The Night Owls
Biologist Mark Higley measures and takes samples from a barred owl on the Hoopa Valley Reservation. Credit: Nate Hegyi
For over ten years, biologist Mark Higley has been stalking the forests of the Hoopa Valley Reservation with a shotgun. His mission? To save the northern spotted owl. The threat? The more aggressive barred owl, which has spread from eastern forests into the Pacific Northwest.
The federal government plans to scale up these efforts and kill hundreds of thousands of barred owls across multiple states. But can the plan really save the northern spotted owl? And is the barred owl really “invasive”… or just expanding its range?
In this episode, Nate Hegyi dons a headlamp and heads into the forest with Mark Higley to catch a glimpse of these two rivals, and find out what it takes to kill these charismatic raptors, night after night, in the name of conservation.
Featuring Mark Higley, Tom Wheeler, and Wayne Pacelle.
LINKS
The federal government’s barred owl management plan is very long but they have a helpful list of frequently asked questions.
Check out some beautiful photos of Mark Higley’s work in this Audubon magazine story from a few years ago.
Curious about the timber wars? Oregon Public Broadcasting has an excellent podcast miniseries you should listen to.
CREDITS
Host: Nate Hegyi
Reported and produced by Nate Hegyi
Mixed by Nate Hegyi
Editing by Taylor Quimby
Our staff includes Justine Paradis, Felix Poon, Marina Henke, and Kate Dario
Executive producer: Taylor Quimby
Rebecca Lavoie is NHPR’s Director of On-Demand Audio
Music by Blue Dot Sessions
Outside/In is a production of New Hampshire Public Radio
Audio Transcript
Note: Episodes of Outside/In are made as pieces of audio, and some context and nuance may be lost on the page. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors.
Nate Hegyi: Mark Higley has some ground rules when he’s out in the middle of the night saving owls. Bring a good pair of hiking boots. A headlamp. Spare batteries. And..
Mark Higley: never put one in the chamber until right before you're going to shoot.
Nate Hegyi [in tape]: Okay.
Mark Higley: Always empty it completely right after.
Nate Hegyi: We were on a logging road in the Hoopa Valley reservation in Northern California. Mark is the chief biologist here… and he was holding a 12-gauge shotgun with a flashlight fixed to its barrel.
We were looking for an invasive species that is threatening the Northern Spotted Owl.
[sound of falling, crunching, etc.]
Mark Higley: You see him?
Nate Hegyi: Mark spotted… something… high up in a tree.
Mark Higley: I’m going to shoot.
Nate Hegyi [in tape]: Okay
Nate Hegyi: He pulled the trigger.
[Click]
Nate Hegyi: Dry fire. He forgot to load a shell.
Chick-click [loading sound]
Nate Hegyi: He aimed again…
Boom! [unloads shell]
[The summit - three violin strikes]
Nate Hegyi: A ball of fluff… almost like a teddy bear… fell to the ground. It was an owl.
[The summit - drums]
Nate Hegyi: Mark does this about three nights a week. Driving around logging roads… killing one kind of owl to try and save another.
Mark Higley: I probably average between 1 and 2 birds a night. It depends on the time of the season. If I hear them, then it's usually pretty good odds of getting them.
[The Summit - heavy drums hit]
Nate Hegyi: This is Outside/In, I’m Nate Hegyi. Today on the show, we explore a controversial new government plan. A plan to shoot hundreds of thousands of barred owls across the pacific northwest in the next few years.
Nate [in tape]: Do you think that these spotted owls would be here if you hadn't started shooting barred owls?
Mark Higley: Oh, we wouldn't have any spotted owls left by now. Absolutely not.
Nate Hegyi: How far should we go to keep an animal from going extinct?
Wayne Pacelle: We're going to unleash an unprecedented assault on a North American native owl and we shouldn’t do it.
Nate Hegyi: And, we’re going to spend some time with Mark to find out, on a personal level, what it takes to make this trade-off night after night.
Mark Higley: If I didn’t believe they were invasive, I wouldn’t be doing it.
