California spotted owl gets second look

By: DAVE DOWNEY - Staff Writer | Sunday, July 3, 2005 8:38 PM PDT ∞

The variety of spotted owl that lives in mountains of Riverside and San Diego counties may receive federal protection after all.

After concluding in 2003 that the California spotted owl was doing reasonably well and did not need to be placed under the protective umbrella of the Endangered Species Act, a federal agency has launched a new study to determine whether the nocturnal bird is on a precarious perch.

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service officials say new information has come out since the review and the bird's predicament warrants a second look. The agency plans to announce by March 14, 2006, whether the regional subspecies of spotted owl should be declared endangered or threatened.

"There is clearly new information out there that needs to be analyzed," said Al Donner, a spokesman for the Fish and Wildlife Service in Sacramento, in a telephone interview last week. "One is the fact that there has been a substantial expansion of the barred owl range (in the Sierra Nevada). The barred owls are a little more aggressive, a little bigger, and in many cases they tend to drive out spotted owls."

Consequently, Donner said, there is a need to determine just how much of a threat the barred owl poses.

Donner said federal biologists also need to determine how much of the spotted owl's territory was lost in the record-setting wildfires of October 2003, which torched three-quarters of a million acres in Southern California. Those Santa Ana-wind-driven blazes may have destroyed 28 spotted owl nesting areas in the mountains around Julian in San Diego County, and in the San Bernardino and San Gabriel mountains, officials said.

"We need to know what affect the wildfires have had on the Southern California spotted owl population," he said.

The Arizona-based Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental group that has repeatedly sued the federal government over what it states is the agency's failure to enforce the Endangered Species Act, challenged the service's rejection of its 2000 petition to protect the California spotted owl. The group petitioned the agency again in September 2004 to reconsider the status of the Southern and Central California subspecies of the signature bird of West Coast old-growth forests.

The effects of the 2003 wildfires aside, the center asserted that the drought and bark beetle had so ravaged Southern California forests that the bird was in danger of going extinct in the heavily urbanized region.

Biologists say there are about 2,000 California spotted owls left, most of them in the Sierra Nevada. There are about 400 in Southern California.

The largest concentration south of the Sierra is the 150 in the San Bernardino Mountains. There also were believed to be about 50 spotted owls in the San Gabriel Mountains northeast of Los Angeles, 20 in the San Jacinto Mountains around Idyllwild in Riverside County, 18 in the Palomar Mountain area of North San Diego County, 10 in the Laguna Mountains of eastern San Diego County and a couple in the Santa Ana Mountains of western Riverside County.

The owls also are known to live in conifer groves in the upper reaches of the Agua Tibia Wilderness southeast of Temecula, and the bird's homes in those mountains were narrowly missed by the 11,734-acre Pechanga fire of August 2000.

The estimates are based on counts made in the late 1990s, and service officials say they want to determine whether California spotted owl numbers have dwindled in the wake of flame, drought and beetles.

"Over the next nine months the service will evaluate this new information, and all the additional information we obtain, then make a decision on whether there is sufficient risk to the species to proceed with a listing proposal," said Steve Thompson, manager of the agency's California/Nevada regional office.

The California spotted owl is closely related to its northern and Mexican cousins, both of which have been listed as threatened species and protected by federal law since the early 1990s. The bird shares habitat in parts of the Sierra with the northern spotted owl, whose range extends all the way north to British Columbia. The Mexican spotted owl lives in Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, Colorado, Texas and Mexico.

The California spotted owl stands 16 inches to 19 inches tall and has a wingspan of 42 inches to 45 inches. It has big dark brown eyes and is wrapped in mottled brown and white feathers.

"Light-colored 'eyebrows' and 'whiskers' form a distinctive X between the eyes," according to the center's petition.

The California spotted owl's coloring falls somewhere in between the light-colored Mexican subspecies and its dark-colored northern cousin, Donner said.

"Their most common habitat is in the area between 3,000 and 7,000 feet in elevation, down through the Sierra and in your island mountain ranges in Southern California," Donner said. "They prefer a canopy of large trees."

Thompson urges scientists, environmentalists and others with updated information on the health of the California spotted owl population to share it with the federal agency by writing to the Sacramento Fish and Wildlife Office, 2800 Cottage Way, Room W-2605, Sacramento, CA 95825.

Contact staff writer Dave Downey at (951) 676-4315, Ext. 2616, or ddowney@californian.com.

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