Northern Spotted Owl. Photo by Dennis Newman.
As if old growth logging, and competition from barred owls wasn’t enough.
There’s another threat to Oregon’s fragile population of northern spotted owls.
Research from Oregon State University says climate change may also hurt the spotted owl’s chances for survival.
The Impact of Climate Change
Climate change models predict Oregon and the Pacific Northwest will experience warmer and drier summers, as well as warmer and wetter winters, because of global warming. Lead researcher Betsy Glenn says both of those trends make it harder spotted owls to survive, but in different ways.
- Unusually dry summers reduce the food supply for spotted owls. That’s when you’re mostly likely to see big declines in the numbers of northern flying squirrels and other small mammals that spotted owls like to eat. Glenn says less food means lower survival rates for adults and owls won’t expand into areas when there’s not enough to eat.
- If the spring time nesting season is colder and wetter than normal, Glenn says it hurts the survival chances of owl fledglings.
“Adult spotted owls have fairly high annual survival rates, while reproduction is much more variable,” says Glenn. “We found that survival was more closely related to regional climate measures such as drought, while recruitment of new owls into the population was more often associated with local weather conditions.”
Other Factors Still Important
The researchers also found that the impact of climate and weather was very different at the six locations they studied in Oregon and Washington. They conclude that other factors, such as the quality of habitat, also play a major role in the future of the spotted owl. That includes the increasing number of barred owls, a larger and more aggressive species. Barred owls are driving spotted owls from their traditional territories.
A quote from the research, which appears in the journal Biological Conservation.
“Given that natural resource managers cannot control climate variation and barred owls are likely to persist and increase in the range of the northern spotted owl, maintaining sufficient high quality habitat on the landscape remains the most important management strategy for the conservation of this subspecies.”
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