Kennewick — In Washington, burrowing owls are rare. Their population has sharply declined as development takes over areas where they’ve lived for years.
Small, brown and speckled with bright yellow eyes and long legs, burrowing owls are a native species in the Tri-Cities.
They are protected under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act and are designated in Washington as a candidate species, meaning they could soon be listed as endangered, threatened or sensitive.
Benton and Franklin counties are the state’s few remaining strongholds for the creatures.
That’s why when the city of Pasco began planning to expand its water-processing facility — a $185 million project critical to its rapidly expanding food-processing industry — officials needed to find a way to protect the tiny owls and their breeding sites.
A state environmental review for the facility found the city’s site contained several active burrows and two breeding pairs on the 440 acres of prime shrub steppe and grassland habitat. One breeding pair can produce up to 13 chicks in a season.
Now, Pasco and state wildlife officials are saying the birds are already thriving in new homes.
Owl ‘evictions’
Burrowing owls typically live underground in natural burrows that they’ve taken over from prairie dogs, ground squirrels or badgers. Unlike nocturnal owls, they are active during the day.
The city and state’s challenge was to “evict” them from their homes and move them away from the water plant’s construction site to another part of the property.
Pasco worked with staff at the Washington Department of Ecology and the Department of Fish and Wildlife, and consultants at Richland-based RH2 Engineering, to reduce the impact on the area’s shrub steppe habitat and create artificial burrows.
Artificial burrows are made using a 55-gallon barrel-shaped container placed about 3 feet into the ground with a long, flexible attached pipe. There is a lid on top of the container that can be lifted so that the burrows can be checked over time.
Below the surface, the burrows are insulated by a foot or more of soil.
There are now seven man-made sites on the city’s lands, with three artificial burrows at each location.
The owls were removed from their natural burrows, tagged and released. Some moved into the artificial burrows on their own; others moved to different natural burrows on nearby private land.
The process occurred outside of the breeding season. Later, the natural burrows on the site were destroyed.
During construction, disturbance buffers also were placed at least 500 feet around occupied burrows to help prevent equipment from bothering the owls or causing burrows to collapse.
The artificial burrow sites are all in a mixed agricultural area on the edges of city-owned irrigation circles near the water-processing facility.
Michael Henao is an environmental compliance coordinator for the city and was involved in the biological surveying of the site to find the owls and helped identify locations for the artificial burrows.
“It was easier for the city and more beneficial for the owls to be (at the new sites),” Henao told the Herald.
He explained that the owls get the benefit of being in an area that is similar to their original shrub steppe habitat with access to prey like rodents and insects in the neighboring agricultural fields.
Shrub steppe habitat
Deep soil shrub steppe is prime land for burrowing owls. It’s made up of grasslands, sagebrush and other woody shrubs.
In the Columbia Basin region, over 80 percent of the historic shrub steppe ecosystem has disappeared, according to state wildlife officials.
About 90 acres of shrub steppe were destroyed as a result of construction for the water facility.
The city was required to pay to replace twice the acreage of shrub steppe impacted by the project— about $190,000 — to the Franklin Conservation District. The district uses the money to buy new shrub steppe habitat areas for preservation.
There were several active burrows and two breeding pairs found on the Pasco site in 2022 and 2023, before construction began in late 2023.
During the last survey in 2024, four breeding pairs of burrowing owls were identified in the project’s footprint. One of the original breeding pairs on the site relocated to an artificial burrow.
Three of the pairs were successful in producing 22 owlets, according to state biologist Jason Fidorra. He worked on the project starting in spring 2022.
“We’ve already seen a net increase in the population of burrowing owls and potential nesting pairs as a result of the mitigation,” he said.
Fidorra explained that burrowing owls are shown to be adaptable and tend to do “fairly well” in irrigated agricultural areas.
The city, along with state wildlife officials, will continue to check on the owls and maintain the artificial burrows.
“The city really believes in industrial symbiosis — there is a full rotation with the water from the processors, and we want to make sure we close the loop,” Henao said. “We want to be good stewards of the land and the animals that inhabit it.”
Fidorra told the Herald that the artificial burrows can help the owl population survive and even grow, as long as they are in areas where the owls can hunt and forage, and stay protected from predators and harmful weather.
“This only addresses one of the needs of burrowing owls,” Fidorra said. “We still have to protect the habitat so that the species can have all of its needs met in terms of survival.
“Long-term, how suitable the site will remain for burrowing owls will be determined in the future,” he said.
