ABSTRACT
Eric forsman walked quickly up the path. Something, he feared, was amiss. Three days earlier he had fitted a radio transmitter on an owl for the first time — fastening it like a tiny backpack — to track the bird so he could measure its home range. Then he had returned to his university office in Corvallis. Walking up a canyon trail near Blue River Reservoir, along the boundary of the H. J. Andrews Experimental Forest in Oregon's Cascade Mountains this summer day in 1976, Forsman was studying the elusive northern spotted owl. The implications of this discovery, Forsman knew, were profound. Spotted owl numbers, he had discovered in his master's work, were declining. And now this bird's flight revealed that the species's range was staggeringly large. Forsman's interest persisted when he matriculated at Oregon State in 1966, majoring in fisheries and wildlife.
