Volunteers Give Tiny Owls New Home
March 26, 2006By CECILIA CHAN
The Arizona Republic
Soil-stained Cassie Phillips shoveled dirt, hammered rebar and connected piping to 5-gallon plastic buckets to build underground homes for pint-sized owls displaced by development.
This was no "cut and paste job," as she originally thought, said the 11-year-old Avondale girl, who labored at the task for about four hours. But her efforts paid off when a makeshift tent finally went up to house five pairs of Western burrowing owls in an enclosed environment for a month.
"There are so many buildings that they can't live anywhere," said Phillips, a member of Girl Scout Troop 1504. "We are really helping these owls and nature."
Encouraging youths to take a stand for wildlife was the focus Saturday as children, parents and environmental group volunteers built 64 artificial burrows in eight trenches, 4 1/2 feet deep.
Walden Media, New Line Cinema and the National Wildlife Federation have teamed up on the habitat project to kick off the May 5 release of Hoot, a movie about three Florida middle school students who fight a construction project to save a colony of burrowing owls, which are 9 inches tall and weigh 130 grams. A production crew was on the scene filming footage of the work to be used in educational outreach and promotion.
"We are doing projects like this across the country in conjunction with the film to raise awareness to protect wildlife habitat," said Carey Stanton Rogers, director of education programs with the National Wildlife Federation. "Wherever you live you can protect wildlife habitat; that's responsible and is not anti-development."
The tent will keep the birds, the smallest species of owls, from flying away from their new homes for a month so that owls become accustomed to their new place, said Bob Fox, co-founder of Wild at Heart, a non-profit Cave Creek group that rescues birds of prey.
The owls' new home is alongside a county channel-widening project near Plaza del Rio Boulevard in Peoria. Once the project is completed, the county-owned land will be handed over to Peoria, said Diana Stuart, an environmental planner with Maricopa County Flood Control District and a Wild at Heart volunteer.
The owls will eventually make nests in the buckets, which are buried underground and connected to the surface through plastic tubing.
The group has relocated 750 Western burrowing owls and built about 1,000 burrows throughout Arizona.
A developer building homes at 95th Avenue and Deer Valley Road discovered the owls, which were taken in and cared for at Wild at Heart for the past two months.
In Arizona, 2,000 acres of burrowing owls habitat are lost each year to development.
Madison Rowbotham of Girl Scout Troop No. 601 said giving up her Saturday was well worth it.
"All animals should have a great home, and all animals should count," the 10-year-old Peoria girl said.
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