California Coast & Ocean

I met Mike at three o’clock in the afternoon at his tiny house in Albion. He was loading his well-used pickup with the equipment he’d need for the night’s work, including a roomy, many-pocketed vest, headlamp, GPS, and loudspeaker system. Crumpled, half-finished bags of snack food littered the truck bed and cab. We headed inland on Albion Ridge Road through the pygmy forest, then turned right onto Elliot Road--one entrance to the Fund’s 4,500-acre Salmon Creek property. “This parcel,” said Mike, “has the highest density of spotted owls I’ve ever worked on: there’s between seven and eight pairs, which translates to a territory every 650 acres or so.” Territories in parcels further inland, he explained, are larger, perhaps 1,000 acres, thanks to drier conditions and a shift from redwoods and firs, which the owls prefer, to oaks and madrones. In the Garcia River parcel to the south, which has several 2,000-foot peaks and many steep-sided canyons, you may get an owl pair only every 4,200 acres or so.

Surveying takes place from early March into June and July, but the focus is on May, the middle of the breeding season. “The birds are most territorial then,” said Mike, “and if they’re nesting especially, they’re in a desperate search for food.” The female lays one to three eggs, usually in late March, then she sits on the eggs for a month, getting a half-hour to 45-minute break, max, every day. The male, meanwhile, has to feed himself and the female, and when the eggs hatch, he must provide for the chicks--"eating machines"--as well. Small rodents are their favored fare, especially the dusky-footed woodrat, though they will also take small birds, bats, insects, and sometimes lizards.

Mike parked near a towering, fire-scarred redwood snag, left over from an old round of logging. “It probably had some kind of deformity,” he remarked. “Amazingly, the worst trees for the sawmill end up being the best ones for wildlife. This tree probably won’t be used by spotted owls for a while because the cavities toward the top are fairly exposed. When the trees around it get bigger and provide a canopy, then you have your classic spotted owl nesting tree.” In the meantime, the tree provides habitat for bats, woodpeckers, Vaux’s swifts, purple martins, and smaller saw-whet, screech, or pygmy owls.

“How big is a spotted owl?” I asked as we made our way along an overgrown skid trail.

“About 19 inches,” he said. “You’ll see--any minute now. In fact, look there,” and he pointed midway up a slender Douglas fir tree. There, staring curiously at us (if I may anthropomorphize--and with owls, it’s almost impossible not to), was a compact owl, complete with spots. “That’s the male; he’s a little smaller than the female. And do you hear that whistling sound? That’s the contact call. It’s the female asking the male, ‘What’s going on? Who are these people?’”

A pocket on the back of Mike’s vest is extra-large--just the right size for a plastic box full of sawdust and a handful of pet store mice. Essential equipment for an owl surveyor. “What I do is, I mimic their call, and the male will usually respond, telling me, ‘This territory’s already occupied--get out of here and don’t come back.’ If I continue to call, he will often come over to check me out. But spotted owls, unlike most other owls, aren’t really intimidated by people, and if you present them with live prey, the fear motivator is overridden by the food motivator. That’s how we determine if they’re nesting or not”--by following the male as he takes the prey back to his mate or their voracious young.

He pulled a mouse out of the box, placed it on the back of his hand, and held his arm up in the air. Within a minute the owl’s eyes had locked on the jittery little animal, then in silence he swooped off his branch, nabbed the mouse neatly in his talons, and soared midway up a redwood tree off to our right. “The male’s going to take it to the nest--if the female lets him. You can tell if a pair has a good relationship, if he’s allowed to feed the young.” Evidently this pair was still working things out, because she immediately flew over and took the mouse, disappearing with it into the nest--a cavity on the backside of an adjacent snag.

Mike explained that this strategy had led him to the nest in the first place, about a month before. “This happens to be a tree that they’ve used in the past; but where we parked the car--as soon as I got out and got my stuff together, there he’d be, waiting for me. So I gave him a few mice, and eventually he delivered one to the female. It took three or four tries.” The male was banded in 1994; he’s been in the area a long time. “We’re still learning about nest-site fidelity, but one thing we do know is that the pair doesn’t really come back--it’s more that they don’t leave; they don’t migrate, at least not here on the coast.”