Raining Great Horned Owls

I've returned!!!! 

Now, this week has been super busy and super fun. I started Tuesday just going over some studies about Great Horned Owls and general urbanized birds. After discussing with some people, I found a connection I thought was pretty interesting. So, in the wild, Great Horned Owls are not nest-builders. They often take abandoned nests (usually from Red-Tailed Hawks) or use crevices or holes in trees or other places (Powell 2004). This is fine in the woods, but many owls have started migrating to the city due to the increase in food abundance and nesting sites (Shochat, et al 2008). In Arizona, especially in Maricopa county, this is especially dangerous because our environment doesn't have suitable trees that could be used for the owls' nests, which forces the owls to either use the crevices in palm trees, areas of a building, or flower pots. Now, these palm trees are extremely unstable and weak and cannot provide satisfactory nesting for the owls. Meanwhile, during spring and summer, the building and flower pots can heat up and potentially burn the nestlings, which force the nestlings to "abandon ship." This brings me to my next point. If you remember in my last post, I talked about the huge number of Great Horned Owl fledglings during February to May. With the information that urbanized owls have unstable nests, I was able to use my Wednesday to cross-reference the time owl orphans were brought in with the weather patterns (particularly wind speed and storms), and saw that days the owls were brought in correlated with higher wind speeds. From this, I was able to hypothesize that the high wind speeds cause the nestlings or fledglings to fall out of their nest, so when a person finds them, they'd be brought in here. I thought this was interesting because it was a clear example of how these owls may adapt to urbanization (by building or finding stronger nests), and also first sign that my research is leading to something that we might be able to change (yay!).

Great Horned Owl doing breaststroke, for fun

My next step is to go over the data from previous years, probably 2010-2015 or more. Then, I can establish a more solid pattern and see if owls have in fact been adapting to the cities (I would discover this if the number of owls brought in decreased over the years). I really wanted to accomplish this step during this week, but sadly my Thursday was busy with little kids.

So, I am excited to say that yesterday Liberty Wildlife held its first ever field trip, which consisted of 50 kindergartners and 10 chaperones. On Wednesday, I was led to believe that I would be helping Ms. Suits, my on-site mentor, lead an arts and crafts activity with the kids. On Thursday morning, however, I learned that one of the volunteers called in sick and that Ms. Suits had to leave me to lead the activity by myself. So, that was an experience. I was able to teach 50 very distracted and hyper little children how to make owl puppets out of paper bags and no one died, so I consider myself successful. Sadly, I don't have pictures because I was too busy working, but there might be some on the website, so I'll keep you guys updated on those.

Okay, so I don't think I have anything else to talk about (next week I really want to focus on American Kestrels, so be prepared for that), so I guess we'll go into the animal of the week: the sea otter, which just happens to be my favorite marine animal!

Hi, I'm a sea otter.

When we think of the sea otter, many of us just think of a very cuddly animal. Well, that may be true (in fact, I really hope it is) but here are some other interesting facts about this animal:

1) The otter is the only marine mammal without a layer of blubber (a.k.a. fat).

2) The otter has the thickest fur of any mammal (about 1 million hairs per square inch. To compare, the average human has about 2,200 hairs per square inch on his/her head).

3) Otters, in their free time, will build slides along the banks of rivers and spend the day playing in them.

Looking something like this

Well, that's all I have prepared for you this week. If you have any questions, comments, or concerns, just post them below and I'll get back to you when and if I can.

Have a nice life, and treat others the way you want to be treated (#TheGoldenRule)!!!!