The cardboard pet carrier rested on a patch of desert grass with a towel draped over it, while an animal rescuer named Eric Murray squatted on a nearby cinder block, adjusting his thick gloves for the extraction. Then, in one swift motion, Murray reached into the carrier and retrieved a small owl with brown and white speckled feathers.
Although an adult, the owl was only about nine inches tall, with long spindly legs and sharp talons. Its large yellow eyes widened as it slowly rotated its head at an uncanny angle to survey the surroundings.
On this hot spring day, Murray and about a dozen volunteers clad in work gloves and sun hats gathered at Martin Farm, a 241-acre parcel of grassland northwest of Tucson, Arizona, to participate in a unique kind of bird release. After carefully spreading one of the owl’s wings to confirm its sex as female—“It’s quite barred all the way down,” Murray said, while pointing to a dark pattern along the inner feathers—he turned to a recently assembled temporary shelter, a 10-by-10-foot tent made of sheer black shade cloth. He lifted one corner of the canopy and gently tossed the creature in.
The bird took a look around and flew headfirst into a fabric wall, tumbling onto a patch of freshly dug dirt. She shook it off but repeated the process again and again.
“Pobrecita,” said one volunteer, which is Spanish for “poor thing.” “No sabe.” She doesn’t understand.

As development in urban areas pushes burrowing owls to find new nests, some have gotten creative with where they settle. This pair has claimed an irrigation channel made for neighboring farmland.

Two juvenile owls rest in the shade near a field of newly constructed artificial burrows. During especially hot days, the young ones have learned to cool off by holding their wings out from their sides to lower their body temperature.
Next, volunteers added another owl to the shelter. Both birds continued to flutter about in agitation. While difficult to watch, this process would be repeated hundreds of times throughout the year. At Martin Farm, this canopy was one of 25 spaced at intervals along the property. In recent years, Wild At Heart, the animal rescue group behind these operations, persuaded the city of Tucson to set the tract aside as a conservation area. The group has seven active sites on public and private lands in Arizona.
The hope was that in a month the tent could be removed and the birds would have nested in this spot—or rather, below it. That’s because these are burrowing owls, an increasingly threatened species that has evolved to live underground.
Once one of the most populous owls on the continent, the burrowing owl has seen a sharp decline over the past 150 years. The population is now a small fraction of its former numbers, with the species listed as endangered in Canada, threatened in Mexico and Florida, and assigned various degrees of protected status throughout much of the American West. The culprits are largely urban development and commercial farming, which churn up land where the animals used to roost. Nowhere else in America is that disastrous progression as apparent as in Arizona, especially the Phoenix metro area, one of the fastest growing in the country. Industrial operations and solar fields are rapidly popping up all around its outskirts.
(Not just a mascot: The real owls of Florida Atlantic are underdogs too.)
Burrowing owls have evolved to take over abandoned burrows, commonly of badgers, prairie dogs, and ground squirrels. Out West, the numbers of many of the creatures they once relied on have dwindled because of drought and past extermination campaigns. But in Arizona, Wild At Heart is proving it can bring these animals back from the brink, even while grappling with fatal trial and error in the process.

While burrowing owls hunt most actively at dawn and dusk, preying on rodents, the birds will snack on insects during the day. The menu includes larger bugs, like this scarab beetle.

Raptor rescue group Wild At Heart has pioneered methods to relocate burrowing owls to safer homes. Here, staffer Eric Murray checks the sex of an owl before moving it to the temporary shelter with an artificial burrow behind him.
It all starts with a network of artificially manufactured burrows just below the surface.
In each tent, PVC piping extends from the dirt, creating a six-inch passageway to the human-made burrow. The tunnel measures about 16 feet long and descends to a depth of roughly four feet, which ensures burrows stay cool as outside temperatures increase. The tunnel connects to a main den created by cutting a plastic 55-gallon drum in half to simulate the size of a typical dwelling an owl might find in the wild.
For 30 days, the two birds inside each tent will be fed a daily diet of three frozen mice to share. Once the canopies are removed, volunteers will return for a week to provide more snacks while the animals get accustomed to their new hunting grounds.
The idea for such specifically engineered and executed translocations began more than three decades ago when avid conservationist Bob Fox and his now late wife, Sam, were volunteering to help injured animals at an Arizona Game and Fish Department facility. In 1991, Sam was granted permission to foster a baby barn owl named Chia, and the couple built a small aviary in their backyard. When Chia was old enough, they were surprised to watch him enthusiastically begin to foster displaced nestlings.
That required a permit from both Arizona and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which encouraged the Foxes to open their own rehabilitation center—a professional-grade facility in the Phoenix suburb of Cave Creek that houses hurt raptors like barn owls, ospreys, and hawks. “It had to become a passion because the work is so involved,” Fox says.

For newly translocated owls, an elevated wooden perch provides a sense of safety while clearly signaling the entry to a human-made burrow.

