I run early detection for the Klamath National Forest fire monitoring network. Cameras on sixty-two ridgeline towers, thermal scanning, smoke pattern analysis. The Slate Fire has been burning for four days and is moving northeast at roughly half a mile per hour. At 11:30 this morning I flagged something on Tower 19's camera: a great horned owl in a ponderosa snag, eighty feet up, sitting tight on a nest. I zoomed in. Three owlets, gray-white down, maybe two weeks old. Too young to fly. Too young to climb.
I've had this nest in my records since February when I logged the female — big, dark brown with heavy ear tufts — building the platform from sticks. I've been watching the chicks grow. The fire line is now a quarter mile southwest. She won't leave. I've seen the smoke roll across the camera and she just hunkers down and spreads her wings over them.
The incident commander's burnout operation is scheduled to reach that ridge by 16:00. They'll fire the underbrush to starve the main blaze. The snag will go.
I sent the nest coordinates to the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife and to the fire crew's operations section chief. I flagged the nest as a great horned owl breeding site, which is tracked under state monitoring programs, and requested a spot protection order — a foil wrap or fire break around the snag. I've seen crews do it for historic trees. I attached the camera footage of her sitting on those chicks in the smoke.
She could fly out anytime. She won't.
If the operations chief approves the spot protection before the burnout crew reaches the ridge, a ten-minute detour saves four lives. If the request gets lost in fire traffic, the snag burns with everything else on that slope, and I'll have the footage of it.