Vargas Island Research Experience
By Max Bailey
This work was conducted with support from the University of British Columbia, the B.C. Ministry of Water Lands and Resource Stewardship, Environment and Climate Change Canada, the Pacific Megascops Research Alliance, and B.C. Parks. We acknowledge that this work was conducted on the unceded and traditional territory of the Ahousaht Nation who were supportive of this work. We thank all the volunteers who dedicated their time to come help us understand these cryptic coastal birds.
In March 2025, I asked a lot of questions about Coastal Western Screech-Owls (WESOke). I wanted to understand what I was to expect with regards to behaviour, diet, movement ecology, etc; essentially anything I found interesting in the moment. Many of my questions were met with, “I just don’t know”. It was soon clear to me that what we do know, at least concerning other locales, couldn’t easily be generalized to the unique situation we were exploring on Vargas Island, British Columbia. Vargas Island lies just off Tofino, on the central west coast of Vancouver Island. In March, it’s wet, cold, and windy. We saw snow on the peaks to the east and any dry day felt like a gift. The island is also primarily low-productivity old-growth cedar bog adjacent to more productive cedar forests bordering the coastline. This, among other aspects, is what made WESOke worth studying here, and why my questions were met with more questions.
Aerial view of Vargas Island, British Columbia. Its habitats include old-growth low productivity mixed forests, bogs and fens, and saline estuaries. Forest composed of primarily western redcedar, Douglas fir, and western hemlock. Credit: Google Earth.
Animals are complex and have intertwined and multifaceted ties to the ecosystems they inhabit and are a part of. Even within a species, behaviour is shaped by the unique biotic and abiotic forces of a particular region. Thus, digging deeper into understanding WESOke requires exploring their ecology in diverse eco-regions. As I learned quickly, we cannot always, and probably should not, apply what we know about animals in one location, for example, interior populations, to those in other areas like coastal Vancouver Island. This critical analysis of assumptions is an essential reflex for the exploring field naturalist and what I experienced on Vargas Island proved to be a perfect lesson.
Within days of my (too brief) introduction to WESOkes, I was struck by the passion and dedication those in this field have. At first, I was excited to be there for the (dare-I-say-it) superficial reasons: wandering through beautiful forests, spending time in nature, and learning new skills. But the more time I spent with Megan Buers and the team of talented biologists, the more I appreciated just how novel and valuable this research opportunity is. This understanding was immediately reinforced through our first roadblock.
The ambition for this project was straightforward: pilot methods to attach radio-transmitters to WESOkes in Vancouver Island’s old-growth systems, collect preliminary movement data, and document field observations. The initial plan to accomplish this goal, laid out to me on day one, was that we were to set up a camp on the west site of Vargas Island, where we would have access to a convenient trail to navigate the dense rainforest. We would then survey for owls, set up mist nets, trap, tag and, before you know it, we’re collecting data. There should, we thought, be plenty of owls out there, just waiting to be studied. As it turns out, we had a very hard time detecting a single trace. I think we all expected things to go wrong in some capacity (Murphy’s Law applies to fieldwork) but I’m not sure we expected it to go wrong in quite this way. Indicated by the confusion around me, there was something going on here, the owls here weren’t behaving as they “should”. Within this confusion there was excitement and a realization that we were studying these owls in this habitat for precisely this experience as every time that expectations are defied, for every time we were wrong, we get insight into novel behaviour and ecology.
Failure also means adaptation. In our case, it meant relocating to the east side of Vargas Island, where we were confident that owls at least existed more recently, corroborated by autonomous recording unit (ARU) data. The downside being that camping was tougher, bushwacking more grueling, and there is no convenient place for nets to be set up to catch the birds.
Me holding a very grouchy looking Pippin. Credit: Megan Buers.
The presence of WESOkes was almost immediately verified night one at Rassier Point. Audio playback lures attracted a teasing male, who spent all sorts of effort taunting us in the night but refusing to fly into the net. Ultimately, no tag was deployed that night, but we were left with a question. Why here, on the east of the island, and not there, in the west? Hypothesis generation is one of the most exciting parts of field research and I, at least, enjoyed playing with ways to test these hypotheses. However, given that we hadn’t yet caught a single owl, we still had a lot of work to do. You could say week one ended in failure, but this would be ignoring the valuable information we learned. I believe we succeeded precisely because expectations were defied. We began to crack the puzzle of what is going on with these birds and, given how little we know, that is as big a victory as you can expect.
