Vet officials tour constituency and local vet clinics PAGE 5
Your LOCAL Media since 1918! Volume 105 Issue 51
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Wednesday, August 23, 2023 s
Beaverhill Bird Observatory home to Nina the Burrowing Owl Jana Semeniuk Staff Reporter
Nina the Burrowing Owl is lucky to be living at the Beaverhill Bird Observatory (BBO). BBO Vice Chair Helen Trefry said the little owl was born in April this year at a captive breeding facility near Kamloops and was the runt of her brood where the youngest ones usually won’t survive. “The youngest ones don’t normally survive, so they pulled (the) runt out. She started (being) hand raised so that I could travel with her when she was a bit bigger, and then I finished raising her in my home for educational purposes,” said Trefry, adding that burrowing owls make great ambassadors. “Not only for endangered spaces like the prairies, but endangered birds like the prairie birds, which are some of the most endangered birds in Canada,” she said. “They're a good candidate for that.” Nina lives in a special room just off the main building at the BBO. She has daily visitors, plenty of food, and large windows allowing her to stretch in the sunshine. Although Nina has a female name, Trefry said it’s too early to
confirm the owl’s sex. “It's really hard to tell at this stage,” she said. “We'll probably do DNA just to make sure. Then we’ll know, because that's a common question everybody's going to ask.” Rather than dig their own holes in the ground to live, Trefry said the burrowing owl will simply steal one. “In general, they take the burrow from a badger or a ground squirrel starts it, then a badger digs it out, or perhaps a coyote, but badger holes are the most common hold that they use,” she said, adding that often burrowing owls lose their babies to the original owners of the holes. “But they're smart, too. The burrowing owls, when their young start to get old enough, they will split the (babies) between burrows so she’ll put them in (up to four different) burrows so if a badger does come in when they're older, the Badger will only eat out of one burrow and the others are okay, so they have ways of avoiding complete decimation.” Trefry said burrowing owls also gamble when laying their eggs by hoping for plenty of food.
Nina the burrowing owl enjoys perching on top of Beaverhill Bird Observatory Chair Geoff Holroyd's hat. JANA SEMENIUK PHOTO
“(One) thing that burrowing owls are doing is they're laying eight or nine eggs and hoping that there's a lot of food,” she said. “(Hopefully) It's a big deer mouse year or a big grasshopper year like it is this year, (then) they can raise all those babies. If it's not, they'll just raise three or four and the younger ones will just die.” Despite conservation efforts, Trefry said she worries that one
day Canada will lose the burrowing owl. “Unfortunately, in the prairies they have fewer of those boom (food) years, because we've just impacted the ecosystem so much that they can't get enough food,” she said. “So, the burrowing owl is probably one of the species that we will likely lose in Canada. I would be surprised if there's more than a few hundred pairs left in Canada.”