Photo © by M.J.Kammerer

Red Rock Audubon Society is starting an exciting
new project in partnership with the US Fish and Wildlife:

To find and monitor the Burrowing Owls in our area.
 

Read all about Project Objectives and the Natural History of the Burrowing Owl here.

Goals of the Urban Burrowing Owl Monitoring Project are:

- Map the location of burrows used by breeding burrowing owls in the Las Vegas Valley.

- Monitor these burrows for at least 3 years during the breeding season to determine the breeding success of these owls.

Information on the location of breeding burrowing owls can be used by county and city governments during their urban planning processes. The cities and counties will be acquiring more land for parks. Why not acquire land where there are breeding owls and leave part of the park natural to protect these owl?

Before the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service promotes the use of artificial burrows in urban areas in southern Nevada, it is important to know if these urban owls are producing enough young to replace themselves, maintaining or increasing the population, or if adults rarely successfully produce young leading to population declines.

The results from this project can be compared to the breeding success of burrowing owls in Lake Mead Natural Recreation Area, where owls breed in natural Mojave Desert scrub vegetation. The U.S. Geological Survey will be monitoring at Lake Mead for the next several years.

RRAS is starting to develop the monitoring methods for this project. Monitoring will involve visiting known nests, once a week, between March and September, and within 3 hours of sunrise or sunset. Right now we need to know the locations of any burrows where burrowing owls breed.

Please provide the names of cross streets for any known location, the neighborhood, and the city (e.g. Whispering Sands and Balsam, near Gilcrease Orchard, City of Las Vegas). If possible include GPS coordinates of the burrows. Please send coordinates in UTMs with NAD 83 as the datum.

The following Clark County websites provides aerial photos of the city. If you enter the cross street (button on left side) a map comes up. Click on the Show Aerial Photo box, and click on the Draw Selection button. The aerial photo should pop up. http://gisgate.co.clark.nv.us/openweb/asp/openweb.asp

If you would like to monitor any of these nests please let us know. Please send information to project organizer Craig Felts.

Photos © by M.J.Kammerer




 

We now have at least 20 burrows with baby owls.  We will continue to monitor the babies until they undergo a prebasic molt and look the same as the adults.  This happens when they are 44 to 70 days old.  We anticipate this occurring in August sometime.

Below is a photo of owls at burrow 329.  The baby is approximately 11 to 12 days old.

Below are owl baby photos that Kelly Douglas who monitors burrow 274 with Leah Hare sent in.  The young owls are about 23 days old.  Please note the small white eyebrows, white throat with dark edges, adult primary feathers on wing, and no tail.

Photo © Kelly E Douglas



 

Project Update 05/29/08
Christiana Manville

We now have three or four burrows with owl babies.  Marjorie has seen her owl babies hop and run and flap their wings.  It is not always easy to spot the babies.  They are 1/3 to 1/2 the size of the adults when they first emerge from the burrow.  While monitoring burrow 151 last night for Bob, who is on vacation, the one baby was only visible for about 30 seconds at the burrow entrance.  The babies usually first come out at sunrise and sunset.  Remember to use the photos and table in the instruction booklet to help you determine the age of the young.

It is very important to follow the monitoring instructions.  Please remember the following: 1) the observation period must be 30 minutes exactly.  You can observe the owls for longer but you can only officially collect data for 30 minutes. 2) Monitoring must occur either around sunset or sunrise.

Several volunteers have asked when to start the intensive monitoring period.  This will usually begin 7 to 10 days after you first see the babies if you have a clear view of the burrow entrance.  f you don't have a good view of the burrow entrance, the babies will be older when you first see them.  The intensive monitoring period may begin 5 days after they are first seen.  Remember the intensive monitoring is when the babies are 21 to 28 days old.  These owl should have a white throat with dark edges and small white eye brows by then.

At burrow 343 there were two baby owls. They were hanging out in the burrow entrance just for a little bit. They were different sizes, the larger had a black mask, probably making him close to 15 days old. The did not move much. This means young at other burrows should start coming out for the first time soon. Please be extra careful when you are monitoring now. They are much smaller than the adults.

