The final plan, developed by a group of federal biologists and outside scientists, proposes spending $489 million over 30 years to return the threatened owl species to a stable, well-distributed population in Washington, Oregon and California.

But federal officials said the plan will be reviewed after 10 years, because so many uncertainties remain about threats to the owl, from habitat loss to climate change to competition from its more aggressive cousin, the barred owl.

Paul Phifer of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, who led the recovery team that developed the draft plan, said it’s not clear whether declining owl numbers across the region can be reversed in a decade.

“The best we can say with confidence is that in 10 years, we will probably be having the same conversation,” he said.

The plan calls for protecting 6.4 million acres in reserves west of the Cascades, all “high-quality habitat” outside those reserves, and up to 1.5 million acres of “older, complex forests” east of the Cascades that are not protected under the Northwest Forest plan. It also calls for controlling fire and insects that have destroyed large tracts of owl habitat in drier east-side forests; and carrying out “large-scale control experiments” to reduce populations of barred owls, which compete with spotted owls for habitat and prey.

Federal agencies dropped a draft proposal that would have given local Forest Service managers the option of protecting mapped owl habitat or devising their own systems of shifting owl reserves.

“We now have a more landscape approach on the east side and defined reserves on the west side,” said Ren Lohoefener, regional director of the Fish and Wildlife Service for the Pacific Region.

The final plan also takes a more measured approach to the control of barred owls.  The original draft recovery plan was rewritten in the fall of 2006 at the direction of an oversight committee of Bush administration appointees, who ordered the team to put more emphasis on the threat posed by the barred owl. The rewritten draft called for luring barred owls to 18 sites across the region with decoys, then shooting them with shotguns.

Phifer said that plan had been dropped for now. Instead, he said, federal agencies will wait for an upcoming study of the effectiveness of different methods of controlling barred owls. “Lethal control will probably be tried in some areas,” he said.  

Approach criticized

The northern spotted owl was listed as a threatened species throughout its range in 1990, under the George H.W. Bush administration, primarily due to loss of its habitat to logging. No plan for recovering the owl was ever adopted; instead, the Clinton administration adopted the Northwest Forest Plan as a blueprint for protecting and recovering a range of threatened species, including owls, marbled murrelets and salmon.

Both environmental and timber industry groups criticized the final recovery plan, which will not be subject to public comment or peer review.
Steve Holmer of the American Bird Conservancy said it could open the way for federal land managers to abandon the Northwest Forest Plan and its more protective 7.5-million-acre system of older forest reserves.

“It leaves a lot of discretion for them to be cutting in places they can’t cut now,” he said.

The plan also exaggerates the impact of wildfire on owl survival, Holmer said. “This is basically turning the whole east side into an uncontrolled experimental logging zone.”

“The Fish and Wildlife Service once again has ignored scientists, even its own federal working group, who called for an outright ban on logging of remaining mature and old-growth forest,” said Dominick DellaSala, chief scientist for the National Center for Conservation Science and Policy and a member of the original owl recovery team.

He predicted that the Bureau of Land Management will use the recovery plan to justify logging more than 110,000 acres in Western Oregon that is largely off-limits to logging under the Northwest Forest Plan.

‘Immense threat’

For its part, the timber industry said it’s about time federal agencies acknowledged the “immense threat” the barred owl poses to spotted owl survival.

But Tom Partin, president of the American Forest Resource Council, said the recovery plan fails to acknowledge the need for “active forest management” west of the Cascades, where most owls live.

“Instead, they have again opted to draw arbitrary reserve lines on maps and walk away from addressing the habitat and prey needs of the owl,” Partin said in a statement. “It didn’t work in the last decade, and it won’t work in the next.”

Lohoefener stressed that the recovery plan provides guidance only and is not a regulatory document, although he said it will be used by national forests in the region as they revise their management plans.

“Unfortunately, the northern spotted owl has not recovered since its listing,” he said. “Today, we believe the most pressing threat is competition from barred owls.” But habitat loss, including from wildfires, remains a major factor, he said.

“Not all fire is bad for owls,” Phifer said, “but catastrophic wildfire destroys habitat.”