Nate Hegyi: Stay tuned
Nate Hegyi: The Hoopa Valley reservation is only about 12 miles across. But when you get there… It feels huge.
There are forested mountains that are thick with pine and oak stands… cut through with winding logging roads.
Nate Hegyi [in tape]: You must know this place like the back of your hand.
Mark Higley: I've seen more of the reservation in the dark than most people see in the daylight, and not only on the roads, but on foot.
Nate Hegyi: Mark isn’t Indigenous. He was actually born outside of Los Angeles. But he was hired by the tribe more than thirty years ago to help study and manage all the wild animals here. Black bears. Fishers. Bobcats… and… northern spotted owls.
That’s the owl he’s trying to save.
There are about twenty breeding pairs living in the steep canyons and gullies of this reservation.
And now Mark wanted to show me one.
Mark Higley: Ho ho ho ho ho.
Nate Hegyi [in tape]: Oh, so you actually just do the hooting yourself
Mark Higley: Yes, For spotted.
Nate Hegyi [in tape]: Okay. And so –
Mark Higley: ho ho Whoo hoo!
Mark Higley: I've been talking too much. I need to get a drink.
Nate Hegyi [in tape]: Feeling like a little bit of a hoarse owl?
Nate Hegyi: Honestly, I thought we’d have better chances going to a local zoo – To me, owls have always been elusive. You’re lucky to hear one, nevermind catch a glimpse.
But then…
Mark Higley: There's a spotted owl right there.
Nate Hegyi [in tape]: There it is.
Mark Higley: Yep.
Nate Hegyi [in tape]: Whoa!
Nate Hegyi: The Northern Spotted Owl is what you might call… a classic looking owl. It’s got those big, mesmerizing eyes… and what look like white thumbprints all over it’s brown plumage.
Nate Hegyi [in tape]: Wow, I just did not expect one to just pop out like this. Smaller than I expected…
Nate Hegyi: I figured this was as close as we were going to get.
But then Mark pulled a live mouse out of his truck.
Turns out, luring owls in is SHOCKINGLY easy.
Biologists and wildlife surveyors have it down to a science.
Mark Higley: Generally, it's all for reading the bands, capturing them, finding nests, finding young. Not for show and tell like we are doing today.
Nate Hegyi: Mark perched the mouse on the end of a stick and gave it to me.
This by the way, is a technique known as mousing.
Nate Hegyi [in tape]: All right. I'm holding the stick with a mouse on it. Oh. Don't fall, buddy. There you Go.
Nate Hegyi: Then - one of the owls goes for it. It glided so silently, you could barely hear it - even though it was just inches away from my microphone.
WOOSH
Nate Hegyi [in tape]: Wow. That was amazing.
[Cach PKL - Limoncello]
Nate Hegyi: I am an unabashed animal nerd… but never in my life did I think I’d get to see a northern spotted owl in the wild… it’s kind of like seeing a celebrity.
Tom Wheeler: It is so important to the history of the pacific northwest – it’s been so impactful – that it’s like running into LeBron James on the street or something. It’s iconic.
Nate Hegyi: This is Tom Wheeler.
He heads a conservation group in Northern California called the Environmental Protection Information Center.
He was just a kid when the Northern Spotted Owl was protected under the Endangered Species Act.
Tom Wheeler: The northern spotted owl was listed in 1990, and this was an effort by the conservation community to get the owl listed because we were logging its habitat out of existence.
Nate Hegyi: To get why this was such a big deal… you’ve got to go back a little farther.
The pacific northwest is known for big, old growth forests. Redwoods, maples, spruces… Massive trees that – back in the 20th century – fetched timber companies thousands of dollars.
Tom Wheeler: This is the period after World War two where we were meeting kind of our, uh, timber and housing needs with softwood from the Pacific Northwest. We were chopping down forests on public lands, you know, primarily managed by the Forest Service. And it was coming at the expense of the northern spotted owl.
Nate Hegyi: The northern spotted owl needs old growth forests to survive. That’s because they rear their young in the broken tops and rotted insides old trees.
They’re also picky eaters… in many parts of the pacific northwest, they eat primarily flying squirrels… which also prefer old growth forests.
