How Burrowing Owls Found a Home on an Arizona Solar Farm

This summer season, greater than a dozen Burrowing Owls hatched in an uncommon habitat: in plastic underground tunnels throughout the footprint of a sprawling, 10,000-acre photo voltaic vitality complicated exterior of Phoenix, Arizona. The owlets performed with clods of grime and had been curious in regards to the digicam that monitored their motion. Their mother and father—across the measurement of small bread loaves atop stiletto legs—scared away package foxes, coyotes, and roadrunners that tried to steal the nutritious mice {that a} human overseer delivered every day.

Put in by the corporate Longroad Vitality and the raptor rehabilitation middle Wild at Coronary heart, the setup was an experiment to assist a struggling inhabitants. In March, 9 owl pairs (and one bachelor) had been caravaned from a housing improvement about 50 miles away, the place the colony’s pure tunnels had been slated to be worn out, to 40 synthetic burrows on the photo voltaic farm. Their query, says Greg Clark, Burrowing Owl habitat coordinator at Wild at Coronary heart, was: Would the relocated birds efficiently reproduce on this new locale, surrounded on all sides by photo voltaic panels?

Whereas such a spot won’t appear to be a really perfect breeding website, these birds of prey are working out of choices. Because the Sixties, their numbers have dropped by greater than a 3rd in the USA, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service lists them as a species of conservation concern. Within the West, the owls sometimes occupy tunnels dug and deserted by small mammals like floor squirrels and prairie canines, however housing and agricultural improvement, habitat fragmentation, and different threats have made such websites more and more scarce. 

When a Burrowing Owl colony is about to be paved over or in any other case disturbed, scientists and conservation teams like Wild at Coronary heart have established practices for trapping and shifting the birds to safer areas. Sometimes, Clark will select relocation websites close to irrigated farmland, the place the birds can hunt bugs and rodents that scurry between crops. However agricultural land within the West can also be waning because it’s purchased up for extra worthwhile improvement. 

“We’ve run up towards the restrict now,” Clark says. At present, he finally ends up driving owls to websites 60 to 100 miles from the place they initially nested—a activity he says is just too expensive and time-consuming to maintain in the long run. However Burrowing Owls aren’t too choosy about the place they reside and don’t require plenty of area, so even small parts of land are useful. “We will do that at spotty areas,” he says. 

That’s the place the collaboration with Longroad Vitality got here in. In recent times, utility-scale photo voltaic vitality has quickly expanded throughout Arizona’s flat, sunny expanses. On one hand, the business’s progress provides to the problem of dwindling habitat for delicate desert wildlife, says Tice Supplee, Audubon Southwest’s former hen conservation director and a present advisor. On the opposite, she says, renewable vitality tasks that assist scale back emissions can gradual local weather change—a menace that put tons of of U.S. hen species in danger. Many conservationists want to assist corporations discover a stability: a option to construct clear vitality, whereas additionally making area for wildlife.

“That’s a reasonably large land use change, and it’s vital to see the place we are able to maximize vitality manufacturing, but in addition maximize advantages to wildlife, their habitats and ecosystems,” mentioned Josh Ennen, senior scientist for photo voltaic on the nonprofit Renewable Vitality Wildlife Institute (REWI). 

Arizona regulation requires a wildlife survey earlier than vitality tasks are constructed. On the Solar Streams 2 venture website, which Longroad Vitality acquired from the corporate First Photo voltaic in 2021, the survey revealed eight Burrowing Owls, says Deron Lawrence, Longroad’s vice chairman of atmosphere. They referred to as Wild at Coronary heart, which ferried the owls to a farm to maintain them secure—and that’s when Lawrence additionally realized Wild at Coronary heart was working low on relocation area. 

