Well, U.S. Fish and Wildlife may have told the Humboldt marten to suck it up this week, but it looks like the service has the northern spotted owl’s back. The agency issued an initial finding — based on a three-year-old Environmental Protection Information Center petition — to reclassify the bird from a “threatened” to an […]
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Northwest Forest Plan’s 20th
Twenty years after the Northwest Forest Plan’s birth, lawyer/writer Daniel Jack Chasan looks at whether the plan has done all it was cracked up to do. Did it save Northern Spotted owls? Did it protect the logging industry from utter devastation? Chasan concludes, in part one of his story at Crosscut.com, that “[n]either the owl nor the […]
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Scat Dogs Spot Owls
No, they’re not canine masters of jazzy nonsense, crooning in the moonlight. They’re the University of Washington’s Center for Conservation Biology detection dogs Shrek and Max, who’ve been trained to sniff out northern spotted owl pellets (the undigested stuff they hack up after a meal) at the bases of trees (and thusly find the owls). […]
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Struggle for Survival
The federal Fish and Wildlife Service is almost ready to implement its controversial study on protecting the endangered northern spotted owl. The public input period has just ended, and once the agency finishes reviewing the roughly 100 letters it received, it will put together its final plan. There is a good chance that the chosen […]
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Shooting Owls
The little white mouse in Lowell Diller’s hand could have jumped. It could have beaten a path up his arm and found refuge in the folds of red flannel. Instead it just stood there on his gloved hand, too tame or too nervous to make a move. Diller’s dogs sat perfectly still, eyes on the […]
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Hey, You. Barred Owl.
All this fright and scatter about how the barred owl’s taking over our Pacific Northwest woods, and nobody bothered to ask the barred owl directly about it? As in, “hey barred owl, how many of there are you, really, and have you really come to finish off what the “Spotted Owl–It’s What’s For Dinner” folks […]
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Bottled Owl
In a story in Discovery News online, scientists say habitat loss related to development and logging, as well as the encroachment of barred owls from the north, have likely combined to depress the Northern Spotted Owl’s population to the point of creating a genetic bottleneck. And that can lead to inbreeding. Or loss. Says Robert […]