Into the Woods with Spotted Owls
Mike Stephens Knows Them Well

Anne Canright

Mike Stephens is a bear of a man--appropriately enough, for someone who spends much of his time in the redwood forests of Mendocino County. Also like a bear, he prowls those woods mainly at night, alert to the subtlest of sounds. In particular, he is listening for hoots and whistles. Stephens is a conservation biologist, contracted by the nonprofit Conservation Fund to monitor spotted owl populations on several tracts of land the Fund has purchased in the past several years. This May I went to Mendocino to spend an evening with him--hoping, of course, to get a glimpse of these rare birds.

You will recall the war the spotted owl sparked in the late 1980s, when the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposed listing the bird as threatened throughout its range (northern California into Washington) due to loss of old-growth habitat, primarily as a result of timber harvesting. Listing occurred in June 1990, and in 1991 all logging in national forests ceased by court order. The loss of 30,000 of 168,000 jobs was predicted, and in short order stickers reading I LIKE SPOTTED OWLS--FRIED and KILL A SPOTTED OWL--SAVE A LOGGER adorned pickup bumpers, and plastic spotted owls were hung in effigy in Oregon sawmills.

In fact, by the 1980s the timber industry was already in big trouble. Between 1947 and 1964, according to a University of Wisconsin study published in 1988, logging jobs had declined in number by 90 percent in the Pacific Northwest, as old-growth forests dwindled and automation became the rule. While individual loggers and small sawmill operators decried what they considered misguided and excessive environmental protection, larger timber interests saw the writing on the wall: the industry needed to adapt and change. The industry sponsored the Sustainable Forestry Initiative, promoting best management practices that dovetail with stricter regulatory requirements. Large commercial timber companies also continued to sell off forest lands.

Some of the divested lands have “been fragmented into small holdings for single-family homes or weekend getaways,” according to the Conservation Fund website. Most acreage, however, has been “sold to timber investment or real estate investment companies, whose harvest practices are often geared toward short-term profit as opposed to long-term sustainable management typically employed by commercial forest products companies.” In 2004, to permanently protect an especially sensitive natural area in Mendocino County, the Conservation Fund went out on a huge (or, depending on how you look at it, incredibly spindly) financial limb, purchasing the 24,000-acre Garcia River Forest from Coastal Forestlands Ltd. for $18 million, in partnership with the Coastal Conservancy, Wildlife Conservation Board, and Nature Conservancy. Two years later they upped the ante, paying Hawthorn Timber Company LLC and the Campbell Group $48.5 million for 16,000 acres of redwood and Douglas fir forests surrounding Big River and Salmon Creek--home to coho salmon, steelhead trout, and northern spotted owls.

The Owl Guy
To pay off the large mortgage on these precious lands, the Fund needs to harvest and sell their timber--and they wish to do so sustainably, with a strict eye to such long-term ecological goals as enhanced water quality, wildlife protection, and improved wildlife habitat. For that to happen, they needed wildlife consultants to census and monitor the more sensitive populations of flora and fauna. Enter (among a small army of others) Mike Stephens, “owl guy."

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.”

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
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.

Hooting and Hollering
We left the first pair in the deepening dusk. The male looked forlorn, as if, having dutifully delivered three juicy mice to his young, now he deserved one for himself. Mike assured me that the fact he’d hacked up a pellet (shortly after his mate) meant that he’d eaten well the night before. “You get no break today, buddy,” he told the owl.

We drove a little farther into the parcel and halted next to a small stream. At this site, Mike had spent several days tracking down a pair who led him on a merry chase through the woods. Only after dedicated pursuit did he manage to find their nest, which is near a tract due to be logged this year and only a couple hundred feet off the road. This habitat is more marginal than the first nesting stand, with younger and sparser trees. The fact that the road is so close to the nest is of concern as well. “If this were a main haul road,” Mike explained, “the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service would say the owls knew what they were getting into when they nested. But for this one that doesn’t get used much, if all of a sudden you have ten big-deal trucks a day coming through, it might cause problems. I think what’s going to happen is that they won’t allow hauling until about the first week of July. And it’s up to me to make sure that if there are fledglings, they’re able to fly and get out of the way if they land on the road when a truck is coming along. Whereas most operations can start in June, this will just be put off a month. I’ll also make sure the nesting process is still happening. If the attempt failed, they will probably be able to haul earlier.”

From the fledglings’ first flight in early July, the parents have four to five months to teach them what they need to know to survive, before kicking them out of the nest by mid-October. “They’ll use feeding as a training session. They’ll almost play games, like ‘If you want it, you’ve got to follow me,’ and they’ll lead the juveniles through all this dense brush.” When it’s time for the young to be on their own, they’re some 20 percent heavier than their parents. This head start doesn’t guarantee success, however. “The data suggest that 80 percent or so of juveniles don’t make it through their first year. The key is the first winter: if they make it through that, their survival rate goes up to about 90 percent.” Part of the problem is territoriality--finding an area that isn’t occupied and that has sufficient forage. It’s an energetics issue as well, since they may have to fly long distances to find a spot that they can call home.

