Owl in the Family
In Carl Hiassen’s novel Hoot, evil developers planning to bulldoze a burrowing-owl habitat are outsmarted by plucky preteen activists – you know, pure fiction. In real-life Phoenix, subterranean avians forced to abandon their burrows qualify for a free move to upgraded housing.
The bug-and-rodent-noshing owls don’t dig their own digs – they squat in burrows made by ground squirrels and other small mammals – so humans must replace what they destroy, says Audubon Arizona education director Cathy Wise (settle down, she’s heard it before). “What typically happens is a developer will get started surveying the land they’re about to develop,” Wise says. “They see the owls or someone will let them know [there are] owls there.”
A heads-up to Arizona Game & Fish Department connects owl-spotters to Audubon’s partner, the Cave Creek wildlife rehab group Wild at Heart. The group captures the owls in special traps, houses them in aviaries for 30 days to break “site fidelity” to the old burrows, then relocates the birds to new 4-foot-deep homes of corrugated irrigation tubing in Phoenix.
The relocation effort occurs during the spring breeding season only. To bond the owls to their new homes, volunteers shroud the warrens with canvas. “The hope is that the females will lay eggs in the burrows and under the tent and then they’ll stay there,” Wise says.
Since 2013, about 1,000 volunteers have helped resettle about 100 of the federally protected owls to burrows at five sites Downtown. Catch them on Owl Cam at riosalado.audubon.org.
Seeking Zika Clues
When a mosquito bites a virus-infected human, it takes time for the virus to saturate the insect’s system before it can pass the disease on to another person. Some diseases carried by the A. aegypti mosquito make the trip in up to 10 days, but the sometimes fatal zika virus might make these rounds in just two or three.
Bug sucks infected blood
• Infection travels from gut to circulatory system
• Virus spreads to salivary glands
• Now the mosquito’s bite carries the virus
University of Arizona entomologist Michael Riehle and colleagues are researching how far and fast mosquito-borne zika can spread. Your data can help: UofA’s Kacey Ernst has developed a smart phone app that helps citizens and health officials share information about illness and mosquito activity. Find out more at kidenga.org or get it from GooglePlay or iTunes.
Rat Expectations
Just one rat couple can produce 15 million descendants in a year, says Ali Applin, VP for business development of Flagstaff-based biotech company SenesTech. But the rodenticides attempted by old-school poisons merely open new territory for neighboring packs to colonize.
SenesTech’s new product, ContraPest, renders the critters infertile. Before they die of old age, the geriatric mammals spend their childless twilight years rat-patrolling their territory, which prevents the four-legged pests next door from moving in.
After a $1.1 million grant from the U.S. National Institutes of Health, and successful trials in the subways of New York, Chicago and Washington, D.C., the federal Environmental Protection Agency approved ContraPest last year.
Scenario 1: Poison kills rat; other rats move in and breed.
Scenario 2: Rat is sterilized; it protects house from other rats.
What ContraPest does:
• Sends female rats into early menopause
• Disrupts sperm production
• Tastes like an egg cream (ask a New Yorker)
• Makes lady rats’ whiskers glow green
