Researchers tag Wyoming’s first barred owl near its Grand Teton nest

Jackson researchers had been attempting to trap the male barred owl for more than a week, but the wary raptor was proving elusive. First, the owl swooped in for the bait mouse but glanced off the trap. The next time, he performed evasive flight maneuvers and escaped. 

Then on Thursday, they set up a different trap in the Teton County forest habitat, this time with dho-gazza nets — fine mist nets designed to envelop raptors that unknowingly fly into them. 

“And then, literally out of nowhere, the female came in and got caught,” said Bryan Bedrosian, conservation director at the Teton Raptor Center. 

His team affixed the female with a GPS tracker. And like that, the bird became the first-known barred owl tagged in Wyoming. To Bedrosian’s knowledge, it’s also the first barred owl tagged in the Rocky Mountains.

The tagging comes two years after the pair became the first documented nesting barred owls in Wyoming, news that ruffled some scientific feathers. Though they are eastern birds, barred owls have expanded their range westward through the boreal forests of Canada and down into the Pacific Northwest, where they have outcompeted the imperiled northern spotted owls and created significant management conflicts. 

Wyoming raptor experts and others are wary about the impact the adaptable and aggressive barred owls could have on native species like great gray owls. 

Those concerns prompted the Teton Raptor Center to initiate the tracking project. Bedrosian and his team aim to tag the female’s wily mate, along with any chicks that hatch from a nest the pair is currently tending. The goal is to gather data on the birds’ movement and behavior to see if and how it’s impacting other raptors.

“I’m not suggesting we do anything right now, but with any invasive species, it’s always easiest to do action at the beginning rather than being reactionary later,” Bedrosian said. Information gathering is step one. 

Potential competition

Barred owls are similar in size to great horned owls, but lack the distinctive “horns.” They are similar in profile to great gray owls, but are smaller and have black eyes in contrast to the great grays’ yellow ones. 

In Washington, Oregon and California, their negative impacts on federally protected northern spotted owls have prompted wildlife authorities to classify them as invasive. Barred owls, which are territorial and eat a variety of prey, have edged out the more shy and specialized spotted owls. 

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has wrestled with the issue for years, even resorting to killing barred owls to help prevent further damage to the declining spotted owls. Those conflicts stirred up concern after the nesting pair was documented in Wyoming by nature photographer Tom Stanton. 

But Wyoming, unlike the PNW, has limited data.

The relationship between barred and spotted owls in the Pacific Northwest is “one of the most extensively studied cases of competitive exclusion in the history of wildlife ecology,” said Wyoming Fish and Game Nongame Bird Biologist Zach Wallace.

Meanwhile, Wallace said, “next to nothing is known about potential competition between barred owls and great gray owls.”

The Wyoming project, he said, is a good step toward filling in that information gap. That’s why his agency helped support the application for a grant that’s helping to fund it. 

The National Park Service is also in the loop on the project and monitoring the situation, Bedrosian said. 

Data gathering 

Barred owl sightings are not unheard of in Wyoming — the 2023 report is just the first documentation of a nesting pair. What scientists are trying to understand now is what the nesting birds do year round, and if others are present in the state and pose competition to other owls. 

Teton Raptor Center is approaching the questions with a multi-pronged strategy. One prong involves analyzing years of historic acoustic data in the region.

The center also received grants from the Wyoming Governor’s Big Game License Coalition, the Jackson Hole Community Foundation and the Jackson Conservation District to help monitor the birds with GPS transmitters, satellite trackers and acoustic recorders. 

The team this spring placed recorders in roughly 200 spots in the Grand Teton National Park vicinity — those recorders yielded proof that at least one other individual, likely a bachelor male, has been in the region.

The final piece is the tracking. The hope is to tag each member of the nesting family, Bedrosian said. The owls produced three chicks in 2023, but their nest failed in 2024. They are nesting again currently, though it’s unknown how many eggs they have. 

But if they get trackers on all of the owls, ecologists can better understand their territory, where they spend the winter months, where their offspring go and if there is competition with other species. 

“One of the biggest concerns is the potential impact on other species that aren’t used to this generalist, very aggressive predator,” Bedrosian said. 

“Where this bird has been located is a historic great gray owl territory that is now vacant,” he continued. “And so did the barred owls push out the great gray? We don’t know. But if you take evidence from the Pacific Northwest with the spotted owls, it doesn’t look good.”