Home for the holidays, I tried doggedly to let go of my puritanical eco-righteousness. As much as I rage against it, my family is upper-middle class, white and typical. When Peter Jennings looks into the camera every night, he╣s talking to people like my mom. Just as I have trained myself to resent the lifestyle of my childhood, I have almost rejected the landscape of its setting. I feel sad that the ponderosa pines, wheat fields and open skies of my childhood don╣t move me like the ancient forests of the Western Cascades.
Maybe it╣s because the owl was my first encounter with wildlife, real forest critters and not the deer or coyote grazing my father╣s fields in the distance. Maybe the uproar in the 80╣s trained me to think I might never seen one. Maybe Lou Gold ingrained the notion of indicator species so deeply in my head that a distant hoot arouses instantly every way in which I love an ancient forest. Maybe it╣s just the inherent magic and summoning power of the owl. There is something special about the northern spotted owl to me, probably to many. I don╣t mean the Northern Spotted Owl, of course. Not the NSO of infamy. I mean that shy bird, with the four note hoot which quickens my heart. That chivalrous male bird and his reclusive soul mate. The one with eyes which speak emotion and thought. That bird which has evolved within the ancient forest, is ultimately adapted to fly through the multistory canopy and to nest in the snag.
This movement can only be stronger when we learn to accommodate the emotions that all of us feel as activists, the fear of law enforcement that is the fear of any animal chased through a forest by a predator. But how to accommodate the overwhelming grief. No sincere person amongst us can deny that it is heart wrenching to see a giant forced to its knees, and that the woe exponentially worsens when a whole watershed is leveled. How to grapple, then, with the almost inconceivable sum of destruction wreaked upon the forest everyday. And how to say good-bye to a species.
It╣s the dirtiest secret of Option 9. We don╣t talk about it and neither do they. The spotted owl is going to die.
It╣s not a fate sealed in stone of course. It is sealed in the Manifest Destiny mindset of our culture. For the owl╣s sake, I wish the challenge were only stone.
The fight will continue. The Biodiversity Legal Foundation is preparing to sue the government for failing to recover the northern spotted owl. Their challenge is based on the fact that Option 9╣s protections for owls were severely undercut by the Salvage Rider, and those protections will continue to be made irrelevant by Habitat Conservation Plans (HCPs). In Washington alone, HCPs have authorized the incidental take of 200 owl pairs, in addition to 155 pairs deemed expendable by the Department of Natural Resources on state land. There are 762 known activity centers (for pairs and singles) in the state at present. In all of the ways in which Habitat Conservation Plan is a misnomer, the word │conservation▓ is most strikingly euphemistic in the owl╣s case. All HCPs are │front-loaded,▓ allowing habitat to be cut now in exchange for regrowth later. But the owl is almost certainly not going to survive until later.
If there is any hope for the owl, a cumulative impacts analysis, evaluating the status of the owl on federal, state and private land is needed. At present, each works independently, allowing individual, incidental takes which are cumulatively, unmistakably pushing the owl towards extinction.
On the ground, the northern spotted owl is giving way to the eastern barred owl, a bird very similar to the spotted owl except that it adapts more readily to trashed habitats. It doesn╣t need pristine, ancient forests to survive.
Was the spotted owl just a strategy for the ancient forest protection movement? How could such a sacred bird be a strategy, and if not, how can we watch it slip away in silence? How do we say good-bye, mourn a species? A moment of silence? A day of outrage? Maybe a walk in the forest as the pink and orange light of the sunset falls through the trees, when the cold is just starting to nip. Will there really be a moonlit night when the mysterious call of the spotted owl won╣t float from the deepest part of the towering giants? If the loss of the grizzly is the loss of our wild nature, and the waning of the wolf the severing of our nomad, predatory way, what can it mean when the owl is gone?
If there is a time, a signal, that our modern movement has failed, isn╣t this it? It could not, of course, have been otherwise, for we are a handful of people fighting the thrust of the modern juggernaut of civilization. Failure is a given and resistance the only prize to be won. There is no finish line. When the ancient forest is gone, we will protect residual trees, and then second growth and then rural, suburban tracts.
Back home, walking the snowy roads, my Christmas belly weighing me down and my mind heavy with these thoughts, I unconsciously chime the notes of the owl╣s cry in response to a half-heard wish of a hoot. I always love snow, and there is after all, a certain magic silence about, even in this degraded landscape. A heavy rush of wind behind my head breaks my reverie. My heart is in my throat when I see the huge bird which has grazed me. Awakened by my longing hoot, it inspects me from a telephone pole. It is as unaccustomed to my attention as I am to his presence in this place. He looks like a fat cat perched on the pole, bigger than any owl I╣ve ever seen. Not a spotted owl of course, the predator plebeian great horned owl.
What a blessing to be visited by this scavenger refuge as I mourn the passing of my totem animal, the spotted owl. The weight of grief at the owl╣s passing is too much to bear. The great horned╣s visit, I can only think, is a promise, a pact between us of sorts. He is teaching me to stow away his symbolism in my heart, so that one day he will provoke me to defend these rolling hills and limitless skies, as I now defend the forest. It is a promise I will keep.