Burrowing Owls

So I'm planning a birding trip to Cimarron National Grasslands in a couple weeks and I'm going a little bird crazy. So I was looking over some old bird stuff and found a couple things I thought I'd post.

Back in the summer of 1996 I worked at the Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge in SW Oklahoma with the Student Conservation Association. I did a lot of different things there, but probably the most memorable was transplanting a family of Burrowing Owls from an unstable area and onto the refuge. This consisted of building a Burrowing Owl burrow, leg trapping the male Burrowing Owl and digging up the female and young birds and then after transplanting them, watching their behavior and supplementing their food with chilled (slow) walking sticks, grasshoppers, etc... It was quite an experience. The male took off, but the female stayed in her new burrow and raised 3 young (the total number we transplanted). Here are a couple of pics. I scanned them so they may not be the best quality.


Ken with male Burrowing Owl


Ken holding baby Burrowing Owl, cute huh?


A drawing I did of a young Burrowing Owl