Editor’s note
On a Saturday evening in late October, my boyfriend and I were walking around César Chávez Park in Berkeley when we came across a man with a camera and tripod near the Burrowing Owl Sanctuary. I asked him if he’d seen any owls. He had. Two Western burrowing owls had been seen at the park this season so far, but have since departed. (A third owl was spotted on November 4.)
The man turned out to be Martin Nicolaus, aka “the Owl Guy,” who has been monitoring, photographing, and otherwise obsessing about burrowing owls at the park for more than a decade. He leads the Chavez Park Conservancy, a volunteer-run nonprofit that advocates for the park and regularly publishes updates on its famous owl visitors. He even created a 24-minute documentary, “The Owls Came Back,” about the owls that visited in the winter of 2018–19, which is available on YouTube.
This year Nicolaus published a book, Our Owls: Burrowing Owls In Cesar Chavez Park Berkeley, which includes his reflections, observations, fun facts, and photos he’s gathered over the years of these cute, pint-sized visitors. It’s a fascinating read, and one that made me eager to return to the park soon.
The following is an edited excerpt from the book, which is available through Duplex Press.
— Kathleen Richards, contributing editor
A Most Lovable Bird
People who like birds love burrowing owls. People who pay little attention to birds also love burrowing owls.
It helps, of course, that these owls are different from every other owl we may commonly see. They’re out in daylight. Other owls mostly hide in the daytime and only come out at night. Burrowing owls usually perch on the ground. Other owls perch in trees. Other owls may seem fearsome, messengers of doom. Burrowing owls are cuddly and vibrate love. They’re also rare, so seeing one is a thrill. We love burrowing owls because we can see them. But it goes deeper than that.
We love them because they can see us.
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They can look into our eyes and we into theirs. Owl eyes face forward, like ours. Another thing we have in common with burrowing owls is that their pupils are round. Burrowing owls adjust their pupils to light, as we do. They also blink with their upper eyelids.
Burrowing owl eyes, like most raptors’, are shaped more like bullets than marbles. This shape helps them see clearly at long distances. But the price is that the owl can’t swivel its eyes the way that humans can. To shift its gaze, it has to swivel its head.
An owl can twist its neck 90 degrees without apparent effort. It can look 180 degrees behind it easily. In my film, “The Owls Came Back,” I show a sequence where an owl swiveled its head 270 degrees. It can also tilt its head upward 90 degrees to follow another bird as it crosses the sky, like a radar antenna. It has 14 neck vertebrae, where we have only seven.
It typically swivels its head very quickly, in the blink of a (human) eye. To protect its eyes during these rapid turns, burrowing owls have a third eyelid that we don’t. The owl can control not only its eyelids but also its eyebrows and the feathers around its beak. It can suddenly switch them from brown to white. Why it does that isn’t certain. Possibly it’s a threat display.
A key sign of owl comfort is standing on one leg. It can perch on one leg for hours, switching off occasionally. Its legs have very little insulation, so pulling one leg up into the feathers conserves body heat.
Finding Them
I have met a number of regular park visitors who told me that they have come to the park for many years and never seen a burrowing owl. In the next set of pictures, you may see how it’s possible to walk the park and never see a burrowing owl.
The owls that visit the park have different preferences for perching spots. Some like to settle in the riprap on the north and northeast shores. A few owls like to settle in the flat grass areas, either in the small patch of grassland in the Burrowing Owl Sanctuary, or in parts of the larger north-side meadow.
The key takeaway is that you might see an owl almost anywhere in the park. There’s an informal network of owl spotters that report sightings to the ChavezPark.org website. This helps park visitors end the days of walking the park and never seeing owls.
Of course, finding an owl is not only a matter of where, but also when. The owls come here to spend the winter season. In spring and summer, they’re courting, mating, breeding, and feeding their chicks somewhere north and east of here. Their summer homes may be in Oregon, Washington, Nevada, or the states east of there as far as the Dakotas, Nebraska, and Kansas.
Every autumn, owl watchers (“owlers”) tingle with anticipation, wondering when the first owl will arrive. We have had two winter seasons (2017–2018 and 2023–2024) when none were seen here. In the winter of 2024–2025, we had an extraordinary owl season, with possibly seven or more owls that stayed awhile.
When owls do arrive, the earliest will show up at the end of September or early October. More may come anytime in October, November, or even December. Many that arrive don’t feel comfortable and move on, sometimes after just hours. The ones that stay tend to dwell until February or March, when they fly back to their summer areas.
Friends
Every burrowing owl we see here was born underground. If it’s a first-year bird, as it very well might be, it lived most of its young life down in a dark burrow and emerged only recently to spread its wings.
Our Western burrowing owls depend on other animals to do the digging. Our owls don’t dig their own burrows, or at least not yet. They really should be called borrowing owls.
They aren’t particular about their hosts. Over much of the Great Plains states, their homes were excavated by colonies of prairie dogs. But they’ll also use the burrows of badgers, desert tortoises, foxes, even coyotes. California ground squirrels are the most important burrowing owl hosts in the Western states.
In winter, the owls don’t need to occupy a burrow all season long. They need the burrows mainly for temporary safety, like air raid shelters.
Researchers tend to assume that the owls only use burrows abandoned by the animals that dug them. But with squirrels? The owls may very well move in without checking for vacancy or asking permission.
I once saw an owl dive into a burrow, and a minute later a squirrel came out of the same hole, and then another. Must have been crowded in there.
The Bigger Picture
Our Western owls have been in retreat across their former range for most of the past century.
In California, the population of breeding pairs has declined steeply, and continues to slide. Before the second World War, breeding pairs were found in the Bay Area near the shoreline in Alameda, Santa Clara, Contra Costa, San Francisco, and San Mateo counties. Nothing is left of them. Today, a substantial but declining population of breeding pairs remains in eastern Alameda County, in the Altamont Pass area, about 45 road miles southeast of Berkeley. Surviving populations around San Jose are on life support.
In October 2024, a heavily documented petition about the condition of the owls in the state succeeded in persuading the California Fish and Game Commission to classify the owl as a candidate for “endangered” status, subject to confirmation.
Seeing burrowing owls in the winter season is a great privilege. As many park visitors have said, they are adorable. What would be even more adorable is to see them in summer, when their chicks emerge from the nest burrows. Can we make our park into a four-season home for burrowing owls?
It’s a big ambition. But not impossible. Burrowing owls are not hardwired for migration. If we can make the owls feel safe, we may well find one late spring morning that a wintering pair of owls have settled in for the summer.
This article and photos were edited and excerpted from Our Owls: Burrowing Owls in Cesar Chavez Park Berkeley by Martin Nicolaus. Reprinted with permission from Duplex Press © 2025.
