Wherever you go, there they are.

Over the past century or so, barred owls have swooped across North America from east to west, inspiring wonder, admiration, and fear about the future of other owls, often all at once. Their story is complicated, as are the labels people attach to them. Are they native or not? And what can their presence in the Pacific Northwest reveal about what it means to belong to a place at this particular moment in history?

Came across this very nice article about the Barred Owl.

As opposed to most recent articles about the Barred Owl being about the pending elimination of a large chunk of the western population of them, this article focuses on how the Barred Owl made its westward journey, why they have been so successful, and the problems resulting from environmental changes expanding the habitat of one species while shrinking it for others.

There are many great facts and photos. It’s not written in a clickbait style. It’s a longer article, but it’s not fluffed up, just full of info. I really recommend you give it a read.

  • anon6789OP
    4•5 months ago

    My copy of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species clocks in at 703 pages, and much of its length can be attributed to the numerous examples Darwin employs to support his thesis. He points out that species of the same genus with similar habits find it most challenging to coexist—one rat species replacing another rat species, Asiatic cockroaches replacing their Russian congeners, and mistle thrushes replacing song thrushes in Scotland.

    So is the case with barred owls and northern spotted owls, which are native to the drippy, dark, and tangly temperate rainforests stretching from coastal Northern California to British Columbia. Elusive and reclusive, northern spotted owls were one of the later bird species Europeans identified and named in North America. One early-20th-century collector described searching for them as “most unsatisfactory.”