A Southern California driver made a startling discovery Sunday morning when they found a live bird of prey stuck in the grille of their car.
The bird, whose head was peeping out, was a great horned owl, authorities said. An officer with Santa Barbara County Animal Services was called to a residence in the 1000 block of Amethyst Drive in the town of Orcutt around 9:30 a.m. Sunday. At least four firefighters from the Santa Barbara County Fire Department helped with the bird’s rescue, the department told The Times.
“This is the first time we had an owl, that I’m aware of, entangled in a vehicle,” said Scott Safechuck, a public information officer for the county Fire Department. “Usually it’s a cat, or sometimes we have cattle that get onto the highway.”
Firefighters carefully cut away portions of the grille as they tried to extract the owl on Sunday.
(Santa Barbara County Fire Department )
Authorities do not know how long the owl was stuck but say it may have happened Saturday. The removal operation took about 30 minutes, after which the owl, which had sustained injuries, was taken to the Wildlife Care Network, a wildlife rescue center in Goleta.
An employee at the wildlife network said that each animal the center helps receives a series of tests, such as CT scans and X-rays, upon arrival. The organization did not immediately provide an update on the owl’s status.
“It’s infrequent that things like this happen,” Safechuck said. “It’s remarkable the owl was still alive.”
The strange political bedfellows created by efforts to save spotted owls in the Pacific Northwest just got even stranger.
Already Republican members of Congress were allied with animal rights activists.
They don’t want trained shooters to kill up to 450,000 barred owls, which are outcompeting northern spotted owls, under a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service plan approved last year that would unfold over three decades.
Now, timber interests are aligning with environmentalists in favor of culling the owls.
Some logging advocates are afraid nixing the plan will slow down timber harvesting. Roughly 2.6 million acres of timberlands in western Oregon managed by the Bureau of Land Management are governed by resource management plans contingent on the barred owl cull going forward, according to Travis Joseph, president and chief executive of the American Forest Resource Council, a trade association representing mills, loggers, lumber buyers and other stakeholders in the region.
The area can produce at least 278 million board feet per year under current plans, “with the potential for significantly more,” Joseph said in a mid-October letter to Congress.
If the cull is scrapped, he said, the federal agency likely will need to restart Endangered Species Act consultation for the northern spotted owl, which is listed as threatened. It’s a process that could take years. According to the letter, it would create “unacceptable risks and delays to current and future timber sales.”
Timber production goals laid out by the Trump administration also could be jeopardized.
Momentum to stop the cull grew this summer when Sen. John Kennedy, a conservative from Louisiana, introduced a resolution to reverse the Biden-era plan.
That move reflected an unlikely alliance between some right-wing politicians and animal rights advocates who say it’s too expensive and inhumane. Some Democrats have also opposed the cull, and companion legislation in the House has bipartisan backers.
The stakes are high. Many environmentalists and scientists maintain that northern spotted owls will go extinct if their competitors aren’t kept in check. Barred owls — which originally hail from eastern North America — are larger, more aggressive and less picky when it comes to habitat and food, giving them an edge when vying for resources.
Last week, Politico’s E&E News reported that Kennedy said Interior Secretary Doug Burgum had asked him to stand down from his effort to stop the owl-killing plan. The legislator told the outlet he would charge ahead anyway.
“I don’t think the federal government ought to be telling God, nature — whatever you believe in — this one can exist, this one can’t,” Kennedy told E&E. “The barred owl is not the first species that has ever moved its territory and it won’t be the last.”
Kennedy did not respond to The Times’ request for comment. A spokesperson for the Department of the Interior said they could not respond to the inquiry because of the government shutdown.
“It’s strange that a Republican in the South is taking on the owl issue, specifically, when its consequences will impact western Oregon BLM timber sales,” Joseph said in an interview. “It will lead to lower revenues for counties, it will impact jobs and it will put the spotted owl on a trajectory towards extinction.”
The stance aligns in part with that of environmental groups like the Environmental Protection Information Center and Center for Biological Diversity, which have supported culling barred owls to help the beleaguered spotted owls in their native territory. It’s an unexpected overlap, given environmentalists’ long history of fighting to protect old-growth forests in the region the owls call home.
Tom Wheeler, chief executive of EPIC, said it’s possible that culling barred owls could lead to a bump in timber harvest on the BLM land in western Oregon but overall it would lead to more habitat being protected throughout the spotted owls’ expansive range. The presence of spotted owls triggers protections under the Endangered Species Act. If the cull boosts the spotted owl population as intended, it means more guardrails.
“It puts us in admittedly an awkward place,” Wheeler said. “But our advocacy for barred owl removal is predicated not on treating the northern spotted owl as a tool against the timber industry and against timber harvest. What we’re trying to do is provide for the continued existence of the species.”
Many Native American tribes support controlling barred owls in the region. In a letter to Congress last week, the nonprofit Intertribal Timber Council said barred owls threaten more than the spotted owl.
“As a generalist predator, it poses risks to a wide range of forest and aquatic species that hold varying degrees of social and ecological importance to tribes, including species integral to traditional food systems and watershed health,” wrote the council, which aims to improve the management of natural resources important to Native American communities.
Since 2013, the Hoopa Valley tribe in Northern California has been involved with sanctioned hunting of the owls and has observed the spotted owl population stabilizing over time, according to the letter.
However, groups like Animal Wellness Action and Center for a Humane Economy argue that the plan to take out so many barred owls over a vast landscape won’t work, aside from the high owl death toll. More barred owls simply will fly into where others were removed, said Wayne Pacelle, president of both groups.
That makes habitat key — and the prospect of losing more to logging in western Oregon devastating, according to Pacelle.
To stop the owl-culling plan, both chambers of Congress would need to pass a joint resolution and President Trump would need to sign it. If successful, the resolution would preclude the agency from pursuing a similar rule, unless explicitly authorized by Congress.
The plan already faced setbacks. In May, federal officials canceled three related grants totaling more than $1.1 million, including one study that would have removed barred owls from over 192,000 acres in Mendocino and Sonoma counties.
Today, I’m featuring an image that was captured at the Wichita Mountains NWR in southwest Oklahoma, a number of years ago. While photographing in the early morning, I saw this Burrowing Owl returning to his underground den, with nesting material in his beak (can you spot this owl’s mate, with only the head peering out of the burrow?):
In the early morning light, the motion of the owl returning was somewhat blurry. Oh well, still a great memory!
This image was captured pre-2004, when I was still shooting 35mm slides. I recently began converting some of those slides to digital files. It will take some time to convert my many slides, but I will be featuring some of my fond memories of early nature photography with you, as I get them converted.
It’s kind of hard not to be smitten with the burrowing owl.
Standing just 9 inches tall and weighing less than a cup of coffee, these owls prefer to live in the ground, where they feed mainly on insects and small rodents, rather than in trees. Their miniature size, feathery floof and comically big eyes give these birds of prey a charisma that captivates the lens of wildlife photographers and the hearts of even the most clinical environmental scientists.
“Once you see a burrowing owl, you just fall in love,” said Catherine Portman, president of the Burrowing Owl Preservation Society.
But their cuteness hasn’t protected this grassland species from a dangerous decline in population. This month, several wildlife conservation groups petitioned the California Fish and Game Commission to list these owls as endangered or threatened under the California Endangered Species Act.
Their report cites a 2007 statewide survey that measured an 11% decline in burrowing owls since 1993; although no comprehensive population count has be done since, they point to regional studies that show troubling numbers. Researchers Robert L. Wilkerson and Rodney B. Siegel counted 6,408 burrowing owl pairs in the Imperial Valley from 2006-07, but according to another study done by Jeffrey Manning, more than 1 in 4 breeding pairs had disappeared.
Shani Kleinhaus, a resident of Santa Clara Valley and environmental advocate with the local Audubon Society, remembers a time when it was easy to spot these raptors bobbing their heads all across the Bay Area, even in their camouflaged plumage.
“In 2009 we still had burrowing owls in the county that were very accessible to the public so people could see them,” Kleinhaus shared. But now, she said, most if not all of these birds rely on local conservation efforts to help protect their dwindling habitat in the Bay Area and help them pair when they reach reproductive maturity.
But it’s a little more complicated than rapacious developers versus hapless birds; there’s plenty of blame to spread around.
Burrowing owls rely on ground squirrels to help build their nests, but farmers often kill them as pests because they nibble on electrical wiring and feed on produce. Feral cats and roving hounds have been known to hunt them down. Invasive grasses brought by Spaniards during the late 1700s to feed their livestock have made grasslands less habitable for ground squirrels and burrowing owls alike.
There are mitigation fees that developers pay if they are encroaching on burrowing owl habitats. And the Migratory Bird Treaty Act and the California Fish and Game Commission codes afford protections to burrowing owls, but advocates say it’s not enough.
A burrowing owl in a busy park in Contra Costa County keeps watch as dozens of dogs explore just feet away.
(Lauren Bettino)
The decline of the owl is ‘death by a thousand cuts’
These environmentalists have petitioned to protect the burrowing owl before, most recently in 2003 when scientists like Lynne Trulio noticed a worrisome decline in the population of burrowing owls across the state. That petition was rejected because the state noted that the owls were flourishing in the Imperial Valley with the increase in agriculture in the 1990s.
“[Burrowing owls] should have been listed back then, in my opinion,” said Trulio, chair of the environmental studies department at San Jose State University. “What’s different 20 years on is that the trend that we saw in 2003 decline has steepened, and has gotten worse.”
Esther Burkett, senior environmental scientist at California Department of Fish and Wildlife, admits there aren’t enough legal protections for the owls and that the state bureaucracy can make it difficult to act quickly. (Her department is not to be confused with the Fish and Game Commission; her team does the research that informs the policy and rules that the Fish and Game Commission decides.)
“You got to know what you’re looking for. So, ideally, for any species, the actual surveyor needs to be trained on how to do that,” said Burkett. “[If] you miss a review of that [California Environmental Quality Act] document you don’t get another chance at it. And then we’re gonna lose three [breeding] pairs and it’s just death by a thousand cuts over time.”
