Florida Burrowing Owl

A highlight of our Florida trip was finding Burrowing Owls on 19 January 2018. Burrowing Owls were not new for us; we’ve seen plenty in South Dakota and elsewhere. But the Florida owls are far from other populations. I have wanted to see them in case DNA research establishes them as a separate species. Certianly little or no genetic flow exists between Florida and Western populations.

So I looked up Florida Burrowing Owl sightings in the BirdsEye bird finding app. The app announced that Burrowing Owls had been recently seen at the Pelican Blvd. Baseball Fields, right in the middle of Fort Myers. OK. The locadtion was not far out of our way. We arrived, and all we found were baseball fields. No surprise there, I suppose. We surveysed te area with our binoculars. On the outskirts of the fields were white crosses. Below each cross lay a Burrowing Owl nest. The owls paid little attention to us. We flushed none while taking these photos.

Florida Burrowing Owls are also unique in their eye color. Apparently due to low populations, recessive eye color genes are often expressed in Florida birds. Instead of being yellow, ksome Florida birds have marbled, black and yellow irises. We did not find any strikingly colored irises in our birds, but a few were somewhat mottled.