Susan Harrison of UC Davis is back with some nice photographs of birds, including Barred Owls. Nearly half a million of these owls are scheduled to be shot in what I see as a misguided attempt to save the Northern Spotted Owl. I think Susan agrees with me here, but I won’t speak for her. At any rate, her IDs and captions are included and you can enlarge her photos by clicking on them.
Large birds of the Oregon Coast, August 2026
One fog-bound morning on the central Oregon coast, a fellow camper hailed me with “There’s an owl by the outhouses!” This wasn’t a total surprise since, in the middle of the previous night, the distinctive “who-cooks-for-you, who-cooks-for-you” call of a Barred Owl (Strix varia) could be heard. We watched as the large grey specter glided along the edge of a meadow, perching here and there in classic hunched-owl position to look and listen for camper-attracted rodents.
Barred Owl:
Sadly to me, the US Forest Service has announced plans to kill large numbers of Barred Owls in a desperate measure to save endangered Northern Spotted Owls (Strix occidentalis caurina). It’s a complicated issue upon which reasonable people (i.e., owl lovers) disagree, and you can read and decide for yourself here and elsewhere. But I will not reveal the location of any Barred Owl!
JAC: Let me add that the Northern Spotted Owl is a subspecies of the Spotted Owl (Strix occidentalis) and is not itself a distinct species. There are in fact several subspecies of Spotted Owls.
A nearly full-grown Osprey (Pandion haliaetus) begged incessantly to be fed by one of its parents; the other sat silently in a neighboring tree. The juvenile finally flew off to preen, but was quickly displaced from its perch by a Red-Shouldered Hawk (Buteo lineatus) that repeatedly chased the young Osprey around the meadow.
Red-Shouldered Hawk:
At the nearby coast, Elegant Terns (Thalasseus elegans) and Brown Pelicans (Pelecanus occidentalis) held a bathing party, and the preening pelicans stretched their unearthly pouches:
Elegant Terns:
Brown Pelicans:
Lovely bird❤️! Thanks for sharing with us!
Great photos, Dr. Harrison. Thank you for sharing. I love owls, too, and find myself torn by the plan to preserve the northern spotted owl by culling barred owls.
I like the expression on the face of the Barred Owl in the first picture.
Very good! I find the planned culling of these owls to be baffling. Getting past my visceral rejection, it would be a better plan to do a limited test, first. That is to do a culling of them over a smaller portion of the planned area. If that is found to help, then so be it. But a more effective measure to help Spotted Owls would be to put more restrictions on logging.
They’ve already done a limited test, and it was pretty effective. They also brought together an advisory committee and brought ethicists to inform their discussions. I was on the committee. This was more than 10 years ago.
Lovely pictures of beautiful birds. I particularly like the name “Elegant Terns”.
Yes, I totally agree with Jerry and others about opposing the owl shooting – though that feels a bit weird, since back in the 1990s it seemed quite legitimate to stop the logging of the last old-growth forests to save the Spotted Owl (of which all 3 subspecies are in trouble), even though that harmed some logging communities and was hugely controversial at the time. But it somehow seems far less justified to make war on another native owl species. Why the Barred Owl has spread westward into the Spotted Owl’s range is still a mystery, but whatever has changed to cause it (probably something to do with habitat, climate…) likely can’t be stopped even with all the killing. Barred and Spotted Owls are extremely similar-looking and I read that they only diverged about 3 milllion years ago. If one is going to disappear anyway, it’s some consolation to have the other.
Not to mention, the spotted owls and subspecies thereof could be maintained in captivity. Likely spotted owls and barred owls occupy niches that substantially overlap, so no ecosystem functionality would be lost if the barred replaced the spotted. Admittedly, I know little about their respective autecologies, so I could be completely wrong.
To address something Norman said below, but without adding an additional, separate comment and thereby potentially running afoul of the roolz, under the Endangered Species Act, unique populations of vertebrate species, such as subspecies, also have legal protections. That’s why the Florida panther, a subspecies of the eastern mountain lion, along with the Texas cougar and others, receives federal protection.
Yes. The southern resident Orcas are protected under the Endangered Species Act.
Beautiful pictures.
Yes, the Northern Spotted Owl is a subspecies. If it were to become extinct, the species itself would survive.
The same is true of the southern resident Orca population (roughly 75 individuals) in the Salish Sea, which is probably the most studied population of cetaceans in the world. Not a day goes by without reading about how imperiled they are and how they risk extinction. But there are probably more than 50,000 Orcas worldwide, so the Orca as a species is not on its way out.
After living in the San Juan Islands for several years, I can understand how people become attached to their local wildlife populations, even if their loss would not be a calamity for the world.
I don’t like the idea of shooting wildlife for purposes of saving the Spotted Owl, as the Barred Owl is just living life as it should. It seems unfair to kill the Barred Owls, but fairness is a human concept. Should it apply in this case? But I understand the dilemma. There’s a strong social component to this debate, so any solution is going to be messy.
Personally I’ve always been glad that the Endangered Species Act is so strong — including that it protects subspecies (and even ‘distinct population segments’), that it protects obscure and ‘unimportant’ species just as much as charismatic ones, and that it requires protecting species in their wild habitats, not in captivity. But there’s something about this owl-killing plan that just seems wrong to me. It’s not just an animal rights thing; if the problem were nonnative rats I’d say let ’em have it. The Spotted Owl is ultimately in trouble because it depends on pockets of lush old-growth forest that are rapidly burning up if they haven’t been logged out already. Eliminating Barred Owls has been shown to benefit them, but it will probably only buy them a little more time. Killing half a million beautiful native owls in the probably vain hope of saving a disappearing one just seems cruel and disproportionate.
Beautiful photos! Do we know why the pelicans stretch their pouches like that?
I don’t! 😀