One-, two-, and three-year-olds often end up as “floaters,” with a very large home range but no defined territory. To claim a territory of their own, they typically have to wait for an opening--perhaps running an older male out of his territory or, in the case of a female, seeing if the male of a pair will take a fancy to her and abandon his mate. These newly disenfranchised birds then become floaters themselves. “They’re almost impossible to study because they don’t vocalize, since they don’t have a territory they’re defending.”

We spent half an hour more trying to attract the second pair with small-rodent noises (pursed-lipped squeaks) and the dry rustle of leaves, courtesy of a mouse tied on a string, as well as repeated contact calls. The male showed himself twice, but each time immediately disappeared into the thick forest with his mouse booty, so it wasn’t possible to verify whether the nest was still being tended. Mike would have to make a follow-up visit. “Even if they’re no longer nesting, they’re obviously roosting--it’s an area that they prefer. And knowing that is important.”

After mouse number two, Mike called it quits. Back in the truck, we creaked and rattled up the rough dirt road so I could observe the main part of his job: hooting or calling. Lasting much of the night and taking him to 15 to 20 stations a night, 75 to 100 a week, this activity helps Mike keep track of the resident territorial owls in the parcel, and of their range. Commonly for THP development, two-year surveys are required, with three calling cycles a year, at least one of which must be done after May 15; the other two generally fall somewhere between March and late July.

By now the sky was deep indigo, and every so often a bit of red reflective tape winked from a black bush in our headlights, signaling a calling station. He chose one at a high point on the ridge, with a good chance of a response.

At each station, Mike explained as he put on his vest (now sans mouse box) and pulled out his GPS unit and clipboard, he plays recorded spotted owl calls--hence the loudspeaker I’d noticed in his truck--and listens for a total of ten minutes. “You make a note of when you start and finish and if you heard anything or not. If you did hear something, you write down the time, the direction you heard it in, a qualitative description of the call, and you try to gauge how far away it was. I also like to make a note of weather,” he said, as he jotted down calm, scattered clouds, dry, 69 degrees. If possible, he lures the birds in to check their ankles for unique identifying bands; if that doesn’t work, he comes back the next afternoon or early evening and does a follow-up visit, traveling to the area he judged the response came from and using the mouse technique combined with a contact call to get a close look and an ID.

Although most of the owl calls are easily mimicked by humans, the $900 device that Mike uses, featuring actual spotted owl recordings, brings more consistent responses. It cycles somewhat randomly between silence and the four basic calls: the upward trending two-note whistle of the friendly “hello-I’m-here-where-are-you?” contact call; the basic four-note call, used to declare territory (“the cadence is the important thing here: one forceful hoot, then two close together, followed by one”); the agitation call, which starts off sounding like an upset monkey and ends in the four-note hoot; and the angry female “crow-bark,” which defies description (and, said Mike, defies mimicry as well)--but reminded me less of a crow than of a sick squirrel.

“This is the part of my work that becomes a job,” Mike said. “It’s a good opportunity to get caught up on your paperwork, but you also need to keep your eyes open, because sometimes the birds won’t respond but will just fly in to check you out. Being patient and persistent is key.”

The calls boomed out from our ridgetop stance. HOOT HOOT-HOOT HOOT! Monkey chatter. Two-note whistle. In the intervening silences, dogs barked. (“Yep, it gets them going too,” Mike chuckled. “Makes the job more challenging.”) Each station, whether there’s a response or not, is entered on a survey form, which the California Department of Forestry and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service use in THP development.

“Actually, when you think about it,” said Mike, “it’s amazing that you can submit a timber harvest plan in February or March, and then by June or July you can be harvesting trees. For the state government to turn something around that fast, especially when you’re involved with endangered species, stream crossings and stream alterations, a whole variety of plants, archeological surveys, geological surveys”--and of course the spotted owl surveys--"it’s kind of amazing." If, however, any of these surveys bring to light an impediment to the cutting of trees, the THP is denied. It’s one area where things are clear-cut.

Suddenly Mike stopped and listened. “I just heard an owl a little while ago, and it sounds like it’s coming closer.” The recorded calls continued relentlessly--but then yes, I heard the four-note hoot myself. And yes, it was coming closer. We stood in the darkness, looking at the silhouetted trees in front of us. Suddenly, a dark form swept into the upper branches of a Douglas fir. “Stay there!” Mike said softly as he rummaged for the plastic box and pulled out a squeaking mouse, then flung it onto the ground. After a few moments’ deliberation, the owl soared down and with pinpoint accuracy snatched the prey off the ground. Perching in another tree, he regarded us, then took the head off the rodent and munched it down.

Our visitor? It was the nesting male we’d tantalized with mousy morsels just a few hours before--identified by the white-on-black markings of the left leg-band. “That’s pretty impressive,” said Mike, shaking his head. “He came quite a ways for a measly mouse. But it’s better than nothing. And I’m glad to give him another--it’s kind of a peace offering.”

As we rumbled back down the road, Mike mused on the satisfactions of a job that many would consider boring--never mind what it does to your social life (Mike starts his workday shortly before dusk, and tries to get to bed by sunrise). “When you’re with the birds,” he said, “you’re forced to be in the present. We’re the only animal that doesn’t really live in the present--we’re always living in the past or future. So maybe the owls activate a different part of your brain. It does something to you, I know that. The closest analogy I have is playing music with other people: time loses dimension, and you find really interesting ways of nonverbal communication. For me, it’s like that with the owls as well.