Northern spotted owl habitat cut

A few years ago I was lucky to tag along with a team of biologists from the Bureau of Land Management as they tagged northern spotted owl owlets near Roseburg, Ore. Today the Trump administration announced they are cutting 3.4 million acres of designated critical habitat for the endangered owl in Oregon, Washington, and California. The decision will allow the cutting of timber on the land, but according to Noah Greenwald of the Center for Biological Diversity, "This is perhaps the nail in the coffin for the northern spotted owl...".

In order to find the owlets in the dense forest the biologist provided a live mouse to the adult northern spotted owl and it flew to its young.

After banding, the BLM biologist releases one of the owlets.