So… In the 1970’s and 80’s, Environmentalists launched a huge campaign to stop the logging here.
They physically blocked logging roads, chained themselves to equipment… pretty much did whatever they could.
They also pushed to get the northern spotted owl listed under the Endangered Species Act. Because not only would that save the bird… but it would also protect millions of acres of its habitat – the old growth forest.
It was a time that many people called… The Timber Wars.
News Archival clip: Truckers tied yellow ribbons to their vehicles and some put spots on plastic owls, a symbol of the animal they say environmentalists are using as an excuse not to cut down trees.
Tom Wheeler: It was a heated time in the Pacific Northwest. You know, you would see, uh, Pickup trucks in rural areas of Washington, Oregon and California with bumper stickers that said save a tree. Wipe your ass with a spotted owl. Stuff like that. Or spotted owl helper. You know, uh, a joke that you should add. Spotted owl. Uh, as a as one of your proteins.
Nate Hegyi: Get it? Hamburger helper… spotted owl helper? Anyway, this is how the spotted owl got celebrity status in the Northwest. To environmentalists, it was a symbol of what they were trying to save. To many others, though, it was the focus of their outrage.
Tom Wheeler: The listing of the northern spotted owl basically shut down logging for a number of years on these federal public lands. It stopped largely the logging of old growth in the Pacific Northwest.
Nate Hegyi: The 1990s saw timber sales fall by nearly 50% in the region. And while there were other outside factors, a study from the University of Chicago found that the spotted owl’s listing directly led to the loss of about 32,000 local jobs.
Of course, that same study says that if we kept logging at the same rate we doing were back then… these old growth forests might not be here today.
So – looking back, listing the northern spotted owl probably saved the forest… but ironically… it didn’t totally save the owl.
[DeVantz - Sticker Sheet]
Nate Hegyi: When the federal government listed the bird in 1990… they warned about the dangers of overlogging. But they also warned that there was another enemy lurking in the forest…
The barred owl.
Tom Wheeler: The barred owl is a very charismatic species. I think a lot of us know the “who cooks for you call” of a Barred owl.
Owl: who cooks for you! Who cooks for you!
Tom Wheeler: It's not lovely when when I hear it out in the forest now. Because I know that it's coming at a very significant cost.
[DeVantz - Sticker Sheet bump and fade]
Nate Hegyi: The barred owl is native to the woodlands of the east coast. They rely on trees.
And for a long time, the Great Plains were a grassy, flat barrier that stopped them from moving West.
But as Canadians and Americans slowly colonized the prairies over the past 120 years… They planted more and more trees.
So the barred owl was able to hopscotch west – from tree to tree – right into the backyard of the northern spotted owl.
And barred owls… are much better survivors.
Tom Wheeler: They are a generalist, like a coyote. They eat a broader base of prey than the northern spotted owl, so they're kind of less constrained by a prey base. Um, and they have a more general habitat need. So that has enabled them to quickly expand their populations and quickly expand their range.
Nate Hegyi: They are also way more aggressive than northern spotted owls. They’ll push them out of their nesting sites or occasionally even kill them.
As the number of barred owls has grown in the pacific northwest… the number of northern spotted owls has fallen – in some areas by more than 75 percent.
And this isn’t just an owl verses owl situation. When barred owls swoop in they start killing other at-risk species like red tree voles and western gray squirrels. They can change the entire forest ecosystem.
[Plaster Combo mux]
Nate Hegyi: That’s why – earlier this year – the federal government announced a plan.
A plan to kill up to 15,000 barred owls a year - for the next three decades - across Oregon, Washington and California.
For those of you doing the math in your head - that’s almost half a million owls.
It is a last ditch effort that Tom – a guy who does not hunt… who has been a vegan since he was 19… fully endorses.
Tom Wheeler: protecting the northern spotted owl did come at a human cost. And now to give up on protecting the northern spotted owl feels, um, feels somewhat forgetful of that human cost that, uh, we should do hard things. Um, and we did hard things in listing the northern spotted owl and protecting the old growth forests of the Pacific Northwest. We should do hard things here, too.