When we laid eyes on a bird in the hand, we finally had a deliverable success. We could start to collect some pictures, biometric data, and deploy a tag to understand their movement ecology. The first WESOke to be tagged was (probably) that same petulant male, taunting us that night at Rassier. Our experience with him was one of frustration and sheer dumb luck. It was Megan and I alone in the second week and it was a week of trying, failing, and trying again. At times, it felt like we were doing something fundamentally wrong. There were WESOke here, and seemingly a lot of them, but they just refused to fly low enough to be caught in a net. Are we setting up the nets in a poor location? Are these birds not aggressive enough this time of year? Are we using the wrong lure? On one of the last chances we had that week, Megan and I set up a net at a site we were confident had low enough perches, a clear fly-away, and was well elevated above the forest floor. These questions and doubts were running through my mind, and I was flagging a bit. I think Megan felt the same and by the end of this night, we had given up trying in vain to lure the circling owl in. We were brainstorming a new approach, quite literally shopping for alternatives, when, without a sound, he flew into our net. It was on a casual glance at the net that we noticed him, and simultaneous waves of relief and alarm hit us. Tagging and release was a success, with the right amount of stress and concern for the bird’s health and safety.
A typical Vargas Island bog. Just one of the many habitat types we encountered here. Credit: Megan Buers.
We affectionately nicknamed him Pippin. I don’t have a good understanding of why it worked after nearly two weeks of failure. But sometimes I guess you just get lucky.
A magnificent western redcedar (Thuja plicata). It’s an example of the type of vertical complexity present in this study system.
Over the next three weeks, we relocated camp twice more, venturing around the east side of the island. There were more failures of course, but we were learning quickly. Despite our random success, we all still thought it wise to adapt a new strategy to netting. Megan and Jeremiah Kennedy, clever as they are, created a net complete with a new pulley system that could reach heights in the canopy we couldn’t get close to before. We had hypothesized that these coastal owls flew just above our nets because the massive trees offered higher perches than those in previously studied regions. This also instilled an important lesson in me: don’t rely on old methods overzealously. Ingenuity paid, and we caught two more owls using that method.
Over the course of the month, the behaviour of these remarkable animals slowly came into picture, coming in bits and pieces. Using a combination of very high frequency (VHF) and GPS transmitters affixed to the owls, we could locate them by picking up the transmission on an antenna and relating signal strength to direction and distance to the owl. Using this method and tracking the owls, and prior to downloading any data from their trackers, we began to see how they may differ from preconceptions. They seemed to cover a significantly greater amount of ground than had been seen before. One anecdotal example highlighted this finding for me. Noel Swain, one of the PMRA volunteers who supported the study, and I were exploring an estuary near camp and performing a playback survey. Our goal was to establish presence/absence of an individual in the area that we could target for netting in the next couple of days. This involved playing a standardized recording of WESOke breeding songs in repeated intervals.
A close up of a Western Screech Owl (Megascops kennicottii kennicottii) in hand. Credit: Megan Buers.
Up a creek, in the early night, we heard a response. Distant at first, but easily identifiable as a WESOke. We were carrying an antenna just in case and we decided to test to see whether the individual singing in response was Pippin, our already tagged bird. I didn’t expect it to be—after all, we were at least one kilometer from his known territory—but sure enough, the signal strength, direction, and timing aligned. When the calling stopped, the signal faded. This wasn’t necessarily a revelation, but for me, it fully settled in that these owls were holding significantly larger territories than previously studied interior birds.
Once we got some movement data back (despite some frustrating troubles), in the form of GPS location coordinates taken at regular intervals over the course of the night, we saw the shape of the territories that we were more or less expecting based on our field impressions. They were large, butted up against each other, and seemed to occupy a variety of habitat types within the landscape. As well, they seemed to show high inter-individual variety in habitat use as certain individuals showed different habitat usage. These data, and other pieces of evidence, were sweet accomplishments I’m happy we made. There are countless more questions to answer but we contributed to an important body of knowledge that will hopefully continue to evolve so that we can better live alongside these animals.
My time on Vargas Island was a reminder of both the challenges and the rewards of field research. What began as a pilot study that I naïvely presumed to be straightforward quickly evolved into a dynamic process of observation, adaptation, and discovery. The Western Screech-Owls defied our expectations, forcing us to rethink assumptions and innovate our methods. In doing so, they offered us glimpses into aspects of their ecology that remain largely unexplored. Perhaps most importantly, this experience deepened my appreciation for the complexity of wildlife research, where uncertainty is not a roadblock but rather the starting point for meaningful inquiry. In the end, every unanswered question and unexpected result added to our growing understanding of these elusive birds and their coastal environment.
