Wintering
In the Bay Area, seasons unfold with a subtle touch. The summer is often gray and foggy, snow is rare in the winter, and temperatures can be mild year-round. Our extremes are, well, less extreme, and if you’re not paying attention, one season can easily blur into the next. Yet, for anyone attuned to the patterns of wildlife, a world of seasonal wonders awaits.
One of my favorite indications that winter is coming can be easy to miss. A creature so discreet, you could spend a lifetime here and never see it. However, in the bleak midwinter—or at least as bleak as California gets—when the earth is seemingly frozen in place, sometimes, if you look closely, you’ll see something move. A burrowing owl!
Burrowing owls reside in parts of California all year, but here in the Bay Area, they’re migratory visitors. Typically, they arrive in the fall, winter here, and return to their breeding grounds in the spring: a short window of opportunity to witness these elusive creatures.
And speaking of short, these diminutive assassins exist on the smaller end of the owl spectrum. At less than a foot tall, they’re tiny but tough. Deceptive in their appearance—bug-eyed, round, and perhaps even comical—make no mistake, though, they watch over their domain with the intensity of a bantamweight boxer.
Our young son, Gavin, is currently enthralled by owls and loves pointing them out in picture books. We thought he’d like to find some in the wild, but burrowing owls are a little different from the ones in most children’s stories. Almost the opposite, actually. Everyone knows owls live in trees and hunt exclusively at night, right? Not these guys!
As the name implies, they live in burrows. In places like Florida and Brazil, they’ll dig their own, but in California, they typically repurpose the abandoned dens of badgers or ground squirrels. A strategic choice, providing them an ideal vantage point to hunt rodents, beetles, and other insects at ground level.
Their preferred habitats include wide-open grasslands, agricultural expanses, and even shorelines. Golf courses, airports, and military bases have become surprisingly perfect territories for these owls as other open spaces are lost to development.
And they’re not exclusively creatures of the night. In the Bay Area, you can see them at all hours of the day. Moreover, migratory owls often return to specific locations year after year. So, while they’re hard to find, if you do locate one, there’s a chance you’ll be able to witness their activities again next winter.
A word of caution, though: if you’re fortunate enough to spot a burrowing owl, give them some space, especially if they appear scrunched up and low to the ground—they may be scared.
This winter, we took Gavin to see a burrowing owl. I wasn’t convinced he registered what we were looking at, but maybe he absorbed more than I thought.
Nature writer Charles Hood poetically described burrowing owls as “peering around like a wide-awake toddler,” but equally, this toddler gives a pretty good impression of a wide-awake burrowing owl.
Resources:
Owl: A Year in the Lives of North American Owls by Paul Bannick
A Californian’s Guide to the Birds Among Us by Charles Hood
The Hidden Lives of Owls: The Science and Spirit of Nature's Most Elusive Birds by Leigh Calvez
What an Owl Knows by Jennifer Ackerman
