The Loma Prietan
March/April 2001
Owls: Those Birds Have to Go!
by Dale F. Mead
Mission College, which boasts an environmental studies program, recently has been giving its students a real-world crash course in how to clear and plow wildlife habitat for campus construction.
The first week of February, the college placed one-way doors over 92 squirrel holes so burrowing owls could no longer use them as shelter. After three days, once the birds had presumably given up their struggle to get back inside their homes and vanished to who knows where, crews quickly removed the doors and plowed on three sides of the gym. Within three days, another 1.6 acres of on-campus habitat was gone.
Only a week before that, an even larger plot had been fenced off and plowed. The Santa Clara-based college’s facilities expansion program is under full steam, and the birds have to go.
“It’s ironic,” said Phil Higgins, 34, an environmental studies major and president of the school’s Environmental Awareness Association. “They have a couple of classes that teach about the environment, but then they lock out the burrowing owls. The school has a café called the Owl Cafe, and on a class schedule they use a picture of an owl.”
But a facilities official for the West Valley-Mission Community College District defended the action as humane, responsible and “consistent with our mitigation agreement” with the California Fish & Game Department. The district runs Mission College and West Valley College in Saratoga.
Mark Perlberger, executive director of the Mission-West Valley Land Corp., an auxiliary organization of the district based in Sacramento, claimed only one owl was living in the area, although Higgins counted two active burrows.
“We did overkill to make sure we covered every location,” Perlberger said. “That’s why there were so many doors” covering holes.
“We’ve exceeded our agreement” with Fish & Game, he explained. “The college has worked very hard to take care of the owls while balancing building out the college for educational purposes.”
The district also paid more than $1 million toward development and purchase of burrowing owl habitat in Byron, south of Brentwood in Contra Costa County, to offset loss of habitat on campus, Perlberger explained.
Scott Wilson, environmental specialist for the Fish & Game Department who has been working with the college off and on for a year and a half, described the burrow-blocking process as “a uniform technique that is used” to clear land of owls.
“The Fish and Game code prohibits a ‘take’ of owls or their nests,” Wilson said, but “there’s no prohibition against people moving owls if they aren’t nesting. We don’t have the ability to tell people they need to leave them alone forever.”
The college also has fenced off a tract that will permanently house burrowing owls and other wildlife, although it is a fraction of the land that has been left undeveloped until now. Other nearby acreage, such as a large plot now dominated by dozens of hares, will eventually be built over as well.
“It’s not just Mission College,” Wilson said. “Around the South Bay from Shoreline (Mountain View) to Fremont, whole flat areas of historic burrowing owl habitat” are disappearing for development.
Now all that awaits is for biologists to determine how many owls are left out of the 60 that lived on campus in 1988 and the 14 that were counted in January. Oh, and there’s a gym to expand.
You may reach the Mission College Environmental Awareness Association by e-mail at Mission_eaa@yahoo.com.