Spotted owls are disappearing fast, and federal cuts could mean no one left to count them

It’s breeding season for the rapidly declining California spotted owl, and Ben Vizzachero was about to lead an effort to survey the stately conifer forests and oak woodlands of Los Padres National Forest for the elusive raptor.

Then Vizzachero was ripped out of the picture. The 30-year-old wildlife biologist was among roughly 2,000 U.S. Forest Service workers who were fired as part of President Donald Trump and billionaire adviser Elon Musk’s push to slash the federal workforce. About 1,000 National Park Service jobs were cut as part of the mass layoffs targeting employees in their probationary period.

“The owls are hooting. They’re answering,” he said several days after his supervisor delivered the gut punch over Valentine’s Day weekend. “We should be out there on any given night.”

Vizzachero said there’s now less money and personnel to carry out the survey, and his colleagues haven’t been able to triage the work he left behind. Although there’s been discussion about how to proceed, he said there isn’t a firm plan in place.

Conservationists worry that losing federal biologists like Vizzachero will deprive agencies of information needed to protect not only the majestic spotted owl, but also imperiled frogs, fish, mammals and other birds. Much of the monitoring of endangered species is conducted by seasonal biologists, who aren’t being brought on due to a federal hiring freeze implemented Jan. 20. Other federal workers accepted buyouts.

The employees’ absence could also potentially hinder a top national priority: wildfire mitigation.

Vizzachero carried out legally required efforts to see how projects, including prescribed burning and vegetation clearance, would affect the brown owls with white spots and other species of concern. Biologists elsewhere conducted similar efforts on public lands to pave the way for commercial timber sales.

It’s unclear whether those projects can move forward without such analyses.

“The obvious problem is that when you’re cutting down trees, you could be cutting down the habitat for California spotted owl,” said Vizzachero, referring to a hallmark of fuel reduction efforts.

A spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which oversees the U.S. Forest Service, said agency Secretary Brooke Rollins supports the president’s directive to eliminate inefficiencies and improve government.

“We have a solemn responsibility to be good stewards of the American people’s hard-earned taxpayer dollars and to ensure that every dollar spent goes to serve the people, not the bureaucracy,” the spokesperson said in a statement.

Many of the recent hires were paid with temporary Inflation Reduction Act funding, the spokesperson said, adding that it was “unfortunate that the Biden administration hired thousands of people with no plan in place to pay them long term.”

Forest Service Chief Randy Moore retired on Monday in the wake of the layoffs, calling the last several weeks “incredibly difficult” in a resignation letter posted online.

The owls with haunting dark eyes and an “X” pattern of white feathers on their face make their home in California’s central and southern mature forests. In 2023, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposed that a distinct Southern California population that inhabits isolated mountaintops be listed as endangered under federal law. A Sierra Nevada population was recommended for threatened status.

Researchers last year surveyed areas historically inhabited by 129 pairs of owls in the San Bernardino Mountains but found only 60 pairs — a decline of more than 50% in recent decades, according to R.J. Gutiérrez, chair emeritus at the University of Minnesota. The San Bernardino population is the largest in the region, he said.

A study published last year estimated there were roughly 2,300 spotted owls in the Sierra Nevada.

Some experts see megafires of recent decades as the raptors’ biggest threat.

Last year’s Lake fire torched stands of old-growth Douglas fir that can serve as owl nesting and roosting refuges in the Figueroa Mountain area of the roughly 1.75-million-acre Los Padres forest, reducing them to what looks like “a bunch of toothpicks in the ground,” Vizzachero said.

But it’s unclear whether owls were in that part of the Santa Barbara County mountains when the nearly 40,000-acre blaze surged through. It’s been more than a decade since the area was thoroughly surveyed, according to Vizzachero. The forest spans nearly 220 miles from north to south, stretching from Monterey to Los Angeles County.

Vizzachero, who worked for the government for a little over a year, said there was concern that listing the owls under the Endangered Species Act would hinder the Forest Service’s ability to make the landscape more fire-safe. His survey work, he said, was intended to meet requirements by federal wildlife officials and “allow our fuels operations to continue to run smoothly.”

It’s not easy work. Protocols in a hefty technical document dictated that scientists determine where owls might be in a particular project area to map out “call points.” A researcher, preferably in the dead of night, would trek to those areas and play a recording of the owl’s call — and see if it answers. That has to be repeated three times spaced out over time, Vizzachero said.

There’s evidence that forest management measures aimed at tamping down wildfires take a bite out of the owl’s habitat, but some scientists say the short-term harm may be outweighed by long-term gains. They’re also frequently touted as a powerful tool to protect communities threatened by fires of increasing size and intensity.

