In December 1998, a group of northern spotted owl researchers gathered at Oregon State University in Corvallis to analyze data on birth and death rates that had recently been assembled on owls from fifteen study sites in Washington, Oregon and Northern California. The group had convened twice before in the early 1990s to look at data collected across a large-scale area—a process called meta-analysis. The two studies provided decidedly alarming information: not only was the population of adult female northern spotted owls declining across its range, but it was declining at an accelerating rate.

So it was with some relief that the most recent data examined at the 1998 Corvallis workshop showed that, coinciding with the implementation of a federal owl conservation strategy in the mid-1990s, the rate of decline was no longer accelerating. But the scientists had no cause for outright celebration. The numbers were still going down, just not quite as fast as they had been.

The scientists were relieved, but they weren’t surprised. Under the owl conservation strategy, a key component of the Northwest Forest Plan, the owls’ numbers are expected to continue to decline for several decades. As logged-over stands of trees grow back to a stature sufficient to support the deep-forest-loving owls, that decline is meant to slow further, and then stop altogether. At some point in coming decades, if all goes according to plan, the owls are expected to mount a recovery.

It’s a remarkable experiment involving a bird that became a lightning rod for the controversy over the fate of the Pacific Northwest’s forests. For scientists, it amounts to a nerve-racking slow-motion spectacle, like watching a trapeze artist tumble from a great height and hoping that the net is sturdy enough to break her fall. Six years after the Northwest Forest Plan took effect, the spotted owl continues its fall. The question is whether the safeguards that have been put in place will do what land managers, lawyers and scientists hope they will: save the spotted owl from plummeting to extinction.

Northern spotted owls range from southwestern British Columbia through western Washington and Oregon into Northern California, with small populations on the east slope of the Cascade Mountains. As animals go, the owl is relatively new to science, “discovered” and named as a new species by naturalist John Xantus in 1859. It was not until the late 1960s and early 1970s, however, that wildlife researchers began studying Strix occidentalis caurina in earnest.

Only then did this retiring owl of the dark and green Pacific Northwest forests begin to reveal the secrets of its natural history, fundamental to which is its need for old-growth forests.

That was, ironically, the same time that federal land managers sanctioned significant increases in logging on national forests, especially those of the Pacific Northwest.

Through the 1950s, national forests were relatively untouched by logging. In fact, just a couple of decades earlier, the timber companies had lobbied against allowing public timber to be brought to market. “In the Ô30s, most timber came from private lands,” says Richard Haynes, a U.S. Forest Service economist. “The timber industry didn’t want the government to log timber off public lands because it would depress timber prices.”

By the 1960s, the companies had cut all the old growth that they owned and turned to public lands as a source of logs. The postwar economy was still booming and demand for lumber was high. The industry could not meet that demand without public trees. “The increase in timber harvest on national forests was a very conscious decision by the Forest Service,” Haynes says.

Logging levels remained high through the 1980s, with some estimates putting the cut at 60 percent greater than the rate of growth of merchantable timber. Under that onslaught, only 10 to 13 percent of the Pacific Northwest’s old-growth forests remained by the early 1990s.

That breakneck pace, however, was on a collision course with the growing desire among the general citizenry to preserve ancient forests—and with the implications of a growing body of research into the needs and status of northern spotted owls.

Studies conducted in Oregon and Northern California from 1969 to 1984 showed that more than 95 percent of locations harboring northern spotted owls were in old-growth stands. Those were the same forests that environmentalists desperately wanted to save. Conservationists struck upon a strategy that would prove overwhelmingly successful: by invoking environmental laws to protect the owl, the old-growth forests in which it lived might be spared the chain saw by default. The little-known owl was about to become very famous.

The battle between timber companies, environmental groups and federal agencies lasted from the late 1980s until the Northwest Forest Plan was implemented in 1994.

