Last week I went hiking in an ancient redwood forest. It was a sweet little one-mile loop trail, easily accessed from the road for someone just passing through.
Twice during my meander, there was a period of ten seconds or so where no cars passed on the nearby highway. Each time, a palpable, delicious silence rose up to fill the air. It was like a black-and-white screen brightened to technicolor, only in sound. Myriad beings who’d been drowned out by the eternal/infernal roar of tires on pavement took the opportunity to speak out.
Perhaps they’d been speaking out all along, but had gone unheard. I don’t exaggerate when I say hearing them was akin to a chorus of angels.
During the second moment of silence, a Northern spotted owl called, just the first three notes of the typical four-note call. It was a sweet voice I hadn’t heard in almost two decades.
—
In 2005, I worked for the U.S. Forest Service as a trainee wildlife biologist tracking spotted owls in Northern California with the idea that, where I located them, the forest would not be logged. This critically imperiled species is supposed to be protected by regulations that prevent logging within a wide radius of their nesting or roosting trees.
Unfortunately, spotted owls only nest in those most monetarily valuable of trees, the old-growth Douglas firs, hemlocks, and redwoods of the Pacific coast.
I’d spent the spring of 2005 working with a survey crew on the Klamath National Forest, roaming through the woods before dawn and just after dusk, to have the best chance of hearing from a wide-awake owl.
Some of us played a recorded spotted owl call on a clunky loudspeaker, while others, more vocally talented, mimicked the descending, four-note call with their own lungs and vocal cords.
Very often, no owls responded. Rarely, maybe once or twice a week, a spotted owl called back to us from deep in the woods. Slightly more often, barred owls were the startling responders.
(While spotted owls tend to give their response hoot from their distant perch or nest tree, barred owls often fly silently — and invisibly, in the dark — to a branch just above a biologist’s head, where they loudly proclaim “Who cooks for YOU??” in a manner sure to make a human jump. It’s a rather charming habit, actually, once you recover from your startlement.)
Newly arrived from the eastern half of the U.S. via Canada, barred owls were beginning to muscle out their smaller and shyer spotted cousins. More and more, surveyors were meeting only barred owls in forests previously inhabited by spotted owls.
—
Later, months after I’d left the owl crew and was working as a solo young wildlife biologist in a nearly-abandoned ranger district, I was out one misty autumn pre-dawn by myself, calling for spotted owls from designated survey sites surrounding a proposed logging project.
Contrary to district policy, I was alone because the station was severely understaffed. The federal government had again cut funding for the Forest Service's basic (and legally mandated) research programs.
The impact on the ground was that I had to wrangle any random staff member I could convince — one day a receptionist, another time a carpenter — to get out of bed at 3:00 am to drive an hour or two out into the mountains with me to call for owls. So I often ended up on my own.
This was a rampant safety violation. But as the years have passed, and I’ve been involved in litigation against the Forest Service, I’ve grown to understand that it was likely also deliberate — or if not deliberate, then at least knowing. Why? Because someone in the Forest Service hierarchy had decided that spotted owl responses, if not witnessed by a second human, were invalid.
No one told me this beforehand. I wasted all those solo dawns and dusks with my heart in my throat, calling for the tiny sylvan beauties, hoping they’d respond so the Forest Service couldn’t allow loggers in to level their forest homes.
If I were able to confirm spotted owl activity in the vicinity of a planned timber sale, the red tape would descend, the best trees would come off the chopping block, and the potential income to the Forest Service would drop precipitously. Old-growth timber is worth proportionally far more on the lumber market than plantation trees.
And of course, the reason the district ranger needed that timber sale to balance his budget was because Congress repeatedly decided against fully funding the Forest Service. And he had firefighters to pay, and recreation staff, and trail crews. One little confirmed owl nest, by making hundreds of acres off-limits to logging, could deplete his annual budget by millions of dollars.
So, in that grey dawn almost 20 years ago, I stood alone, yet again, on a mountainside in the Klamath Valley. I was worked up, to put it mildly: I’d just navigated an old logging road that no one had driven in a while, one perched like a narrow ribbon on the side of a steep mountain. I’d come around a bend to see a landslide had obliterated the road; the roadbed was resting 20 feet down the mountain.