Wild At Heart habitat coordinator Greg Clark holds Tawny, a one-winged owl that has become an ambassador for the organization.
The Foxes’ home phone became a sort of 24-hour hotline for people who discovered injured birds. In Arizona, burrowing owls are listed as a species of concern, and the state’s Game and Fish Department has become proactive, recommending that construction sites be surveyed ahead of any building, so owls can be removed. Over the past 20 years, Wild At Heart has grown to a small staff and a larger volunteer corps fielding increasingly frequent calls for humane trapping and relocating.
The idea for an artificial burrow came from Sam Fox. “There was no mechanism for relocations,” Bob Fox recalls. “And so when they were ready for release, Sam said, ‘Well, you can’t just toss them out; you’ve got to build something for them.’ ”
(Tiny burrowing owls find safer homes with the help of these scientists.)
The rescue group ultimately designed nests that were inexpensive to build and easy to install. But it faced a difficult learning curve. One year, a single badger chewed through 50 burrows in search of an easy meal. Another year, heavy rain led to flooding, making the nests unlivable. The burrows now feature mesh wire below the drum to protect the dens from burrowing critters. Most of the pipe entrances are slightly raised and surrounded by rocks, keeping them elevated in case of flooding. The team also added wooden-stake perches to give the owls a spot above ground to scan for predators.
However, the real challenge happened once the tents came down. “We had these puzzles,” says Greg Clark, the nonprofit’s habitat coordinator. “The owls would lay lots of eggs in the tents, and everyone thought that was wonderful. Except some eggs were being abandoned. And no one really understood that.”
Several years ago, the Fish and Wildlife Service had questions about habitat simulation efforts. In 2017 an agency study of Wild At Heart’s practices compared 122 nest sites, some translocated, with others in undisturbed areas that didn’t require relocation. For the next two years, Wild At Heart worked with an independent team that included Martha Desmond, an ecology professor at New Mexico State University, and David H. Johnson, founder of the Global Owl Project, which provides evidence-backed strategies to help guide owl relocation.

A weeks-old owl chick flutters and nips at its father. The next step is flight, with young birds learning to soar far higher roughly a month after hatching.
It turned out that Wild At Heart had been placing too many owls together: six to 10 owls in the enclosures. “That seemed to be a big stressor for all of the owls and how well the eggs would be brooded,” Clark says.
Relocating males in breeding season, March to August, caused another issue. The males didn’t have experience hunting in the area, and once the tents came down, the free mice disappeared. The females often abandoned their nests in search of better partners. “Everything crashes and burns,” says Johnson.
(Can this tiny owl survive in one of America’s fastest-growing states?)
All of this led to high fatalities. By affixing radio transmitters to 43 translocated owls and 42 resident owls, the researchers could track the fallout, knowing that translocated birds always suffer higher mortality rates. In this case, the death toll among the recently moved was more than double, with 24 translocated owls dying compared with 11 resident ones. “It was not a good situation at all,” says Desmond.
But the new data inspired changes. Wild At Heart now uses smaller tents, spread farther apart, and only pairs the owls. Those steps, plus the continuous feeding schedule, demand a lot from volunteers. To find sites that are protected from development and near good food sources, Clark is looking beyond big population centers, making it difficult to recruit people willing to drive.
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Being limited to certain seasons for the releases is also a challenge because Wild At Heart can’t control how many owls it gets. Johnson, who conducts research with organizations around the world on translocation, says that Wild At Heart stands out for the sheer number of owls it receives. In a typical year it has around 200 owls that need to be relocated. But in peak homebuilding years, that average rises to more than 250. Lately, renewable energy has added to that pressure, with over a hundred owls being relocated in the past two years because of solar projects.
Many relocation sites can house only about 50 birds. If the sites are full, uprooted owls might stay longer in the aviaries, where they may lose their fitness. That can affect survivability when they’re released.

Two fledglings peek out from an artificial nest at Martin Farm, a 241-acre refuge north of Tucson.

Wild At Heart continues to improve its nest designs. This 16-foot-long corrugated entry pipe is wrapped in fencing to keep out badgers and other predators.
In search of solutions, the team has begun to build relationships with some of the solar developers that are moving into existing owl territory. Longroad Energy, a company developing around 10,000 acres in the area, recently agreed to leave thousands of acres undeveloped. It’s also working with the nonprofit to build new burrows on designated land.
“Owls are adaptable,” Johnson says. “We can be successful. We just have to think through our methods a lot more. That’s what’s changing now.”
Two months after the tents were taken down at Martin Farm, Jenohn Wrieden, a biologist at Wild At Heart, drove across the dusty grassland, weaving between the widely spaced burrow sites, which were marked by their wooden-stake perches.
By now, the relocated birds should have fled or taken roost, and below ground, the owlets were getting ready to fledge.
Wrieden spotted something in the distance and slowly rolled to a stop, raising her binoculars for a better look. Through the lenses, she could see a family of owls, complete with eager fledglings stretching their wings for some test flights.

A male owl heads home to his mate, dinner in claw, after snatching up a kangaroo rat in the Sonoran Desert’s continually shifting landscape.
On top of the burrow, a juvenile owl stretched its wings, while another got a running start and took off in flight, completing a short loop before returning to the ground. Because the fledglings weren’t banded, it was hard to tell if they were the progeny of the translocated owls or perhaps owls from elsewhere in the area.
In a typical release, around a quarter of translocated owls might stay and breed. They usually lay about six eggs, the rate observed in non-translocated owls, but not all end up surviving. On average, a new owl family can raise two juveniles, making this family one of the luckier ones.
Inevitably, some owls move to natural burrows they like better. But that’s part of why the arid grasslands of Martin Farm were chosen in the first place. The area has good proximity to natural burrow builders—like badgers and ground squirrels—that still populate surrounding fields that have yet to be developed. Crucially, none of the owls will return to the land they came from, which has since transformed into construction sites for housing developments or solar fields.
Wrieden saw a Cooper’s hawk circling far above the little owls. It was a potentially dangerous predator, but she didn’t seem concerned. The family could always retreat underground or take their chances. Offering them that opportunity felt like its own kind of success.
(These 5 lesser-known species may vanish. If they do, we’re all in trouble.)
Jessica Kurtz covers climate issues for The 19th, a nonprofit news organization. This is the Arizona-based writer’s first piece for National Geographic magazine.
A Pulitzer Prize–winning photographer, also based in Arizona, Jack Dykinga spent four years following western burrowing owls.
This story appears in the January 2025 issue of National Geographic magazine.