The Disjunct Range of the Burrowing Owl

[MarkGelbart]

For the Europeans who post here and may not be aware of the burrowing owl, it's a North American species that has an odd range. It lives in central Florida and nowhere else except 1500 kilometers to the west in the short grass prairie region.

I've studied all the literature I can find on why this might be so and just posted an 850 word essay about it on my blog.

Rather than re-type the essay here, I'm posting a link to my blog--http://markgelbart.wordpress.com/

************************************************** ****
And here's a link to my book--http://stores.lulu.com/GeorgiaBeforePeople

[goosey]

Excellent stuff Mark. Have you ever seen one yourself?
Amazing to read of a species which has actually benefitted from building work!

I believe I have seen a pair of burrowing owls at the Owl Centre (Muncaster Castle, Cumbria UK) though I don't know if they were Athena cunicularia floridana or Athena cunicularia hypugaea. The centre is the home of the World Owl Trust where conservation breeding programs and owl research takes place with 48 owl species from all over the world.
Annoyingly I have just checked my owl images I took there and I haven't got images of them , no doubt they were dug-in somewhere in their enclosure and I didn't spot them .

[MarkGelbart]

I've only seen burrowing owls on nature programs on television. Marty Stouffer covered them several times on his excellent but now defunct, Wild America, which can be had on dvd.

The only owls I've seen in Augusta, Georgia are barred owls. There are lots of them here. They like to hang around the swamps and creek bottoms, and they can get very loud.

You can probably find audio of barred owl hooting online. It's quite distinctive.