The Owls on the Vacant Lots Are Nesting Again

From late winter through early summer, Marco Island's burrowing owls are on eggs and then on chicks, and the island fills up with small PVC stakes and lengths of line marking the burrows.

This is one of the genuinely unusual things about Marco. Burrowing owls are small, ground-nesting and active in daylight, and here they nest not in remote prairie but on ordinary residential vacant lots, beside pavements, between houses. The island holds one of the more significant populations in the state.

They are there because the island's development pattern accidentally suits them. A cleared, sandy, unbuilt lot in a grid of low houses looks a great deal like the open ground the species evolved for. Marco now has a formal arrangement to keep it that way, a safe-harbour programme run with the state wildlife agency and Audubon of the Western Everglades, under which property owners agree to protect burrows and volunteers dig starter burrows to attract new pairs. The city has at points paid a small incentive for starter burrows that owls actually adopt.

The Owl Watch volunteers who find and monitor burrows are the ones who stake them out, marking a buffer with PVC and line so that mowers, dogs, cars and visitors stay clear.

Watching them properly

• Look for the stakes. Drive or cycle the residential streets slowly in the morning; the birds are easiest to see in the first two hours of light.
• Stay outside the marked buffer. Photograph from the pavement or from inside a car, which the owls tolerate far better than a person on foot.
• Bring a modest telephoto or binoculars rather than walking closer. An adult that bobs, calls repeatedly or flies off is telling you that you are too close, and an abandoned burrow is the outcome nobody wants.
• Keep dogs away entirely, and never let a child approach a burrow mouth.
• Do not put anything near the entrance, and do not attempt to feed them.

Nesting activity tails off through the summer. By late autumn the birds are still present but far less conspicuous, which is why February to June is the window worth planning around.