After years of political feet dragging and destructive logging, the federal government has released a plan to protect one of Canada’s rarest birds.
On June 5, the government published a final recovery strategy for the spotted owl. Native to the old growth forests of southwestern B.C., there’s only one known spotted owl left in the wild in Canada.
“The first interview I did on spotted owls was back around 1993,” says Joe Foy, a protected areas campaigner for the Wilderness Committee.
With help from First Nations groups and the environmental group Ecojustice, the Wilderness Committee has spent the last two decades advocating tirelessly through the court system for both the provincial and federal governments to introduce more protections for the spotted owl.
“During that 20 years, numbers of spotted owls declined,” says Foy. According to him, B.C. had negotiated a recovery strategy with the federal government more than 20 years ago. But the province never created a credible plan for protecting the bird’s critical habitat.
Instead, province-authorized logging continued to reduce the spotted owls’ habitat, while the species was out-hunted by the larger barred owl. To save the spotted owl, B.C. launched a captive breeding program in 2007.
“It actually accelerated the decline in the wild because the province needed captive owls to put into their facility, and so those captive owls came from the meagre supply of owls in the wild,” says Foy. “The number of owls in the wild really, really plummeted.”
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The captive breeding program has around 37 spotted owls, occasionally releasing some back into the wild. But even with these releases, the population numbers aren’t going up. In 2022, the program released three males into the wild, hoping they would breed with the lone wild-born female. But by the next year, two of the owls had turned up dead and one was returned to the program after being injured by a train.
In the same year the owls turned up dead, the federal cabinet rejected an emergency order from Steven Guilbeault, the Minister of Environment and Climate Change at the time, to save the spotted owl’s habitat from logging.
“The reasons they gave were pretty scant,” says Foy. “They said they wanted to continue to negotiate with the province and with First Nations.”
Now, two years after the federal cabinet rejected Guilbeault’s emergency order, the federal government has released a more comprehensive recovery strategy. Although, Foy notes that this means there’s also been two more years of critical habitat destroyed by logging.
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As part of the most recent recovery strategy, the federal government has called for protection over 4,000 square kilometres of forest within a day’s travel of Metro Vancouver. According to the strategy, the federal government thinks a wild spotted owl population is recoverable. The government’s goal is to reach a stable population of 250 mature spotted owls in the wild within the next 50 years.
To achieve this goal, the province’s captive breeding program plans to release nine spotted owls per year between 2025 and 2030, and 14 owls per year thereafter.
The government has also said that human-caused threats, such as logging, will have to stop in the habitat immediately, and invasive barred owls will have to be removed.
The only sticking point in the strategy is the timeline around when B.C. must stop logging in the area. The other week, Foy was out documenting several proposed, pending, and active logging sites within the 4,000 square kilometres of critical habitat.
According to the government’s strategy, the Species at Risk Act specifies that the critical habitat must be described in the Canada Gazette (the federal government’s official journal) within 90 days of appearing in the public registry. And then any destruction to that critical habitat, such as logging, will be prohibited 90 days after it’s been described in the Canada Gazette.
But Foy points out that authority over forest management falls to the province, and B.C. has been pushing back against this critical habitat designation.
“I could find pretty clear language that if the minister believes that the province is not acting, then the minister must go to the federal cabinet,” says Foy. “What happens next will be this dance between the province and the federal government, like so many issues of importance to Canadians.”
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