One Owl, Three Kinds of Ground

Today, we cover:

1. Saskatchewan's fledgling owls, the short version. Young burrowing owls are learning to fly along the province's roadways right now, and a conservation group is asking drivers to slow down before the season ends.
2. Utah's new burrows, the short version. A wetland sanctuary built 18 artificial nest structures this year, and owls moved in almost immediately.
3. California's pending decision, the short version. State regulators are still weighing whether to formally protect the species, even as the healthiest population on record keeps growing.

Every summer in Saskatchewan, burrowing owls do something almost no other owl does: they raise their young in a hole in open ground, usually a repurposed badger or ground-squirrel burrow, rather than a tree cavity or cliff ledge. From mid-July through the end of August, the fledglings of that arrangement are learning to fly and hunt, and Nature Saskatchewan has spent the month reminding drivers what that means for the birds: paved roads run warmer than the surrounding grassland, which draws the insects and small rodents owls hunt, which in turn draws young owls that haven't yet learned to clear an oncoming vehicle. "Motorists can help reduce the risk of owl-vehicle collisions by slowing down near known or potential nest sites and being on the lookout for low flying owls," said Grace Pidborchynski, who coordinates the group's Operation Burrowing Owl program. The stakes are unusually concentrated: Nature Saskatchewan puts the country's entire breeding population at around 270 pairs, so a bad week on the highway is a bad week for the species.

Roughly 1,300 miles southwest, at Audubon's Gillmor Sanctuary on the shore of the Great Salt Lake, the same ground-nesting habit is being solved from the other direction — not protecting burrows owls already have, but replacing ones that no longer exist. Natural burrows depend on other animals, ground squirrels and prairie dogs among them, to keep digging and maintaining them, and where those populations have thinned, burrows collapse faster than owls can find new ones. This year, Audubon built 18 reinforced burrows from upcycled materials, engineered to hold up under the weight of larger animals and positioned so owls could still see predators coming. The uptake was almost immediate: one burrow was occupied within three days of installation, against a two-year timeline the team had planned for. Seven of the nine resulting nest sites drew a pair this season, and every one of those nests fledged owlets. Audubon now plans to roughly double the structure count, to 32 burrows across 16 sites.

California, meanwhile, is still deciding what any of this adds up to legally. The western burrowing owl has held candidate status under the California Endangered Species Act since October 2024, which gives it the same take protections as a formally listed species while the state Department of Fish and Wildlife completes a mandated review. Imperial Irrigation District submitted its own data into that review in December: more than 30 years of monitoring showing over 7,100 breeding pairs in the Imperial Valley and another 300-plus in the Coachella Valley, a population that was near zero as recently as the early 1990s. "IID believes this information will substantiate that listing of the species is not warranted," board chairperson Gina Dockstader said at the time — the district's argument being that the valley's existing irrigation and land-use patterns are already doing the job a state listing would try to mandate. The Fish and Game Commission's decision on the petition was slated for this month; until it rules, every burrowing owl in California keeps its candidate protections regardless of what the local numbers say.

The owl never builds its own hole. It just has to live in whatever's there this year.