Fire Is a Major Threat to California Spotted Owls—Could it Also Help Save Them?

Wildfire is nothing new in California. In recent years, though, the blazes have taken on increased severity and reshaped the landscape. As more of their home turf transforms, California Spotted Owls—dark-eyed, mottled-brown raptors living in the state’s central and southern forests—have been feeling that heat: Destructive megafires burned more of their habitat in 2020 and 2021 alone than in the previous 35 years. Experts say these growing disasters represent the most urgent threat to the birds.

Recognizing this mounting menace—along with other, intertwined hazards such as climate change and drought—the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) last year announced plans to give the birds Endangered Species Act protections.

Yet the California Spotted Owl’s best hope, counterintuitively, may also lie in fire. Research increasingly suggests that lower-severity burning—which burns up accumulated fuels but can leave many larger trees intact—not only inoculates many drier forests against destructive megafires, but also creates the mosaic of habitat types that the birds gravitate toward. “It really depends on how it burns,” says Gavin Jones, a U.S. Forest Service wildlife ecologist. “In general, these owls like fire.” 

A host of threats

The California Spotted Owl is one of three subspecies. Mexican Spotted Owls, listed as threatened by the FWS, haunt the wooded canyons and mountain forests of the Southwest and Mexico. The Northern Spotted Owl of the Pacific Northwest spurred battles between loggers and environmentalists with its own threatened listing in 1990. California Spotted Owls live between their relatives, in mature, multistoried forests on the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada and isolated pockets of the coast, from Monterey to San Diego County.

Over millennia, California Spotted Owls evolved in a patchwork of habitats created by frequent fires of varying intensity, Jones says. However, climate change and fire suppression—including of traditional burning practices long employed by Indigenous people—have contributed to drier, more homogenous forests dense with brush and fire-sensitive tree species. The resulting conditions are ideal for wildfires burning hotter, larger, and more often. Each year, high-severity fires now scorch areas of Sierra Nevada forest five times larger than before European-American colonization.

For the owls, megafires pile onto a host of other threats. Over the past century, California lost considerable prime Spotted Owl habitat to large-scale clearcutting by timber companies. While policy reforms have reversed that trend, large trees don’t grow back in a hurry, and beetle infestations and drought have taken a toll on the remaining mature forests. “Historically logging has been a major threat, but that has been reduced substantially,” says Rocky Gutierrez, a wildlife ecologist who has studied Spotted Owls for decades. “They are also threatened by the increase in these large catastrophic fires.”

Meanwhile, Barred Owls—a larger, more aggressive species whose native range is in the East and across southern Canada—are encroaching down the West Coast, prompting the FWS last fall propose a sweeping culling program to protect Northern and California Spotted Owls, which the agency is now finalizing. On top of all that, deadly poisons, used to control rodents on marijuana plantations trespassing on national forests, are likely affecting Spotted Owls up the food chain.

The only recent population estimate counted roughly 2,300 California Spotted Owls in territories across the Sierra Nevada in 2021. Just after scientists gathered that data, however, two megafires scorched more than half a million acres of owl habitat at high severity.

Fire as a tool

Environmental groups first petitioned to list the California Spotted Owl under the Endangered Species Act in 2014, though the years-long process was stymied temporarily when the Trump administration declined to protect the subspecies. The Biden administration last year proposed to manage the owls as two separate populations, listing one stronghold in the Sierra Nevada as threatened and a small, fragmented population along the coast as endangered.

One notable aspect of the FWS listing proposal is its embrace of intentional fire as a tool to prevent catastrophic blazes that kill owls and damage their habitats. Such “good fire” includes a range of practices: prescribed burning, which uses controlled, lower-intensity fires to remove dangerous fuels; cultural burning, which involves Indigenous practitioners applying fire to steward natural and cultural resources; and managed wildfire, which allows lightning-ignited wildfires to burn in low-risk areas. The listing proposal also recommends more intentional fire around Spotted Owl nests to protect them from more harmful burning. (In addition, it recommends more thinning of the owl’s forests. Though critics contend thinning sometimes offers timber companies a pretext for cutting big trees, research shows that clearing dense brush and selectively logging, when combined with intentional fire, can create the patchwork structure that benefits owls while also reducing fire severity.)

On top of preventing more destructive blazes, beneficial fire produces a sudden return of nutrients to the soil, Jones says, as ash becomes fertilizer for surviving vegetation, spurring growth that travels up the food chain. “It provides this optimal buffet of prey for the owl to cue in on,” he says. Jones speculates that California Spotted Owls continually pursue newly burned patches, including smaller areas of high-severity fire. A 2021 study he co-led suggested that intentional fire could boost California Spotted Owl conservation by recreating habitat variation.

Those recent findings align with some much older views on the role of fire in California forest management. The Yurok and other Tribes in California, which have used fire for millennia to help produce medicines, foods, fibers, and healthy ecosystems, have been leaders in revitalizing cultural burning to revive the land and their connections to it, and co-founded a support network for Native American fire cultures. “We as humans are supposed to be part of the ecosystem,” says Margo Robbins, a Yurok tribal member and executive director of the Cultural Fire Management Council, a nonprofit promoting cultural burning on the Yurok Reservation and ancestral lands. “The primary tool we use to take care of that forest is fire.”

Framing the future

Other land managers are getting on board with that perspective. “We have to get fire in these ecosystems,” says Ian Fox, deputy for the U.S. Forest Service’s Wildfire Risk Reduction Infrastructure Team. The federal government is investing $3.2 billion by 2031 to lower catastrophic wildfire risk and improve forest health, including through prescribed fire. The Forest Service manages most California Spotted Owl habitat, around 5 million acres that include some of the nation’s highest-priority areas for wildfire treatment .

In California, federal, state, and local governments, community groups, and private landowners burn around 125,000 acres annually using prescribed fire, with a goal of reaching 400,000 acres of beneficial fire use next year. California has ramped up funding and rolled out policies to remove barriers for prescribed and cultural burning on state and private lands. Across national forest lands last year, the U.S. Forest Service, tribes, communities, and partners burned nearly 2 million acres using prescribed fire—a record high, but still well short of the 20 million acres the Forest Service aims to thin and burn by 2032.

Even so, expanding the use of beneficial fire faces significant challenges. The risks of prescribed burns getting out of hand, for instance, may turn off local people and governments. Same goes for the air quality concerns associated with fire. And the seasonal windows available for safe burning are shrinking as climate change worsens. 

But the federal government appears willing to face those challenges in its efforts to improve forest health and to help California Spotted Owl numbers rebound. The FWS is reviewing public comments on its listing proposal and plans to make a final decision this year. Regardless of the outcome, the agency says existing efforts to reduce megafire risk with intentional fire and thinning will continue in these owls’ woods. In one form or another, fire will frame the future for these birds, either devouring the forests they need to survive or clearing a path toward a safer future.