in the H. J. Andrews Experimental Forest in the Western Cascades, offered to take me on a daytime visit to one of the nesting sites he tracks. The project isn’t tracking every spotted owl in the region — although it probably gets close — but instead uses known nesting sites to sample the population. They’ve developed a statistical model for this; tallying the presence of birds at historic nesting sites from season to season, the study team maintains a working sense of owl population dynamics. The study, which has been running in the Andrews since the 1970s, helped to show that Strix occidentalis, the spotted owl, needs the complex ecology of old-growth forest to survive. This work fed the so-called Timber Wars of the 1990s, when bumper stickers implored lumber-industry advocates to “save a logger: eat a spotted owl,” and activists learned to climb into the forest canopy to save trees older than the Forest Service, older than the republic itself.

The Timber Wars have abated, but the owl demography study continues, now nearly fifty years on, tracking the evanescent presence of birds in forests facing threats that know no allotment boundaries or sale-tract numbers. And although the science of spotted owls helped preserve the last stands of old-growth Douglas-fir forest…