This chapter looks at the author's experience looking for Mexican spotted owls in Scheelite Canyon in the Huachucas. Like most people living in the United States during the late 1980s and early 1990s, the author had never heard a spotted owl's high-pitched four-note bark. The one-and-a-half pound owl became an inadvertent celebrity. The spotted owl emerged as an indicator species not just of forest health, but of a fevered nation's political temperature. The bird's fate provoked legal fisticuffs between two federal agencies, the Bureau of Land Management and the Fish and Wildlife Service. By the early 1990s, the spotted owl seemed to have migrated opportunistically from the ancient forests it had favored historically to a whole new ecological niche in the federal court system.
Use of Protected Activity Centers by Mexican Spotted Owls in the Sacramento Mountains, New Mexico