HOOPA, CA - A female northern spotted owl catches a mouse on a stick held by Mark Higley, wildlife biologist for the Hoopa Valley Tribe, on the Hoopa Valley Reservation on Aug. 28, 2024. Biologists offer mice to owls in order to locate nest trees or fledglings. A male spotted owl has lived in this location since 2015, and had paired with a female barred owl until the female was removed in 2021. Last year, this female spotted owl paired with the male spotted owl, resulting in two fledglings this past May. In the structurally complex and older forests of the Pacific Northwest, the spread of the invasive barred owl, in addition to high-intensity wildfires, is threatening the existence of the northern spotted owl. Biologists in northern California are leading the removal of barred owls as part of a research effort to protect the northern spotted owl.

ARCATA, Calif. – The hooting had died down and the two bird lovers faced the immensity of the dark forest.

Scanning his light among the redwoods, Danny Hofstadter listened. The distant ocean sounded like wind. There was nothing more from the barred owl that he and his colleague, Madeleine Cameron, had been stalking.

“I hate the silent treatment,” Hofstadter said.

They slung their shotguns over their shoulders and hiked on.

Here among the world’s tallest trees, Hofstadter and Cameron are part of a tiny band of biologists holding the line against an invasion that threatens to push the northern spotted owl, an icon of the Pacific Northwest, into extinction. The birds’ decline, accelerated by an encroaching rival, has become so dire it led the scientists here: Four nights a week, they strap on headlamps and slip into the forests of Northern California to kill barred owls.

Their work is part of an ongoing study by the University of Wisconsin to assess whether removing the barred owl, a species spreading with abandon down the West Coast, will help the spotted owl survive and protect the wider ecosystem. But these nocturnal hunts are now expanding beyond research. The federal government in August approved a plan to kill up to nearly half a million barred owls over the next three decades.

This effort is one of the country’s most audacious attempts to stop the spread of a species the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service considers invasive. Opponents have decried the policy as sanctioning a mass killing, picking winners in a competition among two owls of similar size and appearance, birds who sometimes even interbreed.

Some environmental and birding organizations reluctantly endorsed the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s management plan – a “gut-wrenching” call, as Birds Connect Seattle put it. Other animal welfare groups remain staunchly opposed. Animal Wellness Action, a nonprofit which described the new approach as “wholesale slaughter,” filed suit last month in federal court to block the program.

The group’s president, Wayne Pacelle, described the management plan as both inhumane and futile, attempting to limit a fast-spreading owl that is native to North America and protected by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act.

“The plan is doomed to fail,” Pacelle said. “You’re going to get on a killing treadmill that the Fish and Wildlife Service can never step off of.”

Hofstadter has been carrying out the most expansive barred owl removal effort to date – a research project involving six hunters that has killed more than 1,000 owls in Northern California since 2019 across nearly 10 million acres. They believe a quick death for the barred owls is more humane than capture. And that their work protecting spotted owls – a species that launched a conservation movement more than three decades ago – will ultimately help safeguard some of the last stands of old growth forests in the West.

But it has not been easy.

“I personally did not decide to do owl work thinking this is where my career would be,” said Cameron, a 32-year-old research specialist on the project, whose only prior experience with guns had come at summer camp. “You get there through watching all of your favorite owls disappear.”

She was always the girl who loved birds. She was raised by “Berkeley hippies,” as she put it, and studied in the wildlife department at Humboldt State University. Now her parents were “mildly horrified” by her job choice. She’s had to warn prospective roommates there might be dead owls in the freezer.

She has turned nocturnal, keeping owl hours. She is not afraid, even alone in remote forests. It’s where she feels calm. As a girl, when her parents had dinner parties she would wander off into the forest. She liked to ride her zip line by moonlight, dark trees rushing past.

In the redwoods, Cameron and Hofstadter parked their pickup truck at a trailhead just before 9 p.m. If she expects to encounter hikers, Cameron will break down her Remington 12-gauge shotgun, hide the pieces inside ski socks. On this night in late August, there is no one around.

They begin by choosing a recorded call to broadcast into the forest. They are talking to owls, and they rely on both technique and superstition. How long to hoot? How long to stay quiet? Their speaker can play 32 different owl calls – hoots of introduction, sounds that accompany food delivery, screams of alarm.

What would deliver a barred owl tonight?

They begin with a call spotted owls use to make contact, this one a female. Four notes: Who. Who Who. Whooo.

They waited on the trail for nearly 40 minutes, as Hofstadter’s dog, a German shorthaired pointer named Charley, scampered among the ferns, a tiny light dancing on his GPS collar.

“Where is this bird?” Cameron asked.

– – –

More than just a bird

The first time Hofstadter saw a spotted owl it changed his life. As a child, he loved dinosaurs and the birds that evolved from them. His grandmother had a special love of owls, her home filled with statuettes. He had been planning to go to veterinary school when he took a U.S. Forest Service internship in Arizona. One afternoon, in the soft light before dusk, he saw a spotted owl perched high in an old Douglas fir, lichen hanging from its branches.

