WORDS BY ISOBEL WHITCOMB
Photograph by Balarama Heller
On summer nights I can hear her. Across the crush of traffic noise, in the park near my house in Portland, Oregon, a series of low, muffled hoots: a barred owl. “Who cooks for you? Who cooks for you all?” Her call, the archetype of an owl hoot, is bucolic. It makes me think of forests dense with the scream of insects and skies awash with stars.
Barred owl calls permeate Oregon’s mountain lakes, city parks, and dense rainforests. But this bird, which evolved east of the Mississippi River, is a recent arrival—and today, whether it should exist here is at the center of controversy. That’s because it’s edging out another, beloved owl species: the spotted owl. The latter, which lives only among the hulking old growth of the Pacific Northwest and California, was the emblem of activists against logging during the timber wars of the 1980s and 1990s. Today, in parts of its range, its populations are plummeting. So last year, after decades of deliberation, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced their intention to authorize the culling of up to half a million barred owls over three decades in order to free up habitat for native spotted owls.
At surface level, it’s an all-too-familiar story: An invasive species takes over and threatens the existence of a native one. But its backstory is complex; unlike many plant and animal transplants, the barred owl wasn’t brought to Oregon by humans. Instead, it’s a migrant. Around the turn of the 20th century, white settlers began planting trees where there had been none before—throughout the Canadian Prairies and Great Plains of the U.S. Meanwhile, they suppressed the natural fire regimes and killed the bison that kept the landscape open and treeless. In doing so, humans inadvertently designed a highway for displaced owls. Over decades, in a slow trickle, they flew north, towards Canada, then west—some settling in forests along the way, others journeying onward. By 1970, they’d reached Oregon.
The U.S. Forest Service’s announcement sparked public outcry. In my hometown in southern Oregon, I saw people who had never expressed opposition to the lethal control of invasive bullfrogs and mussels rally in defense of barred owls. On March 25, 2024, 75 wildlife protection and animal rights organizations, including several chapters of the Audubon Society, signed a letter in opposition to the decision. I, too, was rattled: When I heard the decision, my heart broke for the barred owls I hear across my street, in the park where I trail run weekly, and at the mountain lakes where I camp.
At a time where people are fleeing deadly heat, wildfire, and floods, it’s hard not to identify with the barred owl’s search for a new place to live.
Using lethal control against an invasive species isn’t unfamiliar. From the Florida Everglades to Alaska’s Aleutian Islands, we trap and kill Burmese pythons, nutria, and rats. New Englanders gladly stamp out emerald ash borers spotted lanternflies. All of these creatures were unwitting cargo, carried by humans to a new place with disastrous consequences. But the barred owl uprooted itself. At a time where people are fleeing deadly heat, wildfire, and floods, it’s hard not to identify with the barred owl’s search for a new place to live. Within biology, this controversy raises an important question: As more plants and animals shift their ranges to more favorable climatic conditions, what is the difference between an invasive species and a refugee?
When barred owls arrived in Oregon, they would have encountered a landscape marred by industrial logging—a landscape where the spotted owl was already struggling for survival. The spotted owl needed to fly under the cool, protective cover of old growth and to nest in the hollows of huge, old trees. By the time barred owls arrived, most of the region had already been transformed into plywood and paper, and spotted owls were isolated to fragmented stands of trees.
Meanwhile, in wiry, replanted forests, amid clear-cut moonscapes, barred owls thrived. They ate whatever living thing they could find, from mammals to insects, fish to other birds. To a barred owl, a squirrel den or a crow’s nest was as good a place as any to raise a clutch of eggs. Over decades, they became a fixture of the new scraggly patchwork of the Pacific Northwest.
The diminutive spotted owl, meanwhile, couldn’t compete with the resourceful newcomer—even after logging slowed to a crawl. A 2021 study found that spotted owl populations had dropped to less than 35% of their 1995 levels. “Basically, the habitat loss on federal land stabilized. But spotted owl populations have continued to plummet. That’s the role that barred owls have played,” said David Wiens, a wildlife biologist at the USGS Forest and Rangeland Ecosystem Science Center in Corvallis, Oregon.
Recently, a team of wildlife biologists conducted an experiment: they carefully studied five tracts of spotted owl habitat. Within each of them, the team set up two plots: One in which they left barred and spotted owls to their own devices, another in which they systematically killed any barred owls that entered outside of the nesting season—a total of 2,485 by the end of the study several years later. In the locations where barred owls were not killed, the spotted owl populations declined 12% each year, on average. At sites where barred owls were shot, spotted owls didn’t exactly rebound—but their populations stabilized.
Wiens, who led the barred owl removal experiment, still remembers his first encounter with a spotted owl 18 years ago. Silent and watchful, she fluttered out of the trees onto the lonely forest road where Wiens, then a graduate student at Oregon State University, was conducting surveys with a group of other biologists. From a branch just fifteen feet away from the group, she regarded them with dark eyes before fluttering away again. “It was beautiful,” Wiens said.
Today, no spotted owls are left in that forest. “It has been completely taken over,” Wiens said. Much of the Oregon Coast Range has met the same fate. Preliminary data suggest that barred owls are putting a dent in populations of the small mammals and amphibians that they like to eat, too. For Wiens and other devoted scientists, it’s been a tragedy to witness, a chorus of birdsong, chirping frogs, and humming insects thinning into a single lonely melody: “Who cooks for you? Who cooks for you all?”