[Plaster Combo, then crossfade into crickets]
Back in the Hoopa Valley, Mark Higley is showing me how he kills barred owls.
Mark Higley: it's like a redneck sport. Get a case of beer and go sit on the tailgate and call him in.
Nate Hegyi: That is not Mark’s line. He heard it from a mentor who was talking about killing barred owls and it was kind of a joke. There’s no beer drinking here. No sitting on a tailgate. It is meticulous and patient work.
He began by setting up two loudspeakers on the side of a logging road. Then he pressed play.
<<hoot hoot hoot>>
Nate Hegyi: Mark records the calls of almost every barred owl before he shoots them. And it's those hoots that are now playing out of these speakers.
The sound of now-dead owls… calling out into the darkness… like ghosts.
<<hoot hoot hoot>>
Nate Hegyi: Mark has been doing this for over ten years. He was one of the first biologists to kill barred owls as part of a small-scale experiment.
He says it stabilized the population of northern spotted owls on the Hoopa Valley reservation.
<<leaves crunching>>
Nate Hegyi: His headlamp jumped from tree to tree… searching.
Nothing yet.
I was standing a little too close to one of the loudspeakers - Mark calls them “callers”.
Mark Higley: don't stand by the collar because if they come in aggressive, you don't want to get hit.
Nate Hegyi [in tape]:Oh, really?
He’s not talking about gunfire. He’s referring to getting hit… by an owl.
Mark Higley: I've never been hit, but some of my coworkers have. One young guy was out for his first night, And he went over there and then set the collar down, but stood right next to it. And he got hit in the head by a barred owl that came in, and he just ducked like that, fortunately, so that it didn't get him in the eyes, but he had gashes across his head
Nate Hegyi: That’s how the callers work. The barred owls are territorial… so when they hear the recordings… they check them out. And sure enough… after a few minutes…
Mark Higley: There's a pair.
[in tape] Nate Hegyi: There's a pair. Okay.
Nate Hegyi: Two barred owls… a male and a female… were duetting. It’s a kind of sing-song call and response that mates will do to let other owls know that this is their territory.
<<riotous duetting>>
Nate Hegyi: Mark pulled out his shotgun and flicked on the night scope… bathing the male owl with light.
<< shot>>
Nate Hegyi: Mark grabbed the carcass, placed it on the tailgate of the truck.
The female was still there – she evidently wasn’t scared away by the shot.
She sat on a nearby branch, still singing her now lonely part of the duet.
<<duet… then shot>>
[Vally VX - Limoncello fade in]
Nate Hegyi: I am a hunter. I’ve shot deer. I’ve shot ducks. I’ve always justified this because I used the animal.
I eat it.
This feels like a different ball game.
An owl’s eyes – large and forward facing – are almost human-like…
And watching that female stare at Mark and make her last sound… drawn into his firing range by the calls of all these other dead owls… making their own last sounds before they were shot.
I can’t help it… I felt uncomfortable.
[post and then fade out Vally VX - Limoncello]
Nate Hegyi [in tape]: : What is it about the barred owl removal that isn't enjoyable to you?
Mark Higley: Well, when I, I was born and raised hunting, and my dad taught me never to kill something. You're not going to eat.
Nate Hegyi [in tape]: Was that something that you had to get over when you first started doing this?
Mark Higley: Yeah, a little bit. But first, basically my justification, my mind is that it's scientific collecting. Not hunting at all. So but still just the thought. I mean, I still take spiders out of my house and put them outside. Ants though, I kind of wipe them out. Insects, beetles, moths. Catch them, put them outside.
Nate Hegyi [in tape]: And you know, when you hunt. you know, I'm sure you feel similarly as I have when you take a deer. I always feel a profound, profound sadness, after I've done that, or I'll feel something.
Mark Higley: It's not the same as when I'm hunting. Like the deer I shot yesterday. Um. I feel like you do. It's like. All right. This animal just gave up its life for me to have good food, and I worked my butt off for it. And it's not over yet because I still have to pack it out. But when I'm doing the barred owl stuff, um, it always feels weird to shoot them, but it doesn't really affect me the same way.