“I knew at that moment that I was going to spend the rest of my life working with that species,” he said.

The northern spotted owl is fluffy, a little bigger than a football, with dark, luminous eyes and a remarkably mellow demeanor around humans. In the Pacific Northwest, it is also far more than just a bird.

During the cultural battles of the 1980s and 1990s known as the “timber wars,” the spotted owl was the central symbol – a species that preferred to nest in the same old growth forests that environmentalists were fighting to save and timber companies wanted to cut.

The federal government listed the spotted owl as a threatened species in 1990. The anger in Pacific Northwest communities was visible on hats and bumper stickers – “Spotted Owl tastes like chicken. Save a logger, eat an owl” – in the honking convoys of logging trucks and the protesting environmentalists who chained themselves to timber equipment and refused to descend from ancient trees. At stake was a fading industry that had helped build the region while also stripping away its greatest natural resource.

When President Bill Clinton implemented the Northwest Forest Plan four years later – the largest ecosystem management plan in American history – the boundaries of the 24 million acres of public land were set to match the range of the northern spotted owl. For a few years, these protections on old growth forests seemed to help the owl’s chances. But over time, an unforeseen threat began to kill them off even as their habitat endured.

“We were not taking adequate account of the barred owl,” said Jerry Franklin, an author of the Northwest Forest Plan.

By the mid-2000s, detections of barred owls, an East Coast native spreading south from Canada, were surpassing spotted owls throughout much of its territory. Barred owls are slightly larger, more aggressive, and prefer the same nesting trees as spotted owls. They produced more young and would eat almost anything: the flying squirrels and wood rats favored by spotted owls, but also frogs, salamanders, beetles, snakes, turkeys and house cats.

Outcompeted by these new rivals, spotted owl populations began to plummet. Of the estimated 6,000 pairs that existed on federal land when the Northwest Forest Plan began, about 2,000 pairs or fewer now remain, and in some prime habitats, particularly in Washington and Oregon, where the invasion has been more extensive, they are nearly gone.

For the researchers who fanned out into the region’s forests every year to document the health of these beloved owls, it felt like a massacre.

“I pretty much just watched spotted owls disappearing over 12 years,” said Angela Rex, who lived in Forks, Washington, and monitored spotted owls in the mossy rainforests of the Olympic Peninsula. “The only time I have cried in the field was because I went to find some juveniles. And there were barred owls in their nests.”

The last time scientists walked the rainforests to count spotted owls across the Olympic Peninsula, once a quintessential habitat, they could only find two pairs.

“The concern now is for the spotted owl to be totally displaced,” said Raymond Davis, a U.S. Forest Service official who leads an interagency monitoring program for spotted owls in the Northwest. “And then blink out.”

– – –

‘No one hates them’

It was, ironically, a timber company that mounted the first lethal defense of spotted owls.

The Green Diamond Resource Company, a Seattle-based firm with timberlands throughout the West, began a pilot study in 2009, sanctioned by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, to shoot barred owls on their land in Northern California.

The company pursued this for several reasons, according to Keith Hamm, the company’s conservation planning manager. The owners valued environmental stewardship. Invading barred owls made it harder to assess the company’s own conservation efforts. And a dwindling population of spotted owls would likely mean even tighter restrictions on logging, he said.

“The scenario for a private landowner could get worse under doing nothing,” Hamm said.

Green Diamond’s research, published in the Journal of Wildlife Management in 2016, and other studies that followed, showed that killing barred owls was effective at stabilizing spotted owl populations.

Those opposed to killing barred owls argue that these studies show only modest gains for the spotted owl in limited geographic areas – something they say won’t be possible across 25 million acres and three states – particularly as barred owls can recover quickly.

“The plan to kill barred owls is a colossally reckless action, almost unprecedented in the history of American wildlife management,” Pacelle, of Animal Wellness Action, wrote in a letter of opposition sent to Interior Secretary Deb Haaland and signed by more than 200 animal welfare groups.

After years of doing this work, Hamm still has mixed feelings. He doesn’t want to have to kill animals. But given the circumstances, he said, the approach makes sense to him.

“There’s all kinds of options,” he said. “But the one that’s most effective and cost effective is lethal removal.”

Green Diamond’s protocols required a spotter to accompany a barred owl hunter to confirm the bird’s identity before a shot could be fired. Cameron began working as a spotter for Green Diamond in 2021, four years after she’d started at the company doing spotted owl surveys. She was well-versed in the bird life of the region, having spent time working with yellow-billed cuckoos, marbled murrelets and goshawks.

When she joined Green Diamond, it was during a pause in the company’s barred owl removal work. Cameron was shocked by the speed that the birds recolonized across hundreds of thousands of acres, driving out spotted owls she had come to know.

“No one hates them. That’s probably the hardest part,” Cameron said of barred owls. “We love them and appreciate them.”

But she was willing to stop them.

“You can’t be sitting front row to an extinction and not want to do something about it,” she said.

– – –

‘You get used to it’

By the time he joined a masters program in biology at the University of Wisconsin, Hofstadter knew all about the decline of his favorite species. He had surveyed and banded spotted owls for timber companies and other landowners in Northern California.

