Rehabilitated Burrowing Owl Finds New Home in Goleta

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This article was underwritten in part by the Mickey Flacks Journalism Fund for Social Justice, a proud, innovative supporter of local news. To make a contribution go to sbcan.org/journalism_fund.

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[Updated: Thu., Jan. 30, 2025, 4:24pm]

Below the dry ground of the grassy land on UC Santa Barbara’s North Campus Open Space are burrows — likely hundreds of them — built primarily by ground squirrels.  

The burrows, as well as the human-made rubble pile burrows created by people working to restore this portion of the Devereux Slough, are a good home for pint-sized burrowing owls. 

On a sunny Friday afternoon, a team from UCSB’s Cheadle Center for Biodiversity and Ecological Restoration and the Ojai Raptor Center released a burrowing owl into one of these burrows. The bird in question came from a center in Calabasas. 

“This bird was transferred to us from California Wildlife Center in December,” said Jaclyn DeSantis, the Ojai Raptor Center’s education program manager. She said that the bird had a dislocated coracoid scapula.

The Raptor Center specializes in rehabilitating birds of prey and releasing them back into the wild. DeSantis said the coracoid is a bone that helps give the bird buoyancy in flight and that this bird’s was dislocated from the scapula. 

“It was stabilized for some time, and then it graduated to one of our outdoor enclosures to gain strength and mobility and symmetry in the flight, and he’s flying great,” she said. 

DeSantis said that she didn’t know, actually, if the bird was male or female — they’re roughly similar in size. The owls range from about 5.5 to 8 oz. 

Burrowing owls, with their brown and spotted white plumage, live throughout North, Central, and South America, preferring wide, open spaces. But loss and change to these spaces has caused their decline in California. 

“People like to use these types of land for agriculture, landscaping, industry,” DeSantis said.

Wayne Chapman, the nursery manager and a project manager at UCSB’s Cheadle Center, said that changes to the land’s flora, like planting non-native trees such as non-native cypress blue gum eucalyptus, have also impacted the birds, making it easier for larger raptors to feed on them. 

“These non-native trees that we have all over the Gaviota Coast are essentially aforestation, and they tilt the scales in favor of great horned owls and red-tailed hawks, which are comparatively common raptors. And they really harm burrowing owls,” Chapman said. 

Blue gum eucalyptus trees, for example, can reach 200 feet tall — a tall perch for a raptor to use.

Last fall, the California Fish and Game commission named the western burrowing owl as a candidate for listing as a protected species. 

Wayne said that currently in the North Campus Open Space, there are possibly two owls. But in the past, they may have been more plentiful in the area. 

“Coal Oil Point Reserve and Devereux Point is just that way to the south, and recent linguistic evidence tells us that that point — its original name in Chumash was some variant of phok’oy, which is ‘burrowing owl,’” he said. 

Northern populations of this owl migrate from their summer breeding grounds to spend the winter in warmer climes. These birds used to breed in Santa Barbara County. But today, Chapman says, the county only gets rare winter migrants. 

“We’ve completely lost the breeding element here; it’s completely extinct,” Chapman said.  

Habitat loss is, again, a culprit in this decline. Burrowing owls generally breed in flat valleys, where cities and agricultural land are on the Central Coast. 

The hope is that this bird will winter here or at least continue to heal before moving on. 

On that sunny Friday afternoon, DeSantis, Chapman, other team members from the Cheadle Center and Ojai Raptor Center, and other interested locals headed to a manmade burrow to release the bird. 

As DeSantis lifted the bird from the box it was transported in, it stuck its neck and legs out, ready. In a blink, it scurried into its new home.