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Great Salt Lake Bird Festival
May 13-17, 2010
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The Birds Seen at the
Bird Festivals
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Great Salt Lake Bird Festival
PO Box 618, Farmington, UT 84037
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Art: Deedee O'Brien
& Barry Burton
2010 Spotlight Bird
Spotlight Bird: Burrowing Owl
By Ella Sorensen
If you leave the water and salty shorelines of Great Salt Lake and venture into the wild open landscape, you chance an encounter with a tiny owl standing its ground staring out with wide yellow eyes. This would be a Burrowing Owl which inhabits the grassy desert landscape that ring the lake and cover its islands.
Their range includes western United States and Mexico and locally all the way to the tip of South America as well as a population in Florida and the Bahamas. Burrowing Owls have long been known to many people. The character of a bird can often be deduced from an acquaintance with local names:
- The Zuni Indians called it the “priest of the prairie dogs”. Burrowing Owls are unique among its kindred being the only owl that nests deep in the earth in a tunnel usually dug by a mammal, especially prairie dogs, ground squirrels, badgers, and fox. If the ground is soft the owl is capable of digging itself, but much prefers renovating the work of another.
- Ridgeway and other early explorers called it the “ground owl” Not only does it nest deep in the earth but it spends much of its time standing on long legs on the ground near the entrance to it’s burrow.
- In a text from the 1500s, Aztec elders of Mexico said the owl was called “cacatecolotl” because it is “born in the grasslands” Habitat for the widespread owl includes open areas of grasslands, deserts, and farmlands not the usual trees and forests of many owl species.
The typical call of this owl is a soft coo coo but when threatened in the burrow the young owlets give a rasping call which sounds remarkably like a threatening rattlesnake. Early settlers were persuaded that Burrowing Owls and rattlesnakes often lived amiably together in the same burrows. If this folktale deceived some humans, it assuredly cautioned other predators from poking their nose in the burrow and into keeping their distance.
Soft feathered for silent flight, these round headed, stubby tailed hunters travel in the gentle light of twilight but are equally adept as nighttime and daytime foragers. They can forage on a wide variety of nocturnal and diurnal animals especially insects and rodents. Clutch size, typically 7 to 9 eggs, usually results in a row of adorable little owlets standing beside their burrow opening bringing pleasure to all who notice their quiet presence.
Most owl species nesting in Utah are year round residents; however, Burrowing Owls are migratory, drifting away from the state in fall and reappearing with the spring. Occasionally a few are sighted in winter but the majority of Utah’s Burrowing Owls probably winter near the southern United State’s border or Mexico.
