In mixed-conifer forests inhabited by California spotted owls, land managers hypothesize that without human intervention natural conifer regeneration will take many decades or longer to begin within interior areas of large high-severity fire patches, due to long distances from live tree seed sources. As a result, widespread post-fire logging, followed by sprayed application of herbicides and planting of conifer seedlings, are used to create tree plantations. These are activities routinely conducted in spotted owl territories following fires, despite current data that indicate this approach has adverse impacts on spotted owl occupancy. Land managers acknowledge such impacts, but continue these forest management practices, assuming they are a necessary harm, one that is warranted to ensure the later return of mature conifer forests used by spotted owls for nesting and roosting. However, few data have been gathered to test this hypothesis. At 5 years post-fire, we surveyed field plots on a grid within large high-severity fire patches in spotted owl habitat within the Rim fire of 2013 in the Sierra Nevada, California. In our analysis the percentage of plots lacking conifer regeneration decreased significantly with larger plot sizes, a finding contrary to previous studies which assumed vast “deforested” areas in wildland fires, a bias created by small plot size. We found higher conifer regeneration closer to live-tree edges, but we consistently found natural post-fire conifer regeneration at all distances into interior spaces of large high-severity fire patches, including >300 m from the nearest live trees. Distance from live-tree edges did not affect pine dominance in post-fire regeneration. The post-fire natural conifer regeneration reported in our results suggests that the adverse effects of current post-fire management in spotted owl habitat are not necessary practices that can be justified.

The Northern Spotted Owl (Strix occidentalis caurina) (NSO) was listed as federally threatened in 1992 due to widespread logging of its old-growth forest habitat. The NSO recovery plan in 2011 elevated competition with Barred Owls (Strix varia) (BO) and wildfires as primary NSO threats based partly on the assumption that severely burned forests were no longer NSO nesting and roosting habitat. We quantified amount of logging before and/or after wildfire and opportunistic detections of BOs within two home range scales (0.8 and 2.09 km) at 105 NSO sites that experienced severe wildfire from 2000–2017. Logging affected 87% of severely burned NSO sites, with BO recorded at 22% of burned-and-logged sites. Most (60%) severely burned NSO sites had evidence of logging both before and after fires while only 12% of severely burned sites had no logging or BO detections, indicating rarity of NSO territories subjected to severe fire without the compounding stressors of logging and invasive BOs. We recommend changes to NSO habitat modeling that assume nesting and roosting habitat is no longer viable if severely burned, and to the US Fish and Wildlife Service’s practice of granting incidental take permits for NSOs in logging operations within severely burned owl sites.

In the western U.S., the black-backed woodpecker has been found to be associated with dense montane conifer forests with high snag densities, typically resulting from moderate- to high-severity wildland fires. However, black-backed woodpeckers are occasionally also detected nesting in unburned forests, raising questions about the type of habitat in which they nest and the potential abundance of such habitat. We conducted intensive black-backed woodpecker nest density surveys in large plots within the middle/upper-montane conifer forests of the Sierra Nevada, California, within general (undisturbed) forests, snag forest habitat from moderate/high-severity wildland fire, and unburned snag forest habitat from drought and native bark beetles. We found black-backed woodpeckers nesting only in the two snag forest conditions, mostly in burned snag forest, and their preferential selection of burned snag forest was statistically significant. No nest was found in general forests. Our spatial analysis indicates that snag forest is rare in the forests of the Sierra Nevada due to fire suppression and logging, raising concerns regarding small population size, which we estimate to be only 461 to 772 pairs in the Sierra Nevada.