The Bog Owl Hypothesis

By Jeremiah Kennedy

My beginning

It seems that most folks have a favorite owl memory. My favorite, and earliest, is of listening to Western Screech-Owls from my grandparent’s bathroom window at their home on Pender Island. I was ecstatic when my grandfather told me that the source of the mysterious whickering drifting in from the night was an owl. An image of tiny grey birds slipping out of arbutus cavities to search for Rough-skinned Newts sat in my head for years after that. I’d gleefully wait at the bathroom window, brushing my teeth and listening to these tiny birds boast about their territories. I don't remember when the singing stopped, but it must have been some time in the late nineties. If they weren’t an obsession yet, they became one when my Grandfather brought one home from his annual sailing trip to Desolation Sound in the early 2000s. When he stopped overnight at Whaleboat Island he found the scattered remains of nest from a wind-shattered Arbutus cavity. All of the chicks had perished, save for one. For the next several nights, the young owl stayed on his sailboat, eating Spot Prawns and chorizo and entertaining everyone they came across. Dr. Don and his voracious owlet.

*Owly* aboard *Petrushka.* (Photo: Don Williams)

Owly made his way to the Orphaned Wildlife Rehabilitation Society (OWL) where he spent some months growing and learning to hunt on his own. There was little left of the fluffy, cautious fledgling I had met when he was ready to be released on the Sunshine Coast. He bounced off the cat carrier walls and lunged at our curious faces peaking in at him. I’m sure I’d have been dead meat if I was anything smaller than a Robin.

I didn’t have much luck with screech-owls for the rest of my childhood. I spent a few years listening for them around Vancouver, where I grew up. All I ever heard were stories of times when screeches were more common than any other owl, and of secret breeding pairs that hadn’t been seen for years. One night I ended up in emergency at one o’clock after biking into the north shore mountains in search of a questionable report that I’m sure now was just a Sooty Grouse.

A not so isolated incident

My screech luck changed while I was in university. In the spring of 2015 I got a job working on the Central Coast of BC with Dr John Reynolds at Simon Fraser University. I got to run bird surveys and banding as part of a larger bio-geography and biodiversity study. This operated out of, and in collaboration with, the Hakai Institute. I spent the summer of 2015 with a small team of dedicated bird researchers, counting and banding birds in Heiltsuk and Wuikinuxv territory around Bella Bella and Rivers Inlet, BC. These islands are both rugged and marvelous. These are easily some of the most remote and amazing places I've ever had the privilege to visit.

We were lucky enough to spend some time on a tiny island off the south coast of Hunter Island, called Triquet. We certainly weren't the first to stay there, yet we felt more isolated than we had ever been. A boat would pass every few days and almost nobody stopped to say hello.

One evening I woke up, around midnight, to frantic whispered shouting from outside my tent. My best friend for years and field technician Ian, was half naked and muttering 'Screech-Owl...SCREECH....OWL' with a level of expressed enthusiasm only Ian possesses for nature.

That evening we sat next to the beach, in the same way people had for many millennia, and listened to an owl that was, by all the accepted literature, not really supposed to be there. It was magical. It was confusing, but it wasn’t new information in the slightest.

The status of knowledge

Triquet is a tiny island. It is so beaten by wind, and its soil is so saturated that its cedars and pines are small and gnarled and interspersed with tall, dense shrubs. In fact, it has come to represent the type island with a particularly difficult undergrowth to navigate in my ecological lexicon. 'Triquet Hell' is reserved for the most soul-crushing of shrubbery. It is a bog forest, surrounded by rocky shoreline. This is not what people thought Coastal Western Screech-Owls liked at the time. If you look at most of the historical literature on the subject there is a general consensus that this species occupies deciduous, or mixed deciduous and coniferous, forests along waterbodies. Mostly along rivers, but also along lake and ocean shores. None of the COSEWIC reports prior to 2016 mention habitats similar to those found on Triquet as being viable for screech. The only literature that I could find that mentions these types of boggy habitats at all, is a reference to Burns Bog as ‘…stunted conifer bog, suitable for screech-owls…’ in Kyle Elliott’s 2006 paper on Screech-Owl declines around Vancouver.

Ian and I had spent years discussing this species and where it should and shouldn't occur. We started birding in Vancouver a few years after the last of the urban Western Screech-Owls disappeared from our neighborhoods. They used to be, in the 1980s and earlier, the single most abundant owl in the city, but, for whatever reason, they've declined to local extirpation across most of the south coast of BC. The main culprit, in most birders minds, is Barred Owls. Having spread from their native range in eastern North America, across the prairies and into British Columbia over the last hundred years or so, these birds arrived in BC in the 1960s and 1970s. Their subsequent boom in numbers, coincided with the rapid decline of Western Screech-Owls across the province. These declines also correlated with wide-spread changes in landscape structure across coastal BC. As clear cut logging became more widespread and mechanized, and as wetlands and forests were rapidly converted into suburbs, food and nest availability has also become far more restricted and sporadic over this same timeframe. Triquet is full of nest cavities, native old growth forest and doesn’t seem to support any Barred Owls. We needed to know more in order to explore some of these correlations in further detail.