In 2018, his masters adviser, Zach Peery, offered to train him on barred owl removal. Peery, the primary investigator on the Northern California barred owl research, was planning to conduct a study in the Sierra Nevada on the efficacy of killing the owls across a vast landscape in a place where the birds had just begun to establish themselves. He chose Hofstadter as a co-lead.

There was one problem. Hofstadter had never fired a gun.

The son of famed cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter, and the grandson of a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, Hofstadter grew up on college campuses in an academic family he described as “totally anti-gun.” He spent most of his childhood as a vegetarian. He’d never killed anything.

While he felt it was an honor to be chosen for such an important study, and the work was necessary, he didn’t feel comfortable around other people with guns, so he avoided shooting ranges. To practice, he hauled cases of shells into a national forest and aimed at paper targets. He moved on to shooting clay targets zipping through the air.

“I shot case after case after case after case,” he said.

In training, he had watched others shoot barred owls, and the experience shook him. He remembers the hoots of an approaching barred owl and the dread he felt knowing it was flying to its death.

Hofstadter shot his first barred owl one night in the spring of 2019 in the Central Sierra Nevada mountains. He was so focused on following protocol – “Is it within 30 yards? Is it facing forward? Am I communicating with my trainer? Is it indeed a barred owl?” – that when he pulled the trigger it lacked the same emotional impact. Then it was on the ground, a study skin, a specimen to be weighed and measured.

He has now shot more than 350 barred owls.

“Whenever I take people out, I try to remember those first couple of times because I don’t want to seem coldhearted about it,” he said. “It’s just, you get used to it.”

– – –

‘The hardest bird’

“Hear it?”

The hoot sounded faintly in the distance, the unmistakable Who-Cooks-For-You call of a barred owl.

Hofstadter took a screenshot of the time: 11:06 p.m. He had been hiking for several miles along an overgrown Forest Service road in the Siskiyou Wilderness of the Six Rivers National Forest, broadcasting owl calls into the night.

Barred owls often respond to these calls by aggressively defending their territory, cannon balling into nearby branches, flying right up to the speaker, even sometimes slamming into the researchers. But this was late in the breeding season, when the fledglings leave the nest and the adults become less defensive of their territory. For more than two hours, Hofstadter’s calls were met with silence. Finally, it hooted back.

With the barred owls they shoot, the team conducts necropsies to learn about the prey in their stomachs. Hofstadter sees his work as putting the health of a population over the health of an individual. He believes removing barred owls will help the entire ecosystem, relieving pressure on many species who are now their prey. For the spotted owls, he knows this is their last chance.

There have been times, however, he wavered.

A few years ago, he had participated in a study of how juvenile barred owls disperse from the nest. He helped capture the birds, enticing them with live mice, and affixed them with GPS trackers. He spent hours with them, observing their behavior, taking photos. There was one in particular, in an old-growth stand of redwoods in Mendocino County, who behaved with eagerness and curiosity, much like a spotted owl.

“You would open your truck door and she’d be there already,” he said. “Just waiting for a mouse, just hanging out with you.”

At the end of the study, it was his responsibility to shoot the barred owls. He considered reaching out to a wildlife rehab center or some place that educated kids about raptors. But the thought of taking the owl from that beautiful forest and making it live in a box stopped him. He would feel worse doing that.

“And I made that decision, you know, for her life,” he said.

The last night he called her in, she arrived making quiet, begging calls for mice.

“That was the hardest bird I’ve ever had to remove,” he said.

In the Siskiyou, the barred owl he summoned remained out of range, perched in the upper branches of a fir, barely visible. Hofstadter moved up and down the trail, trying to draw her into position for a clean shot.

Eventually, the owl ceased to respond.

“She took off,” Hofstadter said.

He hiked back to his truck empty-handed. At 1 a.m., he began the long drive home.

– – –

A hoot in the darkness

The next night, in the redwoods, it seemed he and Cameron would fail again. Their barred owl was no longer responding.

And then, on the walk back to the truck, a hoot in the blackness.

“It sounds low,” Cameron said.

They left the trail, moving upslope, following the sound. Hofstadter picked his way to a different vantage, limbs and twigs crackling underfoot. He looked up, running his light among the redwoods, the ancient columns rising far beyond the reach of the beam. It was nearly midnight.

“There he is,” he said.

The barred owl was perched on a thin bare branch. It was a clean look, within range.

Hofstadter switched off his headlamp to load his gun. When he was ready, he flicked on the light, pressed in ear plugs, raised the gun to his shoulder and aimed. Charley whined at his feet in anticipation.

“Are you ready?” Hofstadter asked Cameron.

At the sound of the blast, his headlamp illuminated a cloud of smoke. The barred owl dropped, wheeling, breaking branches as it fell. Charley ran off to retrieve it.

Hofstadter sighed.

“All right,” he said. “We got a removal.”

Cameron quietly touched his hand in congratulation.

“Beautiful shot,” she whispered.