Northern Spotted Owl Blog Posts

Each spring, National Park Service staff monitor northern spotted owl breeding activity in national and state parks in Marin County. With the 2022 breeding season now almost over, we’ve found that the local population appears stable. Marin remains the only part of the owl's historic range, which stretches north to Canada, where the population is not in severe decline.

National Park Service biologists have been tracking federally threatened northern spotted owls in the forests of Point Reyes National Seashore and Golden Gate National Recreation Area for decades. But this February, biologists began to supplement traditional surveys with a new method: remote acoustic monitoring. Biologists also received a grant to use acoustic monitoring to conduct the first comprehensive inventory of invasive barred owls on park lands.

The northern spotted owl monitoring season is winding down, and the results are nearly final as biologists complete the season's surveys. Reproduction for this year was near the average with nineteen fledglings counted from twelve successful nests. One nest failed, and ten pairs of owls did not nest this season.

Did you know that Marin County, CA, including Point Reyes National Seashore, could be essential refuges for the northern spotted owl subspecies in coming years? In forests farther north, the eastern barred owl has moved down the coast and invaded historic spotted owl territories.