Fake Bird Poop Comforts Owls

Relocating animals in the wild is a tricky business that sometimes requires trickery. Take the western burrowing owl, under consideration for an “endangered” designation …

Take it from its nesting sites where human incursion – i.e., development – is imminent, in this case Southern California.

At a recent soon-to-be construction site, 44 owls were removed from their burrowed homes and divided them into two groups. Half were simply moved to an appropriate habitat, while half were brought to a site that had been altered to look like there were already owls in the area. The trickery: they splattered nontoxic white latex painted on the rocks around burrows in the new site to approximate bird poop and set up an outdoor speaker to periodically play burrowing owl calls.

The 22 birds that were placed in the fabricated owl-friendly space settled comfortably into their new home, while every one of the control-group birds fluttered away until they nestled elsewhere, some as far as five miles from the protected habitat intended for them.

“There’s been this assumption that if endangered animals are just moved elsewhere they are going to be fine, but that’s clearly not always true,” Dan Blumstein, an ecologist at the University of California, Los Angeles told the New York Times. “Experiments like this are essential for figuring out what works and what does not.”

The experiment is described in the journal Animal Conservation.

Photo credit: San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance