Research project looking for information about owl sightings
The Royal Saskatchewan Museum (RSM) and the University of Regina included a citizen science component in their new research project about great horned owls.
Any sightings of great horned owls in the prairie landscape will assist researchers to learn more about the distribution of these large birds.
“We as researchers obviously can’t cover the entirety of Saskatchewan and so we’re really relying on people to report their sightings to us.,” RSM Curator of Vertebrate Zoology Dr. Ryan Fisher said. “Lots of people in their farmyards will see these owls nesting and that’s the type of information that’s really useful and really important to us.”
The research team is specifically interested in owl sightings outside cities and south of the tree line in the agricultural zone that includes grassland and aspen parkland.
Great horned owls are one of the most common types of owls in Saskatchewan and North America. Their original habitat across the continent is connected to any area with significant tree cover for nesting purposes, but human activity made it possible for them to expand their distribution.
“So pre-European settlement they were probably limited to things like river valleys, where there were some trees in the prairies or in southern Saskatchewan,” he said. “But what we now know about them is that they’re able to nest in things like trees that have been planted around farm yards, in things like shelterbelts, and they’ll even nest in old abandoned buildings. They also use structures like power lines and fence lines in the prairies to hunt from. We’ve added all of these new things in the landscape and the owls seem to be able to take advantage of that.”
This study will therefore investigate how human modifications to the landscape have assisted these owls to be so successful.
“They actually do quite well in areas that have been disturbed by humans,” he said. “It tends to be quite the opposite of what we typically think of the impacts of people on animals. Our research is really trying to understand what factors, especially in southern Saskatchewan, have
facilitated these owls expanding across prairie Saskatchewan.”
They hunt at night and their large size makes it possible to catch a variety of prey, varying from birds and rabbits to mice and gophers.
“The number of things that greathorned owls will eat in a summer is pretty spectacular,” he said. “They’re kind of your perfect natural pest control agents out on the prairie. If you have a greathorned owl in your tree or in your farm yard, you can bet it’s probably doing a pretty good number on some of the mice and voles and ground squirrels around your yard.”
Great horned owls are early nesters and they will lay their eggs before the snow disappears. They will start to nest in late February and March. Dr. Fisher emphasized that these owls are extremely sensitive to disturbance. People should therefore be very careful when they observe these birds and keep as much distance as possible from them.
“It really just comes down to keeping a healthy distance from them and not making loud noises as you’re looking at them,” he said. “They will nest in farm yards and things like that and generally people leave them alone and they leave people alone. And so we want to keep it that way. It’s actually just to have respect for the owls, keep your distance, but we would love to hear the observations that people have.”
The research team is interested in information about the location of the sighting, which can be GPS coordinates, quarter section or nearest range road, as well as any other information about what an owl was doing or the setting where it was seen.
“People can report the exact locations to us and those are kept completely confidential, but we would ask that if people are out and about, they not share those locations with their friends or on Facebook or social media just so we can try to keep the disturbance of owls to a minimum,” he said.
The University of Regina developed a form that can be used to report owl sightings to the research team. There is a link on the bottom of the RSM web page (www.royalsaskmuseum.ca) to submit a sighting.
This project will run into 2023 and the research team will also be going out into the field to look for and observe these owls.
“They’ll be out in trucks with binoculars and spotting scopes, looking for these owls in the next couple of months,” he said. “But the citizen science data will complement a lot of that information that we’re collecting as a relatively small team.”
The research team is planning to visit southwest Saskatchewan to do fieldwork, because the area is a combination of sparsely populated farming and ranching areas and natural grassland.
“It’s a really interesting area where in the past there probably weren’t a large number of owls, but because there’s human structures in the area and things like that, it seems like a really good part of the
province to get a good handle on what the owls are doing in sort of a mixed-use landscape,” he said.
He anticipates that some of the hunting behaviour of great horned owls will also make southwest Saskatchewan a suitable area for the research team to observe these birds.
“They seem to do a lot of their hunting in things like roadside ditches and crop fields, but they’ll also hunt in grassland ranch land,” he explained. “So that area down in southwest Saskatchewan gives us that really nice possibility of getting those types of landscapes in our study.”
The great horned owl research project will have several outcomes. It will result in a better understanding of their distribution, abundance, and habitat use. It might also provide details about the impact of these owls on some prey animals, and this may lead to the development of some habitat management strategies for great horned owl and prey species in southern Saskatchewan.
This research project fits in well with the mandate of the RSM to create a greater understanding of Saskatchewan’s biodiversity.
“We’ve also started an urban wildlife project in Regina,” Dr. Fisher said. “There’s been work on snakes that has been led by the Royal Saskatchewan Museum. There’s lots of work being done by Dr. Cory Sheffield, who does research on pollinators in Saskatchewan. It’s part of our mandates here at the museum to do research in the province.”