Science of Seeing: Hope and the Thing with Feathers
To see a northern spotted owl, you must travel a two-lane highway for many miles, then make a turn onto an unmarked road and drive until the gravel slowly disappears under a swish of overgrown grass. You creep along until the path narrows, and the branches of young Douglas fir begin to pluck at your truck antenna like mischievous kids lining a parade route. You stop just as your front bumper grazes the massive trunk of a toppled tree, blocking you from going any further. Then—and only then—do you kill the engine and step out of the car.
This is a typical workday commute for Rita Claremont, one of a small group of biologists who conduct surveys of northern spotted owls each summer in the Cascade Mountains some 45 miles east of Eugene, Oregon. On a sunny day in August 2017, I tagged along with her into the old-growth forests that are home to these birds. We were joined by two other writers who, like me, were participants in the Long-term Ecological Reflections program at the nearby H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest station. Established in 2003, the program pairs writers and scientists in the field where together they spend time “re-imagin[ing] our relation to the natural world.”
Arguably, in the Pacific Northwest, no other animal has caused a greater reassessment of our relationship to the natural world than the northern spotted owl. In the pitched timber wars of the 1990s, the bird was the cause célèbre of environmentalists who sought to use the owl’s plummeting numbers as a way to end tree harvesting in the dwindling old-growth forests on public lands. In response, plastic owls were hung in effigy by sawmill operators who viewed the lockdown of these commercially valuable forests as a threat to their livelihoods.
Despite securing protection under the Endangered Species Act in 1990, owl populations have continued to struggle. These days, only about 1,200 pairs are estimated to live in the entire State of Oregon, most of them confined to remnant old-growth stands, a mere two percent of the original forest.
Claremont knows these owl habitats well, having spent nearly a quarter century crashing through them in search of the birds. At 52 she says the field work has taken its toll on her shoulders, back and knees, but you’d never know it by the way this trim, energetic biologist scrambles down a steep ravine, negotiates the soggy bottom of a narrow stream, and then lopes up the opposite slope, leaping from rock to rock or traversing the length of a downed tree covered in slippery moss with the grace of an Olympic gymnast on a balance beam.
Continue reading Fischer’s “Science of Seeing: Hope and the Thing with Feathers” in Zygote Quarterly.
