Diet and home range size of California Spotted Owls in a burned forest

This article originally appeared in Contact Calls, the newsletter of the Institute for Bird Populations.

In a recent paper in the journal Western Birds, IBP scientists and colleagues at the Wild Nature Institute assessed diet and home range size of California Spotted Owls occupying burned forests in the Sierra Nevada 4 years after a fire, and compared the results with data from previous studies in unburned forests. Results suggest that the burned habitat in our study area was particularly rich in pocket gophers and that Spotted Owls foraging on gophers in burned forests do not require home ranges substantially larger than the home ranges used by owls in unburned forests. This publication is the fourth in our series of papers on Spotted Owl ecology in burned forests that is changing the way forest managers think about the effects of wildfire on Spotted Owls.

Bond, M. L., D. E. Lee, R. B. Siegel, and M. W. Tingley. 2013. DIET AND HOME RANGE SIZE OF CALIFORNIA SPOTTED OWLS IN A BURNED FOREST. Western Birds 44:114-126.