Young this age will only be seen near burrow entrances. Try to position yourself so that you can see the entrance of the burrow. If this is not possible, the day you start seeing owls, the owls will be older and possibly in the 21 to 28 day range when the intensive monitoring occurs.

If you will be gone for more than 10 days, make sure someone monitors your nest for you. It is very important that we try to see the young when they first emerge.
 

Project Update 05/05/08
Craig Felts

Volunteers  29 - Burrows Monitored 34 - Pairs Known  37 min

Project: The Urban Burrowing Owl Project is closing its 2^nd month of monitoring in the 1^st of 3 years.  We are always seeking new information on owls anywhere that they occur. At this time we have more pairs than monitors, largely because the owl pairs we have are on the north side and the volunteers that are unmatched to burrows are on the south side.  Therefore our efforts to find new owl pairs are concentrated on the south side.

Owl Activities: The owls being monitored have been observed mating, displaying to their mates, displaying to other owls, interacting with other owls, dealing with coyotes, cars, joggers, and dogs.  Their life cycles are progressing from courtship to egg laying and incubation.  While those activities are not observed directly, the egg laying and incubation is implied when the female of the pair remains in or very near the burrow.  Single males at the burrows are being noted more and more frequently.  We are also seeing some pairs move around so monitors are left without owls in their assigned burrows and new pairs or relocated pairs are showing up nearby.
 

We have 21 pairs of owls so far that we will be monitoring this season.

Most of the owls are up in the north end of Las Vegas Valley. (Floyd Lamb Park, Near Gilcrease Orchards, Upper Las Vegas Wash.)

Floyd Lamb Park, will be building a detention basin where 5 pair are now.  Hopefully, they will move over to the artificial burrows or some small cliffs nearby.  Upper Las Vegas Wash may have another huge beltway and the Western Energy Corridor going through it.  Another section with owls is going to be UNLV north campus.  Even on Nellis AFB where we thought the owls were protected we heard the wash where 20 pair live is going to be concreted in by Clark County.

We are meeting with Nellis AFB tomorrow, Friday, then Monday Christiana will be meeting with Clark County.

Sharon Shaffer has adopted a burrow and will be making a video of the owls and do presentations on them and their plight of losing their habitat to development.  Maybe we could schedule her for one of our meetings next year.

We still need more volunteers and hope to find more pairs.  Ideally we need at least 30 pairs to monitor to make this a good study and compare it to other studies.

The Clark County study so far is not finding too many owls in the rest of the county.
 

Project Update 03/16/08

We had some great volunteers who dug out their winter coats, hats, and gloves and braved the cold windy weather Sunday, March 16th for training. One of our favorite pairs of owls cooperated and sat quietly so everyone could see them. We were prepared to stay until after dark to see some activity in their burrow. We did indeed see them preening and fluffing out their feathers and looking around and then they flew off to do their nightly hunting.

Some monitoring of the Burrowing Owls has already started and will continue to increase as we see the pairs of owls starting their new families. We are matching volunteers with owls in their neighborhoods to make it easier for them to monitor.

We still need to know the location of local urban Burrowing Owls.  Although we have located over 213 burrows, some burrows are inactive or being used as satellite burrows by the Owls.  Burrowing Owls like to have more than one burrow to live in for safety reasons, such as if the original burrow collapses or is bulldozed, they will then have other burrows to use.  Also, to protect their young from predators or other dangers, the parents may split the babies up into two burrows.

Even though we have located many burrows, we still need to find live Borrowing Owls - especially PAIRS of Owls!  We had reports of 173 Owls, and now we need to determine an accurate head count by confirming that Owls are still present at those reported locations.  This needs to be be done now, as breeding season is starting, because some Owls may have been migrants or even killed.

If you know the location of any Burrowing Owls, please let us know so we may add them to the monitoring project.
 

Project Update 03/05/08

The first group of volunteers attended training on March 1st.  About a dozen people participated, and even though it was pretty windy, the group was still able to get great looks at the Owls.

Some even witnessed one pair of owls mating!  (That's the happy couple below.)  If all goes well, hopefully in about 6 weeks we'll have little baby Owls poking their heads out of the burrow.