Without a partner, I couldn’t judge the edge well enough to back around the curve. So instead, with the nose of my mint-green half-ton pickup just touching the slide’s rubble, I’d executed something like a 27-point turn on crumbly dirt. Every time I backed up, I hopped out of the truck to look at the edge and see if I could get maybe six more inches of traction before a tire would go over. If that happened, the truck would be gone; the ground was that unstable and steep.
I survived, and the truck did not go over the edge, but by the time I’d gotten back to my owl-calling spot, my body was full of adrenaline and dawn was just about to break. I was alive! And an owl responded to me.
Perfectly pitched to carry through mist and giant trees, a sweet and distinctive spotted-owl hoot floated across the wide valley: “Whoo, whoo-whoo … whooooooooo.”
Bam. One forest and one owl home saved from the chainsaws. Surveys the following spring would triangulate the nest tree and a very large circle would be drawn on the map, protecting the forest within from demolition.
Instead, funding for my position expired that fall and was not replenished the following year. I later found out that my data, which no one had tried to replicate after I left, had been discounted because I’d been alone when I recorded it. The timber sale had gone forward, and yet another endangered owl family had lost its home.
This felt like a betrayal — of the owls, and of me — and played a large part in my decision to leave the Forest Service to go to law school, and to later practice public-lands and forest defense.
These days, I typically work on lawsuits against the agency. I am all too aware of the internal agency pressures, driven by bad decisions in D.C., that lead to bad choices by land managers. I am sorry to say not much has changed in that arena in the 20 years since I first joined the agency.
A fully funded Forest Service is one that is able to pay firefighters, biologists, trail crews, wilderness rangers, hydrologists, geologists, archaeologists, and all the rest, without liquidating our irreplaceable natural beauties to do so.
Not for nothing, achieving a fully funded Forest Service is a challenge during any administration. It is an impossibility under a Republican one.
—
As the decades passed, I increasingly lost hope that I’d ever hear another spotted owl’s call. The human pressure on their habitats is unrelenting. They are also being herded south by the oncoming rush of barred owls moving in from Canada, and they will soon reach the southern edge of the great Pacific forests, where they will find there’s nowhere left to go.
I’m honestly still in a bit of shock at what I heard last week. Standing there in the wake of the owl’s call, the roar of traffic resumed, and I had to put a hand against a redwood trunk to steady myself. Touching these trees is like touching the stone column of a gothic cathedral, only one made of damp, living iron, and I was indeed steadied.
I keep this lovely spotted owl above my desk to remind me why I do my work. This week, home from my road trip, I find I keep looking up at her.
You’re still there, I say. You’re really real.
I love you.
—
Silence is important, so important, for all forms of life, and we are only just beginning to understand how much it matters.
This week’s words spilled out of me after reading Antonia Malchik’s recent essay on living in and longing for quiet. Thank you, Antonia, for the inspiration.
For more reading, here’s a piece I wrote on the science of silence and its wider human/natural implications. I think you’ll be surprised at how incredibly necessary it is, not just for humans, but for entire ecosystems.
Have a lovely weekend, all. I wish you the quiet you need, and I hope that you, too, may find something you thought was lost. 💚🌲🦉~~Rebecca
Thank you for this, Rebecca. For your care in practice. For your palpable love. It gives me hope. And also this sits alongside the obvious sadness too. I too am devotee to quietness and silence, often writing about it in somewhat elegiac ways. I will devour your thoughts i'm sure. This morning waking to a cacophony of dawn birds, having read this, I am sitting with the tension between longing for quietness but also what this means when all our owls fall silent and are gone. What I really want is the return of other voices. I'm rambling. Love to you xx
This beautiful essay has moved me to tears. I grew up in the redwoods. I know the hush you speak of well and I remember the efforts to protect the spotted owl. My dad was an environmental activist and journalist in the area, Bob Martel. I'm so glad you got to hear a spotted owl on your road trip. That seems so just.