After development was full, Lawrence puzzled if they might welcome the species again. Longroad provided the group round 250 acres nestled between Solar Streams 2 and Solar Streams 3 for its Burrowing Owl relocation work. Clark jumped on the alternative. He had rehomed owls to photo voltaic farms earlier than—however by no means at this scale. Each hoped to indicate {that a} photo voltaic website with the suitable habitat might be a secure place for a colony. They started working putting in burrows and putting a breeding pair in each (at first surrounded by netting in order that they wouldn’t fly again to their former residence). In addition they arrange lights to draw bugs and fed the owls defrosted mice day by day as they adjusted to their new digs. 

For this experiment, the corporate funded monitoring and feeding via the breeding season. (Usually, Wild at Coronary heart solely has the capability to do that for 30 days.) One month in, all of the females had laid eggs. “That is working,” Clark mentioned. By late June, 36 chicks hatched. Inside three months, 29 owlets had fledged, and Clark slowly weaned the birds off their meal deliveries to encourage the birds to begin looking on their very own. He started seeing insect carcasses of their scat—an encouraging signal. On the finish of August, Wild at Coronary heart stopped feedings altogether.

In constructing the Solar Streams photo voltaic complicated, comprised of a number of tasks, vitality builders additionally needed to take into account threats to declining desert songbirds referred to as thrashers. Realizing the realm overlapped habitat for 4 thrasher species—Bendire’s, Sage, Crissal, and LaConte’s—conservation teams together with Audubon and the Maricopa Hen Alliance, an area Audubon chapter, advocated for setting apart thrasher habitat throughout its planning. In 2021, nevertheless, Maricopa County denied the Alliance’s request to guard key areas via zoning restrictions, since not one of the species had been endangered. Nonetheless, the Audubon chapter continued to work on behalf of the birds. The group partnered with discipline biologists to conduct a thrasher survey in 2021 and offered the outcomes to First Photo voltaic, the homeowners of the positioning on the time. 

Though the Alliance didn’t get all of the land put aside that they wished, says Mark Horlings, the chapter’s former board member, the last word venture included devoted wildlife corridors with habitat for thrashers, in addition to openings in its fences to let small animals move via and protections for nests throughout development. Unofficial information since then have discovered thrashers nonetheless current, though the group hasn’t carried out a extra formal survey. 

As photo voltaic vitality expands within the Southwest, scientists, corporations, and authorities officers are additionally trying on the greater image to assist photo voltaic builders reduce their impacts—for instance, by avoiding key habitat or migratory routes, creating vegetation between clustered photo voltaic arrays, and avoiding development throughout breeding season. Arizona is drafting photo voltaic improvement pointers to assist defend wildlife like Burrowing Owls, “in order that they will stay on the panorama and never be moved tremendous massive distances,” says Kenneth Jacobson, raptor administration coordinator at Arizona Recreation and Fish. 

In a 2025 research, Arizona State College researchers mapped out the place best utility-scale photo voltaic websites—flat, sunny areas with straightforward plug-in to native vitality grids—overlap with vital habitat for delicate species all through California, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas (the research discovered, for instance, prime photo voltaic websites have a 13 % overlap with Burrowing Owl habitat in these states). The nonprofit REWI can also be presently creating a database to assist the photo voltaic business entry data on biodiversity when deciding the place to website tasks. In the meantime, a analysis and advocacy coalition, the Desert Thrasher Working Group, has additionally created pointers for photo voltaic design to mitigate influence to thrashers. 

On the Longroad relocation website, the Burrowing Owls nonetheless seem like doing properly. Many of the younger have fledged and dispersed, which is typical, whereas three pairs of adults stay. Clark has a grander imaginative and prescient going ahead: working with photo voltaic builders to actively develop vegetation to draw bugs and rodents for Burrowing Owls to eat, offering long-term habitat. As of now, Lawrence says he doesn’t have plans to try this, however he’s speaking with Clark a couple of potential design for a photo voltaic panel that may seize water from the humidity within the air to assist develop vegetation. 

Clark hopes he can work with extra photo voltaic corporations, which have funding and motivation to assist Burrowing Owls, to proceed to guard the birds he loves. “If we are able to persuade sufficient photo voltaic farms to purchase in on this,” he says, “that’s what we’re gonna do.”