Burkett manages a wide array of species in the state and said she’s overwhelmed by the need and the lack of resources she has to address the problems facing many of these animals. The last time they put together a comprehensive report on burrowing owls was in 2012, and even that report took four years to put together. She likens the situation to a hospital where they’re trying to address many patients — species tagged as “special interest” like the burrowing owl are in the ICU, but most of their resources are going toward endangered and threatened species in the emergency room.
Activists intervene on the owls’ behalf
Portman spends a lot of her time teaching Californians how to apply the California Environmental Quality Act to protect burrowing owls. The statute, which Gov. Ronald Reagan signed into law in 1970, requires developers to gauge the environmental effects of their projects and plan how to mitigate them — and allows the public to challenge them. But it’s not always easy to make sure these agencies are doing their due diligence.
“I don’t put that on the developer. I put that on the land use jurisdictions,” said Portman. The agency tasked with preparing the environmental impact report usually makes the developer bankroll it, and it’s in the developer’s interests to hurry the project toward completion. “The city councils, the county Board of Supervisors, whoever the lead agency is, gets to decide how that land is used,” Portman said, but they “do not take full advantage of the authority that they had.”
Other scientists are working to increase the chances burrowing owls can survive and successfully reproduce. For example, the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance, which has been collaborating with agencies and municipalities to save the burrowing owl, recently released some owls that had been rescued from near-certain death as chicks.
Jeff Miller, senior conservation advocate at the Center for Biological Diversity, was author of both petitions; he’s one of the few activists who remembers when biologists started sounding the alarm in the 1990s. Miller believes the outcome of this petition could be different because the priorities of the commission have shifted over time.
Back when the Fish and Game Commission began, Miller said, “everything was managed as to be fished or to be hunted.” Today, more board members have expertise in environmental issues, he said, and “there’s a lot more emphasis on conserving imperiled species.” The commissioners did not respond to The Times’ request for comment.
A burrowing owl in a busy park in Contra Costa County dozes off while devoutly standing guard outside his burrow.
(Lauren Bettino)
Burrowing owls and California’s grasslands
Burrowing owl advocates said the goal of listing the bird as an endangered species is to eventually get it off the list. But Trulio thinks listing the bird under California’s Endangered Species Act could be the key to preserving the state’s grasslands.
Trulio’s speciality is urban species, and she’s contributed to the research that underpins Santa Clara County’s habitat conservation plan on burrowing owls. But before that she was also the lead scientist for the South Bay Salt Pond Restoration Project, one of the largest tidal wetland restoration projects on the West Coast.
“One of the things that drove the effort was the fact that there were endangered species” in wetlands, said Trulio. She said it took years to change the perception of the wetlands as a dumping ground and to get a ballot measure to fund its preservation.
Where developers might look at grasslands as vast empty landscapes to build on, Trulio said, she sees their value to the public as spaces for outdoor recreation and sequestering carbon to fight climate change. It’s not just about protecting this one species of bird, but the ecosystem they inhabit, Trulio said.
“We need to protect burrowing owls before urbanization takes hold,” Trulio stated. “Once urbanization takes hold, what really happens is land values become so high that you can’t protect them.”
The double-edge nature of visibility
Lauren Bettino, a Bay Area wildlife photographer, had never seen a burrowing owl before she set out to Point Isabel Regional Shoreline to snap a photo of these rare birds.
Bettino was taking a break from her search and sat down on a rock only to realize she happened to share a perch with a burrowing owl. “He was not concerned about me at all,” Bettino recalled. “I spent probably an hour and a half to two hours just sitting next to him and watching him.”
Bettino tries not to advertise exact locations of where she photographs wildlife because it could attract over-zealous photographers who could disturb them. But she’s believes sharing pictures of the burrowing owls is an important way to encourage people to care more about their natural neighbors; she knows most people are not field biologists.
The Audubon Society’s Instagram page often features burrowing owls where they are liked by thousands of viewers. To Kleinhaus it makes sense why there’s such an outpouring of love. “Seeing an owl opens your eyes to something very mythical or primordial,” she said. “It elicits emotion not just from me, but anyone who sees them.”
UPPER WEST SIDE, Manhattan (WABC) — At Flaco’s favorite oak tree in Central Park, many were leaving flowers and letters – it is just a glimpse at how loved he was.
If only Flaco knew what he meant to New York City.
Flaco’s flight to stardom began in February 2023 when someone broke into the Central Park Zoo and freed him.
He spent the last year out of captivity – roaming New York City, warming hearts and really defying odds – odds stacked so firmly against wildlife in the city.
The Wild Bird Fund says light pollution at night is part of the problem – some activists are pushing for the city to pass ‘Flaco’s Law’ – anything to prevent the demise of a wild, beautiful creature.
“Flaco’s loss is a big loss for the city. He was able to capture the imaginations of so many people,” said NYC Audubon Director of Conservation Dr. Dustin Patridge.
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