The Bend High Desert Museum announced that its spotted owl, Polka, died of old age. He spent the last years of his long life roosting high in an old growth snag made of concrete, behind a thick wall of bullet proof glass. And unlike most spotted owls in captivity, he fathered many offspring.
Polka, a 26 year old spotted owl at the high desert museum in Bend. He and his mate were among the only spotted owls to reproduce in captivity.
Polka was one of only a few dozen spotted owls kept in captivity and one of just two pairs to successfully hatch chicks. Jim Dawson, the curator of living collections at the high desert museum, thinks its time to start a serious captive breeding effort to aid in spotted owl recovery. Captive breeding isn’t part of the species’ current recovery plan, and it remains controversial.
Polka was a rehab bird, injured by biologists during a banding study. He bonded with a captive female owl with a broken wing named Dot, and the pair eventually produced eight chicks. Dot died last last year.
Biologists aren’t sure why Polka and Dot reproduced so enthusiastically in captivity, or why other captive spotted owl pairs have been unsuccessful. Dawson says raptors are notoriously hard to breed.
“The pair, when they go into breeding mode, gets very territorial and they’re very nervous about their nest site. You want them to focus on each other,” he says.
Eric Forsman, a leading spotted owl biologist who captured Polka and Dot, says the trick may simply be finding pairs of owls that are compatible with each other, trying with a larger sample of owls. But like many scientists, he’s skeptical captive breeding can help save the species.
“We haven’t attempted it with very many individuals…I think given enough time and practice, we could probably breed spotted owls in captivity, but I’m not sure that’s the solution to our problem,” the U.S. Forest Service wildlife biologist says.
The problem, Forsman says, is that even if you could increase owl numbers in captivity, the limited old-growth habitat available in the wild is increasingly being taken over by larger barred owls. And barred owls may wind up being much harder to remove from the landscape than threats like lead or DDT, which pushed the California Condor and Peregrine falcon to the brink.
Credit: Amelia Templeton.
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