Nesting owls delay tree removal

Caption

A barred owl sits in a tree in Forsyth Park in 2025.

Credit: Courtesy of Andy Young

By Mary Landers — The Current 

Savannah’s Park and Tree Department was poised to remove a dying Southern red oak tree from the city’s iconic Forsyth Park when the tree’s residents made them rethink that plan.

“I don’t know if it was the mother owl or the father owl, but they were not too happy about it,” said Scott DeArmey, assistant director of the Savannah Park and Tree Department.

The agitated bird, with its greater than 3-foot wingspan, expressed its displeasure by swooping down on a city worker headed to the treetop in the bucket of the lift truck.

“So at that point, you know, they realized something was going on, and looked over and actually saw the cavity where this nest is that had eggs,” DeArmey said.

Park and Tree called off the tree removal and surrounded the tree with temporary fencing to keep pedestrians safe from falling limbs. Notices explain what’s going on.

Caption

A southern red oak in Forsyth Park, scheduled for removal, is the home to two barred owls.

Credit: Justin Taylor / The Current

While the notices identify the birds as great horned owls, that’s not the case, said Deb Barreiro, a Tybee birder who works for the Department of Natural Resources. She and her husband, Andy Young, had seen the birds before and identified them as barred owls. So have other local birders, who reported their findings to the site eBird, where there are 19 photos of barred owl sightings in Forsyth Park but no sightings of great horned owls. 

The two species are similar. Great horned owls are larger and have black bills and yellow eyes. Barred owls have the opposite — yellow beaks and dark eyes. Barred owls also have a distinctive “who cooks for you” call.

Barreiro said she was alarmed when she happened to see workers preparing to remove the tree, but by the time she approached them to discuss the resident owls, they had already decided to back off.

DeArmey later learned that the owls — and thus their nesting tree — are protected under the federal Migratory Bird Treaty Act, one of the nation’s oldest environmental laws. (Though that protection was recently weakened by the Trump Administration, which moved to shield companies from penalties when they accidentally kill migratory birds.)

The tree remains in rough shape.

“It’s got some decay pockets and some cavities,” DeArmey said. “And it had a section of it tear out during the hurricane.”

Those same qualities that marked the red oak for removal made it prime real estate for barred owls, which nest in tree hollows.

The tree will still come down, but not until the owls finish raising their young. That’s going to take about two months — one for incubation and one for raising the nestlings, according to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. DeArmey said his crews will stand down as long as necessary.

This story comes to GPB through a reporting partnership with The Current.