Migrating glaciers, fluctuating food sources, changing climates—throughout the history of the Earth, these shifts have pushed animals to seek out new habitat. During the last ice age, animals moved to warm refuges in the landscape. Meanwhile, others roamed from Asia into North America across a land bridge exposed by falling sea levels. In that way, the story of the barred owl isn’t new or unusual. “The idea that species have these static native ranges is a historical inaccuracy,” said Christopher Weiss-Lehman, an ecologist at the University of Wyoming researching species range movement and evolution.
In the past, movement allowed species to persist in changing environmental conditions. Sometimes, it led to upheaval. Three million years ago, North and South America collided for the first time. Opossums, giant sloths, and armadillo-like creatures the size of cars lumbered across the Panamanian Isthmus from South America into North America. In the reverse direction, cougars slunk, horses galloped, and rodents scurried.
“Spotted owl populations have continued to plummet. That’s the role that barred owls have played.”
Today, South America is a patchwork of those range-shifted species. North America, not so much. Puzzled scientists analyzed fossil data to try and get to the root of the imbalance. Their results, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggested that South American mammals, which included a massive group of species similar to marsupials, just couldn’t compete against North American bears and big cats. The result was a cascade of extinctions.
“Throughout history, you see this reshuffling when species move around and different populations interact,” Weiss-Lehman said.
Then, there’s the uncomfortable reality that we, humans, are a range-shifting species. People may have begun arriving in the Americas as early as 25,000 years ago. Although the exact date is uncertain, archaeologists do know that our arrival precipitated another wave of extinctions, as humans hunted down the continent’s once-abundant supersized mammals. “We’re honestly one of the most interesting examples of a range-shifting species,” Weiss-Lehman said. “It gets at an interesting question: How do we see ourselves in the landscape?”
Do we want to consider the first carnivores to enter the Amazon—the ancestors of jaguars, pumas, and spectacled bears—invasive? Do we consider the first Americans invasive? When I shared this perspective with USGS research ecologist Toni Lyn Morelli, she laughed. It’s not the first time she’s heard it, and thinking about it sometimes makes her want to throw her hands up in defeat. If there’s no such thing as a native or an invasive species, then what are we fighting so hard to preserve?
Morelli doesn’t want to halt species movement altogether. “In climate adaptation, range shift is the number one strategy,” she said. “We want species to move if we want them to survive climate change.” That’s already happening: In California’s Sierra, mountain-dwelling pika are being forced to higher altitudes; Moose, lynx, and squirrels are seeking out cooler latitudes in Canada. In one study of 4,000 land mammals, scientists found that half were on the move.
She just doesn’t want these species to cause mayhem in their new ecosystems, like the barred owl did. Morelli and a team of other ecologists are encouraging researchers and conservationists to assess that risk based on a framework developed for human-introduced species. This framework considers characteristics like how quickly it reproduces and how abundant it is in its home range. But in the end, the team acknowledged in a review, there’s inherent value judgment in deciding which species are invasive; which we allow to move, and those we don’t. That begs the question: what values motivate the mass culling of barred owls?
Delve into the literature about spotted owls, and you’ll see one word come up an awful lot: “iconic.” Literally speaking, the word icon comes from the latin word for a likeness, a portrait or a statue; In other words, to be an icon is to symbolize something else.
The spotted owl entered the spotlight at the height of the timber wars of the 1980s and 1990s. Activists were chaining themselves to trees and building barricades around the last remaining stands of old-growth forests. The controversial tactics raised awareness, but they didn’t do much to halt timber sales. Instead, it was the spotted owls that brought the industry to a halt.
“The idea that species have these static native ranges is a historical inaccuracy.”
In the 1970s, scientists realized that the bird was inextricably tied to the dwindling old-growth ecosystem. Beginning in 1987, activists latched onto the bird, which was listed as “threatened” in the State of Oregon but not at a federal level, as a strategy for halting clear cutting. Three years of political battles ensued. By the end of it, the activists achieved a federal “threatened” designation for the spotted owl and federal policy to protect the bird’s habitat. Already slowed by its decimation of old-growth forest, the logging industry’s response to these events were sudden—by 1996, timber sales in Oregon dropped to less than 0.5 billion board feet, down from 2.9 billion board feet on average between 1983 and 1989.
The spotted owl is a symbol: of an iconic, endangered ecosystem, of a moment in history, of our own guilt at the loss of vast swaths of towering, moss-draped trees.
And if the spotted owl is a symbol, the barred owl acts as a scapegoat. The reality is, barred owls didn’t initiate the loss of these birds or of the habitat they guard. Its presence has the same root cause: the relentless extraction of resources.
I admire the barred owl. I never knew the Pacific Northwest of old, with its tangled root systems and towering trees festooned with mosses. Though I have visited patches of old growth forest left in national and state parks, I experienced these places as museums, sites of both awe and mourning. Much of the Oregon I know is a state where dense thickets of tangled, juvenile trees compete for sunlight, where hillsides look like the backs of mangy dogs. And still it is home.
Similarly, the barred owl has made home in a broken landscape. On summer nights, it’s oppressively hot in formerly-temperate Portland. Average summer temperatures have increased by around 3.7 degrees Fahrenheit in the past 50 years alone. As the sun sets, and the day’s heat radiates from my neighborhood’s asphalt grid, I crack my window. Over the sound of crickets, I wait to hear the hoot of the barred owl.
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Barred Owls Blur Lines Between Invasive Species and Refugees
