New research has found that northern spotted owls are approaching or have already crossed functional extinction across large areas of the Pacific Northwest, despite decades of conservation efforts to revive the species.
“Northern spotted owls are already functionally extinct in large swaths of their range. It’s not a thing that’s happening in the future, it has happened,” said Damon Lesmeister, a U.S. Forest Service biologist and courtesy faculty member at Oregon State University.
“That doesn’t mean we can’t do anything. There is still an opportunity for carefully considered management actions,” Lesmeister added, in a news release.
Functional extinction means creatures no longer play a meaningful ecological role or cannot reproduce enough to persist.
Northern spotted owl populations are so low in Washington and on the Oregon Coast that they are approaching functional extinction thresholds.
No spotted owls were detected in the Washington Cascades at latitudes north of Seattle.
Read the full story by The Capital Press here: https://capitalpress.com/2026/08/27/why-spotted-owls-are-functionally-extinct-in-parts-of-the-pnw/
