The federal government has finalized its long-awaited recovery plan for the critically endangered northern spotted owl.
With a plan to protect 4,000 square kilometres of old-growth forest, the recovery strategy hopes to reintroduce captive-raised spotted owls — just one of which remains in the wild — and grow the wild population to 250 mature owls within 50 years.
The spotted owl is known to biologists as an indicator species; their population health reflects the health of the forests they inhabit, and so, their declining numbers have been used since the 1990s to illustrate the impacts of industrial logging on forest ecosystems.
The species was first identified as endangered in 1986, and it has been a slow process to produce a recovery strategy since then. A 2006 plan for recovery lacked information on critical habitat, and in 2024, a federal court ruled that former environment minister Stephen Guilbeault broke the law by delaying (for eight months) a recommendation for an emergency order to protect the species. The newly amended version released this month has new details on threats and habitat, as well as new short-term goals, in accordance with a 2020 federal policy that wasn’t in place at the time of the original plan.
Joe Foy, protected areas campaigner at the Wilderness Committee, calls the spotted owls “warning lights” that shine on the health of the larger ecosystem. As the log trucks have kept moving through BC’s forests, however, all but a single light has faded. The only remaining wild-born spotted owl, a female, was last seen in 2022.
The newly published federal recovery strategy identifies a cumulative area of 4,000 square kilometres as core spotted owl critical habitat in and just north of the Fraser Valley. Around half of this area overlaps with provincial parks and existing protected wildlife areas. The other half does not have provincial protection. Protecting the area for the owls may have knock-on benefits for people, Foy said.
“A lot of these things that have been protected for the spotted owl, and should be protected for the spotted owl, are also favorite recreation areas, viewsheds, even drinking water supplies for three million people,” Foy said.
“The idea is that if forestry can be brought under control in a way that can bring the species back, a lot of other things should be protected in its wake.”
Industrial logging has been identified by the recovery strategy as one of the two main contributors to the spotted owl's decline in BC. The other factor is the increased prevalence of an aggressive close relative, the barred owl. But attempts to reintroduce the spotted owl into habitats cleared of barred owls, as part of a captive breeding strategy, have been unsuccessful.
According to Foy, this is because industrial logging is the dominant factor driving their decline. Simply getting rid of competition from barred owls is not enough, because the competition only exists because of logging.
“You see this with endangered species all around — and that is, if you weaken the health of a species by industrial habitat destruction, the final blow comes as a result of that habitat destruction, but it's often another species. With the mountain caribou, it's wolves … we argue the same with the spotted owls,” Foy said.
Spotted owls cannot survive in fragmented forest systems, which are created by the logging and clear-cutting of forests. They need closed canopies and open forests as they have evolved specialized survival strategies for these conditions. The barred owl, originally an eastern North American species, are generalists and thrived in the modified forests left behind by logging while spotted owls faded away.
Aside from its 50-year aspirations, the recovery strategy has interim goals to meet. The government wants to re-establish a population of four to six individuals in the wild by 2030 and monitor sites where reintroductions have occurred or are planned.
“The publication of the amended recovery strategy shows us that the spotted owl’s recovery is still biologically and technically feasible — we now call on the provincial and federal governments to take tangible steps to protect the species’ habitat from destruction,” said Rachel Gutman, a lawyer for Ecojustice, in a news release.
The first of the strategy’s short-term goals is to “immediately mitigate human-caused threats” to the birds’ habitat. As recently as a couple of weeks ago, provincially permitted logging was present in parts of the critical habitat, Foy said.
“We'll turn our attention now to the provincial government, and there's a lot of arguments. We're doing the right thing. We really are at the end of the road. The forest industry is much smaller than it used to be,” Foy said. “And really the question is, can we stop while we still have something to protect?”
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