Burrowing Owl
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| Burrowing Owl Conservation status: Endangered | ||||||||||||||
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| Athene cunicularia (Molina, 1782) |
The Burrowing Owl, Athene cunicularia, is a small owl. They are permanent residents in the southern areas of their range; northern birds migrate to Mexico and Central America.
Adults have brown plumage with white spotting, darker on the chest. The belly is white with brown bars. Their eyes and bill are yellow and they have long legs. The females are darker than the males.
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Calls
The who-who call of a burrowing owl is mainly given by adult males to attract a female to a promising burrow. This call is also associated with breeding and territory defense. These owls also make other sounds, which are described as chuck, chatter and scream. These sounds are usually accompanied by a bobbing of the head up and down.
Mating and Nesting
The nesting season begins in late March or April. Burrowing Owls are usually monogamous but occasionally a male will have 2 mates. Their breeding habitat is open grassland or prairie across western North America and the far south of the United States. They nest in a burrow. They take over a burrow created by another burrowing animal such as a Prairie dog or ground squirrel or if soil conditions allow, they may excavate their own. Adults usually return to the same burrow every year.
Diet
Burrowing owls mainly eat large insects and small mammals, especially mice, rats, and ground squirrels. Unlike other owls, they also eat fruits and seeds, especially the fruit of Tesajilla and prickly pear cactus. They can be active day or night during nesting; at other times, they are active at dusk and night. These birds wait and swoop down from a perch to run down prey on the ground or catch insects in flight.
During the nesting season, burrowing owls will spread dung from mammals around the burrow. The dung attacts beetles which are a staple of the owls' diet.
This bird is endangered in many areas and has disappeared from much of its original range as a result of population control programs for prairie dogs and loss of habitat.
Burrowing owls are able to live for at least 9 years in the wild and over 10 years in captivity. They are often killed by vehicles when crossing roads, and have many natural enemies, including snakes, cats and dogs. They are listed as an endangered species.
Burrowing owls in fiction
Carl Hiaasen's young adult novel Hoot (2002) is about a group of schoolkids doing something about the planned construction of a pancake house that would go hand in hand with the destruction of the burrowing owls' habitat in a small town in Florida.
Reference
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