The northern spotted owl was listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act in June 1990 due to declining populations throughout its range, the result of habitat loss from logging of old-growth forests. Bracketing that listing was a series of reports and analyses offering proposals to protect the owl. Included were government-sponsored studies as well as a conservation plan pushed by the timber industry. And there was a parade of lawsuits, appeals and environmental impact statements. When a federal judge ruled that the government had failed to protect the owl, public lands logging in the owl’s range came to an abrupt halt.

The stalemate was finally broken when President Clinton and Vice President Gore held a forest summit in Portland, Oregon, in April 1993. A group of scientists was convened after that meeting and given the task of devising a new set of forest management plans on lands within the range of the northern spotted owl. Ninety days later, the team presented ten alternatives to the president. Clinton chose Option Nine, later to be called the Northwest Forest Plan.

The plan is revolutionary in that it seeks to manage and conserve not just owls, but all the species found in old-growth forests on federal lands within the spotted owls’ range, from bears to bryophytes.

“I’ve worked on forest management plans in India, Africa and China,” says Bruce Marcot, a Forest Service wildlife ecologist, “and the Northwest Forest Plan is a leading-edge and bold thing for the agencies to do.”

But for many, the real test of the plan is how it treats the northern spotted owl. The plan—the lynchpin in the birds’ hoped-for recovery—aims to provide large areas of mature forests that will support clusters of fifteen to twenty pairs of northern spotted owls. A worthy goal for conservationists, it’s one that comes with a catch: it may take decades to accomplish, and the entire scheme may fail if it turns out that the rate at which the owls’ ravaged habitat recovers is slower than the owls’ decline.

To achieve its goals, the Northwest Forest Plan established a variety of management designations on federal lands within northern spotted owl range. Much of the land—some 7.5 million acres—was designated as late-successional reserves. In those areas, according to the plan, federal land managers should take a largely hands-off approach, with the goal of nurturing remaining stands of old growth. (The plan also designated 4 million acres for timber production, with the goal of providing a steady, reliable supply of timber.)

“What the late-successional reserves are,” explains Grant Gunderson, former threatened, endangered and sensitive species manager for the Forest Service’s Pacific Northwest Region and now wildlife program manager, “are areas with good spotted owl habitat and lots of stands of old growth. But they also have clear-cuts in them. They aren’t pristine by any means.”

The reserves, however, are not envisioned as wilderness-areas-to-be. Managers can allow a variety of activities within them, including commercial logging. But before projects can go forward, managers must convince an oversight committee that the activities won’t harm owls. Over several years, according to the Northwest Forest Plan, those areas will recover and support spotted owls.

“Nobody expects that to happen overnight,” says Martin G. Raphael, a Forest Service research wildlife biologist. “We expect the owl population to decline until it reaches equilibrium with available habitat. That could take a couple of decades.”

So far, the “decline” part of the equation is working quite nicely. Studies conducted concurrently with the development of the Northwest Forest Plan indicated that northern spotted owls were declining at a rate of just under 5 percent a year. The most recent analysis indicates that the population is declining at just under 4 percent a year.

Scientists acknowledge that much remains unknown about northern spotted owls, not the least of which is the actual number of owls that are out there. (Researchers also don’t know how many owls lived in the Pacific Northwest’s forests before the large-scale logging took place.) Scientists analyzed data collected between 1987 and 1992 and calculated a known population of 3,605 pairs of owls. Many of those are in Oregon—a total of 1,971 known pairs were documented in that state from 1988 through 1992.

As of mid-1994, 5,431 locations in Oregon, Washington and California were known to harbor resident pairs or individual northern spotted owls. Just over half of those were in Oregon. Three-fourths of the known population of northern spotted owls were found on federal lands.

There are some areas where owl populations are stable, and there are others where the decline seems precipitous, including southwest Washington and that state’s Olympic Peninsula, as well as the northern Coast Range of Oregon. On Northern California’s Hoopa Valley Indian Reservation, the decline was 12 to 14 percent each year, according to Alan Franklin, a researcher for the Colorado Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit.