Once again John Reynolds picked up the cause. I joined the lab as an Undergraduate Honours student, and on a slim budget, with a handful of borrowed units from WildResearch, and the help of my wonderful friend Michael, I was off to the coast to look for owls. We were hosted by families in the Great Bear. Without their incredible generosity, we would never have been able to get this work done. Cal, Jan and the entire Humchitt family helped with logistics and let us stay for over a week in their home in Bella Bella. Nick and Janna Kaminski hosted and fed us on Hunter Island. After a month of surveys in February and March, we had observed the highest known densities of Western Screech-Owls in BC.

A view of Denny Island bog, a habitat where we found almost all of our screech-owls (Photo: Jeremiah Kennedy)

These observations were easily the most exciting ones I had ever made. Speaking with our hosts, however, I soon realized that this wasn’t close to a new discovery. I knew that Ian McTaggart-Cowen and Charles Guiget had seen a surprising number of screech in their time in the Great Bear between the 1930s and the 1960s, many of which were collected from bog forests. But what I didn’t know was what people who lived in the area for immeasurable generations thought on the topic.

Cal Humchitt is one of the main facilitators of this project. He has always helped me understand the forest and ocean better. From finding Wolves by smell, to getting help from songbirds when looking for deer, he gives you a hundred stories and a hundred lessons that raise your ecological awareness without being able to help it. He knew the unassuming owls we were looking for and had the Bella Bella school kids ready to come do some surveys with us by the time we got out there. These birds were around, and common in parts. This wasn’t new information to Cal or anyone else we spoke to in Bella. This showed me that as an owl research community, we were not effectively asking the people who knew these systems intimately. If we had, these observations would not have felt so new.

One of the images Cal put in my mind was of screech-owls feeding on the Herring spawn in March and April. I’ve not seen this yet, but Gunnels from the stomach of some birds that Guiguet shot in the 1940s and an understanding that most things that Cal asserts will show themselves to be true in time, make me confident that this takes place.

Nalu, a place where Cal taught me how to fish for Halibut and where he’s convinced I’ll find more owls (Photo: Cal Humchitt)

Testing the Theory

We now had data from several islands that were much larger than Triquet. These had healthy populations of Western Screech-Owl in most of the old growth we visited. When we ran into ancient Western Redcedar on north hunter we also found Screech, so we knew that it wasn’t just bog. But there sure were a lot of them in almost any bog we went to. Why would these birds be so tied to this weird stunted forest? Once again, we couldn’t disentangle Barred Owls and habitat. Most of the lower productivity bog habitats were untouched by forestry. The only places we saw Barred Owls were in second growth plantation forests, dominated by a single age of Hemlock and Alder. Year round food availability and temperature mediation aspects of old native forests and the absence of Barred Owls from these habitats should both be attractive aspects of these landscapes for screech-owls. As we are trying to disentangle these effects, we also know that disentangling them is not required for protecting the habitats where these birds exist. If you treat Barred Owls as an artifact of the landscape, then these old growth bogs, and other old growth cedar, are refugia from threats in general.

The bog question was expanded on by the Provincial Government, led by Ecosystems Biologist Jenna Cragg. They focused on the expansive bogs on Northern Vancouver Island. Quickly, it became apparent that these patterns were consistent with the Central Coast. This is when Hemmera biologist, and PMRA co founder, Toby St Clair, started in on the project. He was tasked with bringing all the existing data for this subspecies, together and figuring out where they are and what habitats they like. This report was fundamental in spearheading province-wide interest in the coastal subspecies. His analysis made it clear how little we know about habitat preferences, population and distribution, and how inconsistent our survey methodologies are. The PMRA was started, primarily, to combat these problems.

Our mission is to encourage and foster collaboration between future, present and past coastal BC nocturnal wildlife researchers, and to provide outreach and engagement to the public, using Western Screech-Owls as our umbrella organism

And here we are. Present day. Looking for owls across the coast of BC. Managing volunteer playback surveys, organizing Autonomous Recording Unit deployment (ARUs) and presenting to universities and research groups to encourage further research. The fact is that screech-owls are not the only organism that will go missing without looking in the right places and asking the right questions of the right people. How do you know what the questions are? You don’t. You just have to go and look and listen and ask everywhere. If you want to help us with this lofty goal, please do.

The first ‘Bog Owl’ I ever saw. (Photo: Jeremiah Kennedy)

Has this inspired you?

If you're interested in helping to complete a Western Screech-Owl survey near your home, you can reach out to us via email (pacificmegascops@gmail.com). This is a great way to learn about the owls around you, and to contribute to science and conservation in a meaningful manner. How do you do these surveys? Check out our survey methods page.

If you would like to collaborate with the PMRA, please send us an email. Lichens, mammals, inverts or plants. Whatever your study taxa are, we are interested in research on a ecosystem-wide scale. We don’t even ask you to like owls… although I’m impressed you got here if you don’t at least have a passing interest in these birds.

I hope that one day every child on the coast of BC gets a chance to listen to screech-owls, tottering away, from their bathroom window as I did. Looking out into the dark, brushing their teeth and thinking...

'What a wondrous sound. What a wondrous place...What a wonderful owl!'