[Laddo]
Nate Hegyi: Coming up… can this plan actually scale up? Will it save spotted owls? That’s next after the break
[Laddo fade]
Nate Hegyi: You’re listening to Outside/In, I’m Nate Hegyi
For about a year I lived out on the prairies of central Montana.
At night me and my wife would sit outside…drink a beer… and listen to the coyotes howl. Sometimes we’d even throw on our favorite country song by the singer Colter Wall.
“The coyote is a survivor, reckon he’s got to be. He lives in the snow at forty below or in malibu by the sea..”
Nate Hegyi: I love that line. The coyote is a survivor.
For decades, the federal government has spent hundreds of millions of dollars killing coyotes on the behest of farmers and ranchers.
They shoot them, trap them, poison them… you name it.
And yet it hasn’t done a dent on their population. In fact, coyote numbers are growing… their range has expanded far from the prairies and the Great Plains of the American West.
Shooters be damned.
Wayne Pacelle: And this is precisely the situation that you'll see with barred owls.
Nate Hegyi: That’s Wayne Pacelle. He’s the head of Animal Wellness Action. It’s an animal rights group based in D.C.
They, and dozens of other groups including the SPCA and local audubon chapters, think the federal plan to kill hundreds of thousands of barred owls is a very bad idea.
Wayne Pacelle: You don't cherry pick one place where you've got an enthusiastic barred owl shooter and extrapolate that to an area of 24 million acres. It's not workable. It's plainly not workable.
Nate Hegyi: Wayne is worried about the sheer size and complexity of the removal area. You have three states, multiple reservations, private land, six national parks:
Wayne Pacelle: are they going to seriously talk about sending in shooters into Olympic National Park and to Crater Lake National Park? I mean, is there not going to be a tremendous public backlash to that?
[Rally - Rayling]
Nate Hegyi: Now, the federal plan does break down all this land into smaller “focal management areas.” These are places where they think removal will have the biggest impact.
But then there’s a labor problem. This plan doesn’t come with cash to pay removal specialists.
And while it’s pretty easy to find cowboys that want to shoot coyotes… owls are a different story.
Wayne Pacelle: Who is going to be motivated to shoot these animals on this scale year after year after year, decade after decade? You have a couple of enthusiasts right now, but they are a very, very small army.
[Rally - Rayling fade]
Nate Hegyi: Compounding this problem… Barred owls are protected under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act.
So you can’t just send a bunch of random, owl-hating dudes out to blast away these birds. That would be illegal. In order to kill a barred owl, you need special training, and permits from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service first.
Because one weird thing about this whole dilemma? barred owls and spotted owls… look very similar.
And you don’t want to go off accidentally killing the species you’re trying to save.
Wayne Pacelle: This is just… on every level. It seems to me the degree of difficulty is in is approaching the notion of impossibility.
[Durna Villa fade in]
Nate Hegyi: But there is something else that really bugs Wayne. It’s this notion that the barred owls are somehow an invasive species. We’re not talking about a bug that was accidentally brought over from one side of the globe to the other. Barred owl ranges… are expanding.
Wayne Pacelle: if we want to define range expansion as creating invasive animals, I mean, where does that end? I mean, the reason that we have animals that populate this Earth is that they expanded in range. I mean, human beings expanded in range. You know, they crossed the Bering Strait 12,000 years ago. Look at every species on the planet. They've engaged in range expansion.
Nate Hegyi: And sure… the barred owls got to the pacific northwest because of human activity. They might not have made it there if we hadn’t planted all of those trees across the great plains. But:
Wayne Pacelle: Everything is human-caused at this point because our our footprint is is is ubiquitous. Native Americans were burning forests and created greater grasslands, which made it more difficult for forest owls to hopscotch across the country. but when that burning stopped, then there were more trees. And then because of climate change, you know, barred owls adapted and moved farther north. And they found a boreal forest that was a continuous forest from east to west for thousands of miles. This has been going on for decades. This is what happens in the world.
[Durna Villa fade out]
Nate Hegyi: To Wayne, humans and our impact are a part of nature. We’ve been altering the landscape for millenia.
