Northern spotted owl

A nocturnal old-growth owl whose numbers keep falling even in protected forest, as a bigger relative from the East moves into its territory.

Northern spotted owl at a glance

Strix occidentalis caurina SPOT-ed owl; Strix occidentalis caurina is STRIKS ock-sih-den-TAL-iss kaw-RY-nuh

Type
Bird · owl
Diet
Carnivore
Size
About as long as a skateboard (18 inches / 46 cm), with a wingspan that can reach almost as wide as a bathtub is long (up to 4 feet / 1.2 m). It weighs about as much as a full bag of sugar (1.3 to 1.6 pounds / 600 to 700 grams); females outweigh males.
Lifespan
Around 10 years in the wild on average; the oldest banded bird on record was recaptured at an estimated 21 years old.
Conservation
Threatened

Eats flying squirrels, woodrats, voles, mice

A northern spotted owl hunts at night, perching quietly on a low branch and watching the forest floor and understory in near-total darkness before dropping onto a flying squirrel, woodrat, or other small mammal and grabbing it with its talons.

Should you worry?

No real worry. It's nocturnal and keeps away from people, hunting deep in the forest at night. If you hear one calling, the only ask is to stay quiet and skip playing a recorded owl call to try to summon it, since that can pull an owl off its territory or its hunting for the night.

For decades, checking on a pair of northern spotted owls meant sending someone out to imitate one: a biologist standing in old-growth forest at dusk, calling a soft four-note hoot into the trees and waiting to hear if a real owl answered. Olympic, Redwood, and North Cascades don’t do that anymore. Instead they zip-tie battery-powered recorders to hemlock trunks and let them run for six-week stretches, and when a biologist finally pulls the data from one, the software sometimes flags a sound nobody was listening for: not a spotted owl’s soft hoot, but the sharper bark of a barred owl, a bird with no business being this far from the eastern forests where it evolved.

That’s the real story of the northern spotted owl now, more than logging alone. Barred owls reached Washington from the East over fifty years ago and have since spread across the spotted owl’s entire range, hunting the same flying squirrels and woodrats, claiming the same old-growth limbs, and simply out-competing a smaller, quieter relative that never had to compete for any of it before. Even inside a park boundary, in forest that has never been logged, a spotted owl can lose its territory to an owl that only recently showed up.

In some fully protected, federal old-growth landscapes, spotted owl numbers have still fallen 80 to 90 percent, protection from logging turning out not to be protection from a rival bird. A ranger checking one of those recorders in the morning already has a good guess which species got there first.

Did you know?

  • Female northern spotted owls are bigger than males, weighing up to 20 percent more, the opposite of most hawks and falcons but common among owls.
  • A spotted owl hunts almost entirely in the dark, dropping silently onto prey it spotted from a perch, sometimes checking several different hunting spots in a single night before dawn.
  • The oldest known wild northern spotted owl was recaptured decades after it was first banded and was estimated to be 21 years old, more than twice the species' average lifespan.

Common questions

Why is the northern spotted owl disappearing even in protected forest?

Mostly because of another owl. Barred owls moved in from the East over the last half-century and now compete with spotted owls for the same food and nest sites across their whole range, out-competing them even where the old-growth forest itself is fine.

What does a northern spotted owl eat?

Mostly flying squirrels and woodrats, along with voles and mice, all caught by dropping silently onto them from a perch at night.

Are northern spotted owls dangerous to kids?

No. They're nocturnal and stay deep in the forest away from people. If you hear one, just stay quiet and don't try to call it in.

How can you tell a spotted owl from a barred owl?

A spotted owl has dark eyes and a barred tail with white spots on its head and chest. A barred owl is larger, has pale eyes, and calls with a distinctive hooting pattern.

Where it lives

Where we got this