Saving California Spotted Owls
Like their cousins the Mexican and northern spotted owls, California spotted owls are a bellwether of old-growth forests. These owls’ classic four-note call was once commonly heard throughout the big trees of the Sierra Nevada and Southern California ranges, but logging, sprawl, large fires driven by climate change, and invasion by the barred owl — an aggressive relative increasingly muscling spotted owls out of the woods from British Columbia to the Sierra — are silencing them.
Background
In the last half of the Clinton administration, the U.S. Forest Service initiated planning for the eight national forests of the Sierra Nevada under the so-called Sierra Nevada Framework, just as the Center and Sierra Forest Legacy filed petitions to protect California spotted owls and Pacific fishers under the Endangered Species Act. The administration subsequently issued the Framework, which set forth protections for the owl and fisher and followed some of the guidelines recommended in our petitions. But, claiming the Framework offered safeguards enough, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service denied Endangered Species Act protection for the owls. Then the Bush administration handily gutted the Framework's protections for both Pacific fishers and California spotted owls.
Our Work
Since our 2000 Endangered Species Act petition, we’ve been working nonstop — including with several lawsuits and two more listing petitions — to make sure California spotted owls get the federal protection they need to survive.
At first the Fish and Wildlife Service repeatedly refused to grant safeguards despite its own science. Then, thanks to our legal work, it finally issued an initial positive decision on protecting the owls in 2015 — but kept dragging its feet. After another lawsuit, in 2023 the agency proposed to protect the species, but it missed its deadline to move forward. So we sued again in 2025.
We’ve also worked to save California spotted owls’ habitat. We’ve helped stop timber sales in the Sierra Nevada and have advocated for strong owl protection in plans developed for the Giant Sequoia National Monument and four Southern California national forests. The Center joined Sierra Forest Legacy in challenging the weakened version of the Sierra Nevada Framework. And in 2014 the Center filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Forest Service over its continued failure to protect post-fire wildlife California spotted owl habitat from outdated and destructive logging practices.
