Photo: Expedition to check out spotted owl habitat checks map before heading out 

For decades we’ve been working hard to convince our provincial and federal governments to protect the old-growth forest habitat of the endangered northern spotted owl in southwest BC (the only place in Canada where the owl lives).

And now we’ve got a new map that shows Wildlife Management Areas (WHAs) that have recently been designated by the BC government as off-limits to logging. 

It’s big news, resulting in huge areas of forests being protected!

The purpose of WHAs is to conserve areas identified as critical habitat for an endangered species. In the case of our BC spotted owl population, it means conserving large areas of old-growth forests. Once an area has been designated as a protected WHA, activities are managed in that area to limit their impact on the threatened species. For the owl that means no logging.

In 2013, the BC government designated over 48,000 hectares of old-growth forests in southwestern British Columbia as protected spotted owl habitat – in addition to the 75,000 hectares protected the year before. Many of these areas have been a focus of Wilderness Committee campaigns since the 1990s, during which time we’ve searched for owls, mapped out their habitat, protested logging and gone to court to push for more habitat conservation.

The now-protected forests are places where we faced some of the hardest fought campaigns we’ve ever encountered. Forests at Siwash Creek, Elk Creek, Manning Park Donut Hole, Enterprise Creek,  S&M Creek, and Fire Mountain are a few of these former protest sites – now protected from logging.

These new protected WHAs have been approved for both the Squamish Forest District (approved in February 2013) and the Cascades Forest District (approved in April 2012), on top of already-approved protected WHAs in the Chilliwack Forest District (approved in March 2011). This is great progress, but as always, more remains to be done!

The map below shows a detailed view of the new protected WHAs, based on their specific designations.

Click here to download the map in .pdf format

The protected WHAs are designated as "long-term habitat areas", which provides strong protection from logging. However, in a trade-off with timber companies some WHAs (or in rare cases, parts of protected WHAs) are designated as unprotected "managed forest areas", which provides much weaker protection that still allows for a great deal of logging. We recently protested logging at one of these sites near Chilliwack Lake.

Because of industrial logging, the spotted owl population in southwest BC has fallen from more than 1,000 birds to less than a dozen estimated to be left in the wild. The Wilderness Committee continues to fight for all WHAs to be fully protected, and for strong protection for all remaining old-growth forests.

Keep up to speed on this campaign by visiting the Spotted Owl section of our web site!