“Location. Location. Location.” It’s a phrase any real estate agent will use to describe three important things to consider when looking for a home.
Now, while that phrase primarily applies to residences for people, the same concept is being employed by habitat-sourcing ‘real estate agents’ at the The Manitoba Burrowing Owl Recovery Program to find locations for the best homes to protect Manitoba’s small but resilient burrowing owl population.
Twelve years ago, conservationists had an idea: if you can rebuild the habitat, reduce threats, and give these tiny owls a little help through the toughest stretch of their lives, they can reclaim a foothold on the prairie.
The Manitoba Burrowing Owl Recovery Program (MBORP), founded in 2013 by biologist Alex Froese, turned that idea into an on-the-ground campaign—reintroducing owls, surveying pastures, enhancing habitat, and educating communities on how to create space for a species that literally needs to be protected underground.
Their headquarters and outreach hub sit in the heart of owl country near Melita. The nesting sites are undisclosed and not publicly accessible.
Currently, Froese relies on a team of landowners, volunteers, and two to three seasonal team members to manage the program. The Brandon Area Community Foundation has been a funding partner of MBORP since 2022, and this past year provided a $15,000 grant to support the program.
This home location process does not involve online real estate listing searches but instead relies on partners across southwestern Manitoba to find suitable locations, dig out tunnels, and install nesting space enclosures the owls will use, and in places where they are less at risk from predators — or people.
The owls traditionally nest in abandoned badger or ground squirrel burrows, but those are rare and often unstable, so MBORP employed a replica home model using large diameter plastic piping and buckets buried underground in the right places to ensure the birds have a safe space and are far enough underground to feel comfortable.
From these new homes, the owls can have up to a dozen eggs and owlets each breeding season and will migrate back and forth between Manitoba and the southern United States. Some banded birds have been located as far south as central Mexico.
These family and home building results have been encouraging. From a nearly depleted population through the early 2000s, the Manitoba program has seen a steady improvement in survival rates from wild and captive-release nesting families, among other partners (Souris River Watershed District, Assiniboine Park & Zoo, Burrowing Owl Conservation Society of B.C., Saskatchewan Burrowing Owl Interpretive Centre, Nature Saskatchewan, Wilder Institute, Wildlife Preservation Canada, and Operation Grassland Community).
Similar programs exist in #saskatchewan, #alberta, and #britishcolumbia, and the overall numbers for western Canada are approaching 600-700 owls according to recent research from conservation programs working towards Burrowing Owl recovery.
Images courtesy of MBORP(video) and photographers Dennis Swaze and April Stampe
