Bob Pearson makes a call for spotted owls on the edge of the Goat Rocks wilderness near Packwood in June. In 1992 he knew of 158 active spotted owl nesting sites in the Cowlitz Valley Ranger District. Now he knows of 60 nesting sites. He knows of 300 nests of the non-native, aggressive barred owl, which is pushing out the rare spotted owl.
Bob Pearson listens for spotted owls after making a call on the edge of the Goat Rocks wilderness near Packwood during a June trip to the high country. As non-native barred owls have invaded the area, spotted owls have been relegated to higher, steeper slopes, Pearson said.
This pair of spotted owls, photographed in 2007 by Joe Kulig, live on Dixon Mountain north of Packwood and are known as the Dixon Pair. Owl caller Bob Pearson said that, to the best of his knowledge, these owls are still actively occupying the site.
This pair of spotted owls, photographed in 2007 by Joe Kulig, live on Dixon Mountain north of Packwood and are known as the Dixon Pair. Owl caller Bob Pearson said that, to the best of his knowledge, these owls are still actively occupying the site.
PACKWOOD — Bob Pearson is the census taker of spotted owls and barred owls in Lewis County’s back country. He knows their nesting sites between Mount Rainier and Mount St. Helens and has witnessed firsthand the bigger, non-native barred owl take the forest over while spotted owl numbers continue to decline.
Pearson talks to owls, mimicking their distinctive hoots. He calls them vocalizations.
“Whoot, whoot . . . whoooop,” he trumpeted last summer on an old logging road at about 3,000 feet elevation, with Mount Rainier looming to the northwest. (Hear him call for owls here: http://tinyurl.com/ycjvlhd)
An owl’s response is usually a visitation by way of a tree branch just a hand’s reach away. At that particular spot above Packwood, Pearson’s call was unsuccessful. But he made his way alone to White Pass to try it at another site.
For years, Pearson called only for spotted owls. But increasingly, barred owls — native of the East Coast — came to his calls until he developed a hoot for them to get a handle on their numbers.
In 2000 the barred owls reached a tipping point, Pearson said. “And after that it just seemed like the barred owls mushroomed.”
“You can’t go to a spotted owl site and not get a barred owl,” Pearson added. “They’re literally everywhere.”
The influx has further hampered the rejuvenation of the spotted owl, an animal that symbolized logging battles in the Northwest after it was listed as threatened in 1990 and whose numbers continue to decline.
In 1992, Pearson knew of 158 active spotted owl nesting sites in the Cowlitz Valley Ranger District of the Gifford Pinchot National Forest. Now he knows of 60.
There are about 300 barred owl sites.
“Now the spotted owls are more or less relegated to the steeper forests,” Pearson said.
Higher elevations bring harsher winter conditions; fewer opportunities for hunting.
Take Packwood Lake: It seems the idyll for any wild creature. Yet Pearson doesn’t know of a single spotted owl to nest there, while at least six pairs of barred owls have claimed its habitat.
Getting Hooting
A native of Illinois, Pearson came to Packwood at the age of 20 in 1973. He was visiting a grandfather whose roots go back to homesteaders and just sort of stuck around, getting a job on a fire crew.
After a four-year stint in the Army in the early 1980s, he came back to Packwood to work on fire crews again. He couldn’t help but take inventory of the amount of logging that had occurred while he was gone and be stirred.
In a couple years’ time, he was working with environmental groups like the Portland-based Gifford Pinchot Task Force, helping inventory remnants of old-growth forest. Impressed by his work, biologists asked him to help survey for spotted owls.
And then he began hooting. He first worked with tapes, refining his calls in the field.
Meanwhile, logging battles grew more contentious. The 1994 Northwest Forest Plan, originally designed to bulletproof timber sales against lawsuits, was full of policy loopholes and did nothing to satisfy industry or improve owl numbers.
Pearson kept working, often as a consultant on timber sales. He stayed busy and often worked seven days a week.
Over time, funding for his survey work dried up.
But Pearson kept hooting.
“People like Bob are more critical in a time where the owls are diminishing and the amount of money going into research is decreasing,” said Paul Bannick, author of the “The Owl and Woodpecker: Encounters With North America’s Most Iconic Birds.”
It’s safe to say Pearson is the owl expert of Lewis County, Bannick said.
On Monday, Pearson was working on data input for owl surveys he conducted this past summer for the Gifford Pinchot Task Force.
Earlier this year, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service released a recovery plan for the spotted owl. In the works for years, it is the federal government’s acknowledgement that the Northwest Forest Plan didn’t work.
Meanwhile, part of the recovery plan calls for the controversial shooting of barred owls as an experiment in repopulating traditional nesting sites with spotted owls. The policy isn’t in practice on the Gifford Pinchot, but Pearson said it’s been successful in California.
Spotted owls may have been the proverbial menu item for loggers in the 1990s, a jibe at environmentalists, but Pearson wouldn’t mind hearing about a few barred owls getting called within the blast of a shotgun.
“I’d like to see it happen to buy the spotted owls a little more time,” he said.
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Adam Pearson: (360) 807-8208