To that end, the Forest Service, Department of Agriculture and Sierra Pacific Industries, a large lumber producer, announced last month a $75-million plan to construct and maintain fuel breaks in California and Oregon national forests. Over three years, the agreement is expected to add 400 miles of fuel breaks across private and federal lands in California.

The California spotted owl’s listing so far hasn’t been finalized, and some conservationists believe it may not be under the Trump administration. Vizzachero said the last update he got was that it would be “April, or maybe never.”

A large-scale surveying effort for the bird’s close relative — the Northern spotted owl — will almost certainly be hamstrung by the federal hiring freeze, according to Taal Levi, an associate professor of wildlife biology at Oregon State University.

Levi, a collaborator on the monitoring project led by the Forest Service, said the annual effort relies on seasonal staffers — who were hired and then let go.

Those seasonal workers would have set out about 4,500 audio recorders in forests stretching from Central California to Canada. Artificial intelligence mines the recordings for owl calls before being vetted by human ears — a recent technological upgrade that enhanced the efficiency of the operation.

Now only a skeleton crew of permanent staff will venture into the vast landscape, according to Levi. Northern spotted owls are scarce but widely distributed across Oregon, Washington and Northern California.

“Missing a year has the potential to ruin three years’ worth of effort,” said Levi, who focuses on data and analysis for the project, noting that it will be hard to detect changes when comparing the previous and following year to the present.

But it’s “not just a program to monitor this endangered species,” Levi said. “It’s really geared around managing public lands, federal lands in particular.”

Darker and sporting smaller spots than the California subspecies, the owls became the central symbol of so-called timber wars in the 1980s and ‘90s in which environmentalists and loggers fought over the fate of old-growth forests in the Pacific Northwest. There are as few as 3,000 of the birds left on federal lands, with declines up to 80% in parts of their range between 1995 and 2017. The raptor is listed as threatened under the federal and California Endangered Species Act.

Federal policies and laws guiding management of vast tracts of public land the owls call home require monitoring of the bird. If they aren’t tracked, it’s unclear whether timber sales and fuels reduction efforts such as forest thinning can move forward, according to the Center for Biological Diversity, a nonprofit focused on protecting endangered species.

“Decades of work has gone into ensuring the owls aren’t harmed by logging on our public lands,” said Noah Greenwald, the center’s endangered species director and a onetime seasonal spotted owl surveyor. “If we can’t do the surveys, the logging may need to stop.”

The Department of Agriculture spokesperson didn’t directly respond to questions concerning how the hiring freeze would affect the monitoring program and efforts that depend on it, but noted that there are exemptions for “critical health and safety positions.”

It’s also unclear what effect the federal job cuts will have on a controversial strategy to control what’s widely considered the Northern spotted owl’s top threat — the slightly larger, more aggressive barred owl.

Last year, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service approved a plan to shoot nearly half a million barred owls — which muscle out spotted owls — over three decades.

The two owls are closely related; they are similar in appearance and the birds can even interbreed. But barred owls are less picky about food and habitat, allowing them to outcompete their fellow raptors.

The idea is to pare back the number of barred owls — which originally hail from the Eastern U.S. — to give the beleaguered spotted owls a fighting chance on their home turf.

Federal wildlife officials also say they need to further curb the owls’ invasion of the range of the California spotted owl in the Sierra Nevada. Some believe barred owls, unchecked, could eventually make their way into Southern California.

But the plan may be de facto terminated or delayed if funding or manpower isn’t allocated to it, stakeholders said.

Greenwald is among numerous conservationists who believe knocking down barred owls en masse is needed to prop up Northern spotted owls.

The federal Fish and Wildlife Service didn’t respond to requests for comment on how staffing and funding could affect the strategy.

Nixing the plan would be welcome news to animal welfare groups that staunchly oppose it and have sued to stop it. Wayne Pacelle, founder of Animal Wellness Action, one of the groups, is appealing to conservatives in the Trump administration and Congress to scrap the Biden-era plan.

Extrapolating from a $4.5 million contract awarded to a Northern California tribe last year to hunt about 1,500 barred owls over four years, Pacelle’s group pegs the cost of the 30-year owl removal plan at $1.35 billion. (Groups supporting the strategy are skeptical of the exorbitant figure.)

The “price tag in this political environment is a big fat target,” he said.

Greenwald anticipates the recent job cuts will harm more than just spotted owls, noting that mountain yellow-legged frogs and Southern California steelhead trout — both endangered — are among the species typically monitored by seasonal field workers.

He believes more layoffs are to come, pointing to an executive order signed by Trump last month aimed at making “large-scale” workforce reductions in the name of government efficiency.

A federal judge in San Francisco last week found that the mass firings of probationary government employees were probably unlawful. But the decision did not immediately reinstate fired employees or guarantee that more terminations won’t take place in the future.