A Tree Falls in the Forest
Less than a quarter mile past a secluded gate in the Willamette National Forest, we’re forced from the jeep by a winter’s worth of downed trees. Steve takes a bow saw to the first few until it becomes clear that we could spend all day at this. So we prepare to continue on foot into the old growth, hunting for a nest of Northern spotted owls
Steve Ackers is a field biologist with the Oregon Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit, and surprisingly clean cut for a guy with three days’ stubble. He takes eight mice from a cage ni the back of the jeep and places four each into plastic containers half-filled with wood shavings. Sliding these into his pack, he grabs an aluminum pole and shuts the hatch.
We start up the road, around and over fallen trees. To our right, Boone Creek is running white with snowmelt, unusually high for so late in May. Steve welcomes the chance, after a week of gray days, to clip shades onto his wire-rimmed glasses.
“Sometimes when I’m out here—especially when I’m alone, not flapping my gums—the owls will come right up to the road.”
“No kidding!”
“They know I mean lunch.”
The nest we’re looking for is new this year. Both parents were spotted in early April, though there was no sign of either on a sopping day later that month. Then, two weeks ago, the male was seen and a fledgling heard from the nest.
At a strip of pink flagging, we step off the gravel road and clamber down a steep, ferny slope. I’m thrilled to be back among big trees after several years in New England. I grew up in Oregon, even worked in timber awhile, but I’ve never seen a spotted owl. Most folks around here know her only as a symbol: lost jobs or forest health, take your pick.
I’m hauling myself over a moss-covered log when Steve spots the mother watching from a limb about fifteen feet away. Her black eyes are set in shallow, downy bowls filling the space between her arched brow and small beak. Her face is flat, her wide body speckled from head to tail. I hadn’t imagined talons so large.
Steve slips off his pack and removes a mouse, which he places on the bark of a big Doug fir, then steps back. The mouse stays so still I think he’s pinned in there, but it’s just clinging to the bark. The owl swivels her head—her gaze sliding from mouse to Steve, to me, to Steve, back to the mouse—and suddenly her tail flares and she’s descending on a broad fan of feathers. She takes the mouse in her claws and flutters to the limb above her, then ladders up a series of branches until she can fly directly across to her nest.
Read more from “A Tree Falls in the Forest” in Whole Terrain.
