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Finding the nest is the most important part of the survey work, for it will help guide development of a timber harvest plan (THP). “Now you have a tree: it’s a dot on the map, and foresters know that, okay, 500 feet out, there’s no cutting; 1,000 feet out from the tree, there’s possibly a no-cut; seven-tenths of a mile out from the tree, you have to have so many acres in varying types of habitat: this nesting-roosting type of habitat, and also foraging habitat.”

The Conservation Fund, though, wants to know how productive the birds are as well. “What could happen is, say we get a torrential downpour, which could cause the nestlings to die. So we want to come back roughly the first week of June and see if the young have fledged the nest--have actually left.” The Fund is also committed to continuing with long-term surveys on land that has been selectively logged, to see whether the THPs they adopt are giving the birds what they need or are causing unanticipated problems.

Mike took a mouse and handed it to me by the tail. It squeaked softly. “Go ahead, put it on your hand.” I did, held my arm up, and before I knew it, the male owl had taken the mouse up to his branch, leaving as a souvenir a tiny scratch by my thumb. This time, the female let him administer the meal to their chicks.

Suddenly, a sneeze erupted above us, reminiscent of a tooting party horn. “I’ve never heard that sound before,” Mike commented. “But look at how she’s shaking her head. She’s getting ready to cough up a pellet.” And so she did, flinging a sodden gob of wet fur and tiny bones to the forest floor. We went in search of it--"sometimes you have to follow your nose”--and stumbled on an old pellet containing a diminutive collar bone and a shoulder or leg socket, before finding the fresh pellet virtually on top of a little skink. “That’s the redwood forest for you,” Mike remarked. “You look close enough and you’re bound to find something interesting."

The Making of a Wildlife Consultant
Mike went to school in Maine, graduating with a degree in forestry in 1990--the year the spotted owl was listed. “So it was a topic for discussion. One of my profs was asking, ‘Who cares about the spotted owl? Maybe it’s just time for the spotted owl to disappear.’ Of course, he was doing that to get a response out of us. And the other students said, ‘Yeah, maybe you’re right.’ But I was infuriated. I didn’t see why you can’t have a happy medium between forestry and wildlife and manage the two.”

Eventually he found himself in the Sierra Nevada, where he spent three years working on a demographic study of the California spotted owl. When that project wound down, word of mouth landed him back-to-back jobs in telemetry studies of spotted owl foraging habitat, once again in the Sierra Nevada, and then in Mendocino County. “It was my job to capture the owls, put radio transmitters on them--mounted on their backs with a sort of backpack system, the antenna going down their back about the length of their tail--and then go out five nights a week year round and try to get locations on them.”

The investigators learned that the owls spend roughly 75 percent of their time in 20 to 25 percent of their home range--"so it’s a small area, and it’s important to know where that small area is, because it should receive the highest priority for conservation. Parts further out in their home range can perhaps withstand some types of timber harvesting. In fact, some types of timber harvesting may actually enhance the prey species. So the idea is that the nest tree is like the anchor of their territory. As long as you keep that preserved without disturbances, you can do some manipulation to other parts of their home range, and they’ll adjust their foraging accordingly.”

At the conclusion of the second telemetry study in 2005, Mike got offers of work, but they all involved leaving Mendocino County. After five years, he’d grown attached to the area, and so he decided to see if he could survive doing consulting. The following year, when the Conservation Fund bought the Big River and Salmon Creek properties, he was in the right place at the right time.

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