I first noticed them from their raucous calls in a nearby tree. Who cooks for you? Who cooks the food? I ran outside to see two owls fly from the tall Douglas fir next door, across the neighbor’s yard, to the next street over. I was thrilled to have owls so near my home. I stood listening as the last of the daylight disappeared and wondered if anyone else had noticed the owls calling.

Who cooks for you? Who cooks the fooood? called the first owl. Then a more distant owl responded, who cooks the fooood? The pair called back and forth for almost an hour. I tried to guess at their mid-summer conversation. ​

Barred owls mate for as long as they survive, but this didn’t sound like two adults to me. From the intermittent, hissing screeches of a young barred, it sounded like one of the owls was begging for food. After the chicks fledge, the mother owl flies off to replenish her reserves, leaving the father to care for the young and teach them how to hunt. From the sounds of it, one of the owls was refining its hunting skills, while the patient father encouraged the efforts. The pair flew to another yard over the hill. As the stars brightened, I could hear the now distant conversation. For the next several nights, I heard the barreds in the same Douglas fir, calling at dusk. Each time, I stopped to listen.

Barred owls are quite striking to look at. It’s the dish-shaped face of the owl that first captures the owler’s attention with large, dark, knowing eyes and a sharp yellow beak. Alternating brown and white concentric circles frame the face, while brown-and-white horizontal bars create a hood-like pattern over the head and neck, as if the barred is wearing a scarf. On the chest are the vertical brown bars for which the “barred” owl gets its name. A long brown-and-white tail hangs below the branch, as sharp, black, inch-long talons grip tight.

Like all owls, the barred owl has evolved over millennia to be a top avian predator. Owl eyes, power-packed with black and white nerve cells called rods, gather every shred of light in the darkness of night. Bats leaving their roosts in a nearby woodpile—for us just a part of the forest backdrop—on their nightly search for mosquitos and other flying insects, become prey for the nocturnally-sighted barred owl.​

The dish-shaped face funnels the softest of sounds to the owl’s ears, placed one higher than the other on either side of the head. These asymmetrical ears allow for a swift and efficient strike from above when the barred owl triangulates the exact position of a sharp chirp from a distressed red-backed vole sifting through the detritus of the forest floor, looking for seeds and fungi. And the zygodactyl talons of the owl—two toes pointing backward, one forward and one movable talon like an opposable thumb—enable the owl to grab and squeeze a hapless deer mouse. ​

Barred owls are relative newcomers to the Pacific Northwest. Over the last one hundred years, they have moved here like many of us, and theories abound about how and why barred owls emigrated from eastern North America. One theory speculates that it was the result of European settlement. In the late 1800s, white settlers headed west, expanding the boundaries of the nation. As they settled the northern Great Plains, they pushed Native Americans off the land, claiming the territory for farms and homesteads. They also ended the Native American practice of burning the prairies, allowing trees to grow where none had grown before. They planted trees too and altered the habitat forever. ​

Following the lush green habitat bridge created by this westward movement, possibly as early as the 1920s,
barred owls—the more aggressive, slightly larger cousin of the northern spotted owl—moved west. Being highly adaptable to a wide variety of habitats, including both the pristine old-growth and clearcut forests, barred owls thrived here.

The clearcut forests may have also inadvertently provided barred owls with protection from their fiercest predators, the great horned owls and northern goshawks that prefer forests, as opposed to clearcut land, for foraging. Eventually, the barred owls found an almost empty niche left vacant by the near extinction of the spotted owl. The barreds claimed territories and began pushing the last native spotted owls out of their preferred habitat, the remaining old-growth forests teeming with prey.

Another theory suggests that barred owls may have moved naturally into the Pacific Northwest from Canada. By overcoming biological hurdles and expanding into the evergreen forests of eastern Canada, they made their way west following the arc of Canada’s boreal forests. They were first documented in British Columbia in 1943, with the first nesting pair spotted in 1946. They were seen in Western Washington in 1969. By 1979 they had spread into Oregon, and into California by 1985, dispersing naturally and normally as part of the species’ successful growth and expansion as a predator rather than as a result of human interference.

​On Bainbridge Island, barred owls were first seen in 1992. Little more than twenty years later, in 2014, citizen scientist and owl biologist, Jamie Acker, monitored thirty-five to forty-five nesting pairs there. Now in 2018, barred owls are considered by some to be an invasive species, unwelcome in the forests of the Pacific Northwest.​​

Barred owls are the opportunists of the owl world. Like coyotes and glaucous gulls, barred owls are not picky about what they consume. As medium-size owls which weigh, on an average, slightly over two pounds, and have a wingspan of three and a half feet, are cosmopolitan hunters, feeding on a variety of small animals and owls, such as northern saw-whet owls, northern pygmy owls, and western screech owls.

They also caught insects, salamanders, and frogs—creatures that also did not evolve alongside these nocturnal avian predators. Barred owls, it seems, are outcompeting many species in the Pacific Northwest.​

Yet in all the time Wiens spent watching the barred owls during his two-year study, he couldn’t help but get to know the individual personalities of the owls. “I have a huge amount of respect for both species [of owls], especially the barred owls,” he said. “They’re an impressive species. Very intelligent and adaptive.”

It may matter only to us humans as we try to save the spotted owls from certain extinction, but if we label the barred owls as invasive, as interlopers who do not belong in our woods, it becomes easier to remove them. Some have suggested this and are currently actively experimenting with removal of barred owls from forests to save the spotted owl.
If they have arrived naturally, as part of nature’s plan to evolve and expand, then removing them becomes a more complex moral dilemma.

​I listened to these barred owls calling near my home in Suquamish, Washington, homeland of Chief Sealth, better known as Chief Seattle. He famously called for us all to remember to live with the land and its creatures, because each strand in the tapestry of life is as important as the next to the whole. Only now, in these early years of the twenty-first century, are we beginning to understand through careful study of natural systems just how these threads in the tapestry are interwoven. But we are studying the broken remains of a once-stable system thousands of years old. Now, with these forests in an ever-changing state of flux, how can we ever know which strands are safe to pull? I watch the beautiful barred owl flying from tree to tree through my neighborhood. However they arrived, they are now members of the web of life in the Pacific Northwest.