Megan Buers is dodging potholes on a labyrinth of logging roads on northern Vancouver Island, hoping for a late-night rendezvous with a western screech owl.
“He’s the Brad Pitt of the screech owl world,” says Buers, a wildlife biologist. In avian lingo, that means this particular owl is a muscular and meaty example of his species, with rakish plumage.
So far, Buers has seen the owl — but not yet managed to fit him with a transmitter for tracking.
En route to the spot where they last glimpsed Brad Pitt, Buers and her research technician Reese Embree stop and roll down the windows of their dusty Subaru Outback. They crank up a speaker and point it at a band of mature trees a logging company has left standing along the Memekay River in the Campbell River watershed.
A western screech owl call plays: Hooot hooot hooot hoot-hoot-hoot-hoot .
They listen intently to see if they get a response, and then hit play again. The rhythm and cadence of the call resembles a ping-pong ball bouncing to a stop. It’s definitely not a screech.
“Nothing,” Buers says, shaking her head.
The dashing owl in question is part of a mystery that Buers hopes to help solve. Western screech owls are disappearing from B.C.’s coast — and nobody is quite sure why.
Thirty years ago, screech owls hatched their fluffy white chicks in at least a dozen parks in the Lower Mainland, including Stanley Park and Pacific Spirit Park. If you grabbed binoculars and a flashlight and went owling in Greater Victoria, you’d be more likely to encounter a western screech owl than any other owl species.
“You used to get them in your backyard,” Buers says. “You’d hear anecdotal tales from folks in Nanaimo that they used to literally have them on their back porch.”
Today, it’s rare to find a screech owl in urban areas. In the mid-1990s, 10 screech owl pairs nested on the University of Victoria’s campus. Last year, birders found only “one lonely male, calling where a pair used to nest.”
Elsewhere on the coast, screech owl populations are in sharp decline, and the owl is now threatened with extinction in B.C.
“We know they like to nest in big trees,” Buers says. “Outside of that, we don’t really know what they need.”
Her research, for a PhD at the University of British Columbia Okanagan, aims to find out if western screech owls require old trees and mature forests for other reasons, including to find prey. Are screech owls more abundant in old-growth forests? And how does that compare to managed landscapes like replanted woods?
A western screech owl, nicknamed Brad Pitt for his buff body and rakish plumage, sits in a tree near a stream in the Campbell River watershed on Vancouver Island.
Photo by Megan Buers.
“What is it that they need? Something easy that’s not going to impact forestry too much, but would benefit biodiversity greatly?” Buers asks. “Right now, we don’t know.”
Tonight, Buers is hoping to catch Brad Pitt and outfit him in a “little pair of pants” attached to a transmitter the size of a small beetle, with two tiny antennas, that might provide some clues about how far he flies and where he roams.
A lot of personality
Catching a western screech owl is part reconnaissance, part luck and a lot of chicanery.
The idea is to trick Brad into thinking another male screech owl has invaded his territory. “He’ll come swooping in,” Buers says.
She parks near a weedy, disused logging road, close to the spot where she and Embree found Brad Pitt last night. She’s pretty sure he and a lady friend are nesting nearby, in a grove of old trees by a stream.
The sun is setting over the serrated peaks of the Vancouver Island mountain range as Buers and Embree pull on warm clothes — hats, down jackets and, for Buers, fleece pyjama bottoms under rain pants.
Buers grew up in the Okanagan, identifying spiders and frogs in her backyard. Intrigued by a northern saw-whet owl that ended up in her family’s chicken coop, she wanted to be an ecologist from an early age. Her LinkedIn profile says she favours the nocturnal; her Instagram account says she’s “owl-obsessed.” She’s been studying western screech owls for five years.
Embree, an early-career biologist hoping to pursue a graduate degree in conservation and wildlife management, retrieves a shopping bag with a net and a dummy owl nicknamed Screechika from the trunk. She’s painted the Styrofoam owl brown, gluing some feathers to it for good measure.
Joining the pair on this late April night are two Indigenous guardians, Riley Ross-Nelson and Scott Assu, from the We Wai Kai First Nation. The guardians are sharing their knowledge of their nation’s territory while they help Buers catch and tag owls — a partnership that B.C.’s Ministry of Water, Land and Resource Stewardship helped broker as part of its ongoing support for her research, which is also supported by the federal government.
“Our nation really cares about managing biodiversity, and all our species are extremely important to biodiversity,” Assu says. “W…
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