Burrowing owls can stop development in its tracks

One of the best anti-development books I’ve ever read wasn’t written by a naturalist named Muir, or Thoreau, or Carson or Leopold. No, the author is Carl Hiaasen, a writer famous for his tongue-in-cheek tales about the vagaries and foibles of life in South Florida.

Hiaasen’s book “Hoot” is all about a little owl that stands less than a foot tall and lives in a hole in the ground. It’s a book for young people who are just trying to find their way in life.

Here’s a synopsis: A young boy named Roy moves from Montana to Florida, where he takes on the burden of helping to save a family of burrowing owls by stopping the planned construction of Paula’s Pancake House in a vacant lot. By employing some crafty ecological strategy, Roy first makes some quirky new friends, then helps those friends expose the dishonesty of the developers and their total disregard for the environment. Through this process, Roy becomes a mature young man. Of course, the real heroes in “Hoot” are the burrowing owls that have created their home on the proposed development site.

Burrowing owls are found throughout open terrain — grasslands, prairies, savannas, deserts, farm/ranch land, golf courses and urban/suburban vacant lots — in both North and South America. Despite their small size (about 9 inches tall with 2-foot wingspans) and ground roosting and nesting habits, they are real owls. They use their sharp talons to capture and kill prey, mostly large insects and small rodents, both on the wing and by running them down on the ground.

Demonstrating their smarts, burrowing owls regularly collect animal dung, which they then spread around their dens. This provides the miniature birds of prey with their own home delivery service, since they eat the beetles and other crawling insects that are attracted to the livestock droppings. Another burrowing owl trick is to make hissing noises that sound just like a rattlesnake to ward off unwanted intruders.

While they are often active in the daytime, they mostly hunt like “normal” owls from dusk until dawn. In the western U.S., they primarily live in holes dug by prairie dogs. In Florida, they typically live in the burrows of gopher tortoises where they have become tolerant of humans, often nesting on golf courses, airports and farms.

When burrowing owls get in the way of “progress” (which happens often in South Florida) developers sometimes hire biologists to entice them to move into new burrows on other sites. At least this helps the tiny owls avoid being entombed when the bulldozers show up.

Those of us who share our land with burrowing owls need to do all we can to help protect them. Throughout much of their range, these big-eyed, tiny-limbed birds of prey are considered rare species. In addition to land development, they’re severely threatened by indiscriminate use of pesticides and predation by many other animals, especially feral dogs and cats.

Sadly, when I heard Hiaasen speak in Florida, he was asked the following question: “Does this bird (Hoot) really exist and live in the ground or is it a figment of your imagination?” Obviously we need to do a better job of educating the public if we want to successfully protect future generations of Hoots.

Budd Titlow is a professional wetland scientist and wildlife biologist and an award-winning photographer. He has written three natural history books, most recently “Bird Brains: Inside the Strange Minds of Our Fine Feathered Friends.”