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.” 

As Wyoming Housing Network (WHN) celebrates its 20th anniversary, the organization reflects on two decades of service to communities across the state. Founded in 2005, WHN is a statewide nonprofit with a mission to strengthen Wyoming communities by providing quality resources and opportunities for people to reach their housing goals.

A Legacy of Affordable Housing

Over the past 20 years, WHN has played a crucial role in expanding access to affordable rental housing. With 14 properties located in cities such as Cheyenne, Powell, Casper, Cody, Guernsey, Riverton, Torrington and Wheatland, WHN provides safe, affordable homes for hundreds of Wyoming residents. These properties are the result of strong partnerships with local communities and are part of WHN’s ongoing effort to meet the state’s growing housing needs.

The organization’s most recent project, Robins’ Point in Cheyenne, is a 48-unit multi-family affordable housing complex currently under construction. As WHN continues to look ahead, it actively seeks new partnerships with Wyoming communities to develop additional affordable and permanent supportive housing projects — ensuring that all residents have access to stable, quality homes.

Comprehensive Housing Counseling for Every Stage

WHN’s impact extends beyond bricks and mortar. Through its robust housing counseling program, WHN empowers individuals and families to navigate their housing and financial journeys with confidence. Most services are offered at no cost, ensuring they are accessible to all.

“As counselors, our goal is to equip Wyoming families with the tools they need to succeed in their housing journey,” says Manuela Ortiz, the housing counseling manager for WHN. “We are honored that they’ve chosen us to help guide them and answer their questions.” With decades of experience as a team, WHN loves to help guide residents in their home buying and give them the tools to financial success that isn’t limited to homeownership.

The services WHN counseling includes:

• Homebuyer Education – Helping prospective buyers understand the homeownership process and prepare for long-term success.
• Financial Capabilities Coaching – Supporting residents in managing money, building credit and achieving financial stability.
• Rental Counseling – Assisting renters with budgeting, lease understanding and tenant rights.
• Foreclosure Counseling – Offering support to homeowners facing hardship and exploring solutions to keep them in their homes.
• Reverse Mortgage Counseling – Helping seniors make informed decisions about reverse mortgage options.

WHN’s counselors provide personalized guidance to help residents make informed, empowered decisions about their housing and finances. One participant noted, “The counselor was very knowledgeable and easy to work with. Super helpful when I had questions and understood our concerns when we expressed them. I definitely feel that this information will be helpful to my husband and myself as we adjust to being homeowners instead of lifelong renters.”

Looking Toward the Future

As WHN commemorates 20 years of service, the organization remains deeply committed to its mission. Looking forward, WHN plans to continue expanding homeownership opportunities, increasing the availability of affordable rental housing and offering comprehensive counseling and education services.

The celebration of this milestone is not just a look back, but a reaffirmation of WHN’s vision: a Wyoming where everyone has access to a safe, affordable and sustainable place to call home. For more information about WHN’s housing developments or counseling services, visit www.whninc.org. Whether you’re looking for a home, facing financial hardship or planning for the future, WHN is here to help — every step of the way.

Related

What do portions of Wyoming and Maine have in common? In each state, there are several counties where the population is fewer than one person per square mile.

That may come as a surprise to some people, especially because Maine’s population is more than double that of Wyoming’s.

Here’s another bit of unexpected trivia: When considering what percentage of each state’s population lives in a rural area, Maine ranks second (behind Vermont), whereas Wyoming comes in at the No. 12 spot, behind both of the Dakotas and Montana.

“Wyoming is not as rural as people think,” said Jim Fonseca, a retired professor of geography and dean emeritus at Ohio University in Zanesville. He’s also the author of “The One Minute Geographer” on Medium, where he writes about world geography.

The reason why people might be surprised by Wyoming’s rural ranking is because the U.S. Census Bureau classifies urban areas as having at least 2,000 housing units, or a population of at least 5,000 people. 

Anything else is considered rural.

Rural is less so people living alone in the woods and more so lots of small towns with only a few hundred people apiece, which is common in states like Maine and Vermont, Fonseca said.

“One thing we’re dealing with is the unexpected definition of what is rural,” he said.

Thorofare’s Remoteness 

Wyoming does, indeed, rightfully live up to its widespread distinction as home to the most remote place in the continental U.S. That’s the Thorofare Ranger Station, located in the southeast corner of Yellowstone National Park.

There are so many different ways to measure remoteness that Jerome Dobson, the longtime former president of the American Geographical Society, was a bit dubious about Thorofare’s claim to fame. 

But the ranger station came out on top as the most remote location in the lower 48 when Dobson considered the following factors: how long it would take to hike to the nearest trailhead, the distance to the nearest fast-food restaurant and the difficulty of the trail.

“It turned out to be a pretty good measure of remoteness,” he said.

To be fair, three locations in Alaska — within the Gates of the Arctic National Park and Reserve, Denali National Park and Preserve and Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Reserve — are more remote than Thorofare.

But Dobson, who is also a professor emeritus at the University of Kansas, said the ranking of remoteness still was a bit surprising.

“What really struck me was that the places that I thought might compete for most remote weren’t on the list,” he said.

Specifically, he said he was surprised that the top 25 most remote locations, by his measure, didn’t include locations somewhere in the Appalachia or near the Okefenokee Swamp in Georgia.

Despite its relative ruralness, Maine doesn’t have a location that ranked highly by Dobson’s measures for remoteness. 

Rural Flight

But when thinking about how rural Wyoming is, Fonseca said, the state shares many commonalities with other areas of the country — including Maine. 

Ruralites nationwide are grappling with finding sufficient job opportunities or easily accessing groceries and medical services. That’s why so many young people have deemed that being rural is a disadvantage, and rural populations are aging as the younger generations move elsewhere, he added.

That’s also why Wyoming is pretty typical in one regard: most of the population lives within a relatively short distance of the I-80 or I-25 corridors.

“We’ve tended to organize ourselves in these areas since the automobile was invented,” Fonseca said.