Spotted owls do inhabit central California, according to the Audubon society. I've seen them in southern Oregon near the border too.
Of course, spotted owls are for all practical purposes little more than a breed of common barred owl. Good thing for the timber industry that there aren't too many color and pattern mutations of barred owls or we'd have each individual barred owl that showed any unusual characteristics- even something as minute as a bird zit or broken talon- renamed "the Oily Pore Puberty Owl" and "the Unmanicured Assymetric Owl" and declared an endangered species by the ecoterror crowd. They would be spiking trees in every part of the US in which a barred owl of any sort could be found.
As for the reference to rats...not only is California's disaster areas home to special rats but the US Senate is infested with rats as well. I can picture rat Senators finding themselves mired in adhesive on some giant sticky rat trap baited with porkrinds and Chinese cash.