The Owl Chronicles Part One

OWL HOMES

Recently Albany Patch pointed out that there have been at the eight acre owl reservation on the Plateau in Albany, built at the cost of about $100K taxpayer dollars. Part of this may be due to the fact that the fence keeps you so far away you couldn’t see ‘em even if there were any. But the rangers, who can get in, say ‘no joy yet’. The absence of owls is a shame because the project started out with such high hopes and expectations, as the accompanying pictures will attest. With sufficient effort OWL HOMES might well have become a reality.

As any competent burrowing owl expert will tell you, when it comes to homes, burrowing owls are a lot like people. If you and your sugarplum decide it’s time to acquire a home, what would you do? Unless you are lucky enough to be a general contractor, or a one percenter, you probably wouldn’t think about building one. You’d try to find one already built that you both like, coax the bank into buying it, and move in. Burrowing owls are the same. When looking for a home, before resorting to all that enervative burrowing, they’ll first try to find an already dug out empty one, and move right in if it’s vacant. Like the occupiers, they believe that possession is nine-tenths of the law.

It may not be widely known, but the East Bay Park & Rec people understood this perfectly well, and to get things going concocted a plan to import a bunch of Prairie Dogs from the high desert in Nevada to perform the initial digging operations. These were to include, tunnels, community rooms, food storage compartments, and individual apartments for families. Why this plan was abandoned in favor of a concrete aproach, I have no idea.

Other approaches have been suggested. One posits that, since burrowing owls are believed to migrate to and from Mexico, they might be more attracted to habitats with Spanish sounding names like Cesar Chavez Park in Berkeley, a site that has been able to attract a whole bunch of them. Unfortunately for Albany, Cesar Chavez Park did not qualify as “mitigation” for the loss of owl habitat due to the construction of the Tom Bates Regional Sports Complex near Gilman, where it is said that over the years (when this was pasture) only one burrowing owl had ever been seen there and then only just once. (While details surrounding that sighting have been lost—at least to me—in the mists of time, in fairness I must point out that there is absolutely no evidence to support the apocryphal rumor that the bird watcher allegedly involved failed a breathalyzer test while driving away from the scene.)

NEXT TIME: Owls struggle with loss of habitat and make efforts to find a new home.