Recently, an injured barred owl caused a kerfuffle in my local neighborhood—with everyone trying to help the beautiful bird. While this seemed unusual, Jude Isabella’s careful reporting has enlightened me: these birds are booming in British Columbia, to the detriment of some other owl species. This piece weighs up human villains against owl ones, with unsurprising results.
Healthy, diverse forests in the east also typically have open areas, carved into the canopy by wind or ice storms or through natural stand development over time. Barred owls thrive in such patchiness; they sweep soundlessly through the open spaces to hunt for prey. Before colonists thoroughly logged the Pacific Northwest, barred owls might have struggled to survive in its comparatively dense old-growth forests. But just as settlers altered the Great Plains in a way that may have provided a conduit west, so too did industrial logging of the Pacific Northwest’s old-growth forests help the region feel more like home for barred owls.
And so the barred owl did what any species would do when limits on its establishment and growth are gone. As Charles Darwin observed in 1859, “Lighten any check, mitigate the destruction ever so slightly, and the number of species will almost instantaneously increase to any amount.” Many species go forth and proliferate when opportunity arises; the barred owl is no exception.
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