Habitat disturbance is an essential process, but climate change has amplified drought and fire severity, posing a threat to species that rely on closed canopy forests, like the California spotted owl (SPOW). While increased disturbance regimes pose a direct threat to older forest specialists, loss of canopy cover may benefit species with more general habitat associations and increase interspecific interactions. Great horned owls (GHOW) partially overlap in range with spotted owls in the Sierras, though they are known to occupy mixed and semi-open forest stands and are more tolerant to disturbance. Here, we leveraged a Sierra-wide acoustic monitoring project, automated acoustic detections, and single-species occupancy models to assess how SPOW interact with GHOW given changing habitat conditions. SPOW were more likely to occupy a site with more closed canopy forest. However, SPOW occupancy was not affected by GHOW presence, nor was there an interaction between prevalence of closed canopy forest and GHOW presence on SPOW occupancy. Indeed, this study demonstrates how bioacoustic monitoring can support previously established relationships. Additionally, bioacoustic monitoring can effectively survey species and novel interactions at a regional scale in a rapidly changing ecosystem.