Researchers are confident that their counts of adult breeding pairs are accurate because those birds remain in their established territory, making them easy to track. Accurate counts of juvenile owls is another matter. Spotted owls typically hatch in May and fledge in about thirty days. They stay with their parents until fall, when they disperse to seek territory of their own. As these juvenile owls fly out of a researcher’s study area, determining their survival rates can be problematic.

Take the Olympic Peninsula, where the apparent decline approaches 13 percent. “It’s a difficult area because it’s wilderness, roadless,” says owl researcher Bob Anthony. “A lot of the owls can fly off into Olympic National Park and be alive and undisturbed. But the way the demographic studies are done is that if you can’t see the owls, they are counted as dead.”

Another potential source of uncertainty in measuring owl populations is the method by which the numbers are calculated. One method is called the Leslie matrix, a mathematical algorithm that measures juvenile survival, reproduction and adult survival. Another method calls for calculating adult survival rates and combining those rates with the number of newly hatched owlets that survive.

“Using these two methods, we find that we get two different answers,” Franklin says. The margin of error for these rates-of-change studies may be more than three points, meaning that the actual decline of northern spotted owls could be anywhere from zero to 7 percent a year.

A variety of factors affect the spotted owls’ survival prospects. A long-standing one is predation by great horned owls. A more recent complication is the continuing expansion of the barred owl into spotted owl territory, where they have the potential to outmuscle and perhaps even hybridize the native bird—an invasion that has alarmed some owl researchers. Weather also plays a role, with cold, wet springs reducing owlet survival and draining energy from adults because they have more difficulty finding food.

The fundamental cause of the owls’ difficulties is well known and well established—habitat loss—and recovery of it is key to owl survival. But what constitutes northern spotted owl habitat depends on the particular owl.

Typical northern spotted owl habitat is old-growth conifer forests with trees older than 200 years. A consistent component of spotted owl-friendly old-growth forests is an overstory canopy of trees from 230 to 600 years old.

Although owls—especially breeding pairs, which typically nest in high-topped snags—gravitate to old forests, they can live in younger forests. This is particularly true of juveniles, which have to feed only themselves and are able to survive in more marginal habitat.

Further complicating the question of what constitutes good spotted owl habitat are geographical differences across the owls’ range. In Oregon and Washington, northern spotted owls typically live in old-growth forests, where they feed primarily on another old-growth dweller, flying squirrels. But in the coniferous-hardwood forests of Northern California, the dusky-footed wood rat is a primary prey species. In those habitats, owls seem to thrive near the edges of forests, where they can catch their prey. That brings up the question: Can we log and still provide owl habitat?

“There are ways you could log,” Franklin says, “but the old forty-acre clear-cut is not the way to do it. You may want to log in uneven configurations, leaving fingers of trees.” That’s especially true in Northern California, Franklin says, where fires burned through forests relatively frequently before the era of fire suppression, leaving a mosaic of old and young stands.

Researchers are working to develop methods that accurately count owl populations, without requiring the time- and resource-consuming practice of going into the woods and tallying them.

“This is long term,” says Joe Lint, a Bureau of Land Management wildlife biologist. “We need a cost-effective method to go out and observe what is happening to the owls.”

The effort to recover the northern spotted owl is also long term. Most owl researchers are optimistic, about both the Northwest Forest Plan and the owls’ chances. “As the reserves start to recover, they will provide the owls with habitat,” Raphael says. “I feel reasonably confident that they will stabilize.” Adds Anthony, “The Northwest Forest Plan is a damn good plan. The long-term prognosis for the owl looks pretty good to me.”

But success is still a long way off. Raphael estimates that initial results won’t be available for twenty years or so. Gunderson suggests that owl habitat in previously logged areas of Oregon’s Coast Range will be back in shape in fifty years.

For others, optimism comes with a caveat. “I am concerned,” Marcot says. “It’s a matter of how fast the [late-successional reserves] which are not suitable habitat become suitable habitat, compared to the rate of decline. Will it be too late or just in time?”