And while it’s okay to change our behavior to protect wild animals… it’s not okay to kill an animal simply because it’s adapting to this new world.
In that sense… We need to let nature take its course.
Wayne Pacelle: I don't have an easy answer on how to save the spotted owl. No one has that answer. But these are not simple questions. And the absence of an easy alternative solution doesn't mean you should pursue a foolhardy plan that has an enormous animal welfare cost.
[crickets creep in]
Mark Higley: This is a male barred owl. He's smaller than the female. Female barred owls are huge.
Nate Hegyi: The dead barred owl’s eyes were closed and its wings were spread out across the tailgate of Mark Higley’s truck. He had a pair of calipers out, measuring the size of the owl’s feet.
Mark Higley: the males have smaller feet, they don't weigh as much.
Nate Hegyi: Mark catalogs every single barred owl he kills. They are weighed, measured, blood drawn, geolocated and then placed into a giant freezer.
While he doesn’t enjoy killing these birds… he’s very comfortable calling them invasive.
Mark Higley: If I didn't believe that they were invasive, I wouldn't be doing it. If I thought that they just naturally would have done this no matter what.
Nate Hegyi: Mark sees the owl’s presence through the eyes of the Hoopa Valley tribe. They are here as a direct product of European colonization.
Mark Higley: once the settlers started to exclude fires set by Native Americans and extirpated buffalo, that helped keep the prairies open and planted trees around every little settlement. It made that stepping stone for barred owls to get across and come down the West coast.
Nate Hegyi: There are spotted owl feathers in the regalia of the Hoopa Valley tribe. They have found baskets that had spotted owl feathers adjoining them. They are a traditional species… and later, in the truck, Mark tells me he sees himself as their caretaker.
Mark Higley: Like I said, I'm not doing it for the fun of it. Right? And you saw me shoot my 700 700th barred owl.
Nate Hegyi [in tape]: Oh, really?
Mark Higley: Yeah, that was one.
Nate Hegyi [in tape]: That was your 700th. Wow.
Mark Higley: That's a weird milestone.
Nate Hegyi [in tape]: Yeah. How does that make you feel? Does it do anything?
Mark Higley: I'm ready to be done. Getting close to retirement. Ready to pass it on. But yeah, if I can do it, anybody could do it.
[Jeremiah’s Suit]
Nate Hegyi: The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service says this plan will take place over thirty years.
And a lot can change in three decades. Politics. Logging permits. Climate change. Who knows what else.
With endangered or threatened species… the hope is that you can always get back to some point of past equilibrium… take your foot off the gas and let the animals themselves take over.
But when you’re going with the interventionist approach – it’s not always clear if there can EVER be an endgame.
What if to save one owl… we’ll have to go on killing another one… forever?
[in tape] Nate Hegyi: I think you're gonna be cutting it a little close on the, uh, getting home by midnight tonight.
Mark Higley: Yeah, it's gonna suck.
Nate Hegyi: We had been out for nearly seven hours. My feet hurt, my back hurt. I was tired.
But then Mark spotted something:
Mark Higley: Dang it.
Nate Hegyi [in tape]: What?
Mark Higley: I just saw a Barred owl.
Nate Hegyi [in tape]: Oh, really?
Mark Higley: Yeah.
Nate Hegyi: Mark got out of the truck… grabbed his shotgun.
<<bang>>
Nate Hegyi: 701.
[Jeremiah’s Suit, spike and fade]
Nate Hegyi: If you want to check out the barred owl management plan for yourself, you can find a link in our show notes. We’ll also have some pictures and video from the trip on our website… outsideinradio.org
This episode was written and produced by me, Nate Hegyi
It was edited by our executive producer, Taylor Quimby.
Our team also includes Justine Paradis, Felix Poon, Marina Henke and Kate Dario.
Rebecca Lavoie is our head of on-demand audio.
Music from Blue Dot sessions. Our theme music is by breakmaster cylinder. But maybe it should be by a barred owl because they have some pretty awesome hoots.
Outside/In is a production of NHPR.