Owl City: Mountain View's tiny burrowing owls are in the way of proposed sports fields

By Diana Samuels

They're about 9 inches tall, with big eyes and toothpick legs, and just a few of them are left in Mountain View.

But despite their small size and population, the city's remaining Western burrowing owls have sometimes loomed large over development along Mountain View's bayfront. Now, the Santa Clara Valley Audubon Society is calling on Mountain View to change its plans to build athletic fields at Shoreline Regional Park, in a space where the owls forage for food.

The owls eat insects and small rodents, and live in ground burrows typically made by squirrels. They're found throughout western North America, but their numbers declined almost 60 percent in California between the 1980s and early 1990s, according to the Audubon Society. The California Department of Fish and Game has designated the burrowing owl a "species of special concern." There are fewer than 40 nesting pairs left in Santa Clara County, said Shani Kleinhaus, environmental advocate for the Audubon Society, and they are "in jeopardy and in dire straits everywhere in the Bay Area."

In the county, they're gone from cities including Palo Alto and Sunnyvale, Kleinhaus said, but can sometimes be found at places including the San Jose International Airport, Moffett Field in Mountain View, and Mission College in Santa Clara. At Shoreline, city Assistant Public Works Director Mike Fuller said they had four nesting pairs last year.

The city has worked to protect the owls for decades, hiring a city biologist who carefully monitors the species, Fuller said. They've built manmade burrows to encourage owls to stay, and keep the vegetation short to make finding food easier.

But now, wildlife lovers are objecting to the city's plans for long-awaited athletic fields on 12 acres in the southwest corner of Shoreline Park, at the closed landfill between the golf course and Garcia Avenue. Kleinhaus and Bob Power, executive director for the Audubon Society, wrote a guest opinion column in the Mountain View Voice last week calling for the city to create a burrowing owl preserve at Shoreline. They've also started a petition, which had about 150 signatures as of Tuesday, Kleinhaus said.

"As time goes by, we see more and more projects coming up, and more and more owls lose their home," Kleinhaus said.

The athletic fields are in the early stages of design, but have been long-desired by local residents. The city began developing a plan in 2003 to find sites for more athletic fields, and ultimately, this September hired a contractor to design a facility at Shoreline.

"There just aren't a lot of sites available," Fuller said. "Mountain View's built out."

When the project is further along, the city will have to do a full environmental analysis, Fuller said. In the meantime, officials are looking at a few options to fulfill legal requirements for handling the owls: set aside additional land at Shoreline for the owls and enhance foraging sites there, spend $250,000 to $500,000 to buy "mitigation credits" that help owls at a wildlife conservation land bank in the East Bay, or a combination of the two.

Money used to buy mitigation credits would go to create and maintain a burrowing owl habitat at Haera Wildlife Conservation Bank in Alameda County. Jeff Mathews, director of sales and marketing for Wildlands, Inc., the company that runs the land bank, described it as a "passive relocation" — they use the money to create and maintain the most suitable habitat for owls, and eventually, the owls show up. Mathews said, depending on the year, they have seen as few as six pairs of owls or as many as 15 to 20 at Haera's 300-acre site, which also provides a habitat for kit foxes.

The city used the mitigation approach last time the owls stood in the way of a development, in early 2008 when Google planned to build a hotel on the "Charleston East" site. The city paid $150,000 to buy 9.75 acres at Haera after it found a family of owls living there at Charleston East.

Those owls' homes were blocked so they couldn't return, Kleinhaus said. The Google deal fell through and a hotel has not been built yet, but the city keeps the site plowed so squirrels don't create more burrows.

Chris Nagano, an endangered species division chief with the U.S. Department of Fish and Wildlife's Sacramento office, said the concept of land bank mitigation has become very popular with cities and developers over the past five years. Though he couldn't speak specifically to burrowing owls, he said land banks are effective in helping species, especially when a city is looking at a small site that would be expensive to replace in a developed area.

"If done correctly, (land banks) can protect large amounts of habitats for species," Nagano said.

Kleinhaus said the concept of mitigation doesn't work for owls: the city isn't physically moving those specific owls to a new home. They're simply assuming that they will find somewhere else to live, and more owls will reproduce in Alameda to make up for them. Burrowing owls tend to show "strong fidelity" to their nest sites, remaining in the same area for years, according to California Department of Fish and Game documents.

As they disappear from Santa Clara County, Kleinhaus said, they're difficult to bring back.

"They've been mitigated to death," she said.

There used to be burrowing owls in Palo Alto's Byxbee Park Hills and Baylands. But Palo Alto Naturalist Annette Coleman said she could only recall one recent sighting, about 2½ years ago by the city's refuse center. The city tried to create some artificial burrows at Byxbee to attract more owls, but Coleman said people initially used the mounds as bike jumps and the owls never appeared.

The owls at Shoreline, though, can be saved with some effort, Kleinhaus said.

"There's nowhere you can go and have a little bit of nature anymore," she said. "I think people need that."

The city and Audubon Society representatives have scheduled a meeting next week to discuss the project, Fuller said.

"I understand their concerns and we look forward to sharing information and working with them," Fuller said. "Hopefully we can accomplish council's goals of establishing athletics fields, and (the Audubon Society's) goals of not disturbing the owls."