aviary for four years before they
mated. “We’ve had to learn everything,”
says McCulligh.
spotted owls rose from obscurity to
distinction in the 1980s and 1990s and
became a symbol of the eradication of
ancient rainforests in the Pacific North-
west. In the United States, debate and
lawsuits raged over logging in the owl’s
habitat and mill towns famously sold
t-shirts and bumper stickers with the
slogan, “Save a Logger, Eat an Owl.”
Even after logging was halted in old-
growth Pacific Northwest forests in the
early 1990s, the species has continued
to decline in the U.S.
In Canada, the federal and provin-
cial governments have known for
decades that the spotted owl was in
trouble, yet they have failed to take suf-
ficient action to reverse that downward
trend. Spotted owls were assessed as
endangered in 1986 by the Committee
on the Status of Endangered Wildlife
in Canada, when only a few hundred
remained in the wild.
In response, the federal government
implemented a legally mandated fed-
eral recovery strategy in 2006. It has
been an abysmal failure. Spotted owls
are now functionally extinct in Can-
ada’s wild, where an estimated 1,000
owls once lived in southwestern B.C.’s
old-growth forests. The B.C. govern-
ment detected only two spotted owl
individuals in the Canadian wild, both
in the Fraser Canyon. They found no
breeding pairs.
The decimation of B.C.’s spotted owl
population has scientists on both sides
of the border asking how we manage
the 600 species legally protected under
Canada’s Species at Risk Act. Substan-
tial amounts of money are being spent
on efforts to recover endangered species
while governments quietly sanctionthe destruction of their habitat. The B.C.
government, for instance, has approved
clear-cut logging in areas it set aside
for spotted owl recovery, while sinking
roughly $1.5 million into the captive
breeding program since 2014.
To save the ailing hatchling,
McCulligh texted a veterinarian, who
diagnosed an infection and prescribed
antibiotics diluted with water.
Thankfully, he survived. Once he
could swallow muscle, the owl was
hand-fed pieces of rat organ meat andGOVERNMENT EXPERTS HAVE KNOWN FOR
DECADES THAT THE SPOTTED OWL IS IN
SERIOUS TROUBLE.rd.ca 85