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• Burrowing Owls at Matador Ranch

  I am here at Matador Ranch conducting burrowing owl surveys.

  All bird populations are declining overall based on our surveys. We have seen that things are really looking good for burrowing owls in this area, more so than other portions of the range. There's just so many birds that migrate from all over to come up here to lay these little nests on the prairie dog towns.

  We monitor the prairie dog towns here at the Matador, just to keep track of how things are changing over time. And so one of the pieces of the puzzle that we were really interested in, this is the burrowing owl story relating to prairie dogs and prairie dog towns, because they’re a keystone species. So they basically create habitat that other wildlife need and use and rely on. And one of those species is burrowing owls.

  The first thing for a burrowing owl burrow that you're going to see is you're going to see all this dung that they have—basically cattle dung—that they brought in and ripped up into these little bitty pieces and placed all around the burrow. This is a decoration thing. You've got the remains of animals, and it's attracting small beetles.

  So when these kids come out, they already have their prey base, like, walking around them because they're all attracted to the dead things. So all of those things basically say, that's a burrowing owl burrow.

  So we have a scope that we're going to scope the burrow with to see if we can see young in the burrow. And then from that information, we'll try to do an age pictorial specific for Matador so that people can age owls in the future.

  The actual oh, wait a second, right? Yeah, yeah. 2 or 3 days old. Three days old. There's a third one.

  Well, it's amazing to watch the animals and see how they persist and how they survive. All righty. Now we know.

  The point of doing this work is all wildlife are a litmus of what's going on in the environment. And so knowing what the population and of particular wildlife species are, it gives us an indication of how healthy the ecosystem is.

  What makes the Matador Ranch really a special place is just the the conservation that has happened in this area for the past 20 years. The conservation that's going on here seems to have really paid off. It's just very incredible.