Somewhere in the flat, sun-blasted desert south of Phoenix, a burrowing owl no bigger than a soda can stands at the mouth of a plastic pipe poking from the dirt. The pipe leads to a buried chamber meant to replace the underground home a bulldozer took from it. Nearby, rows of photovoltaic panels stretch toward the horizon. The owl bobs its head, scanning for grasshoppers, apparently unaware it is part of a federal experiment testing whether one of Arizona’s quirkiest raptors can survive alongside the state’s booming solar industry.
A bird without a burrow
Burrowing owls are oddities in the raptor world. They nest underground, typically commandeering tunnels dug by prairie dogs, ground squirrels, or desert tortoises. The burrows serve as nurseries, shelters from predators, and critical refuges from triple-digit desert heat. When construction crews grade a site for a solar array or a housing subdivision, those burrows vanish in hours, and the owls have nowhere to go.
That problem is growing fast across central and southern Arizona. The same flat, treeless terrain that burrowing owls favor for spotting predators and hunting insects is precisely what solar developers need for unobstructed panel arrays. The U.S. Bureau of Land Management’s Phoenix District, which oversees millions of acres of public desert in the region, sits at the center of that collision.
How the relocation works
In a published account, the BLM’s Phoenix District described leading what it called an “augmentation and translocation” effort for burrowing owls displaced by development. The operation was carried out in partnership with Wild at Heart, a Phoenix-area raptor rescue and rehabilitation organization, and the Arizona Game and Fish Department, the state agency that manages non-endangered wildlife populations.
The distinction between augmentation and translocation is deliberate. Augmentation means adding birds to a site where a small population already exists; translocation means moving them to an entirely new location. Both strategies aim to prevent local population collapse when construction wipes out nesting habitat.
Before any owl was moved, receiving sites were prepared with clusters of artificial burrows. Each cluster consisted of underground nest chambers connected to surface entrances by PVC pipes, a design consistent with U.S. Geological Survey guidance and protocols published by multiple state wildlife agencies. The structures were spaced to approximate natural burrow densities so that several owl pairs could establish territories while maintaining the loose colony arrangement the species prefers.
Wild at Heart’s involvement indicates the owls received veterinary screening before release, including checks for injury and disease and assessments of whether individual birds were fit for life in the wild. The Arizona Game and Fish Department handled permitting and population oversight. Although burrowing owls are not listed under the federal Endangered Species Act, they are protected under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, which prohibits harming the birds or destroying active nests without authorization. Arizona’s State Wildlife Action Plan also designates them a Species of Greatest Conservation Need. Any capture and relocation required coordination among all three partners to stay within those legal boundaries.
After release, BLM staff and volunteers monitored the sites to track whether the owls stayed in the artificial dens and resumed normal behaviors: hunting nearby, defending burrow entrances, and eventually pairing up for breeding season.
What the program has not yet proven
The BLM’s account, first published in February 2021, confirmed that the translocation took place and named the agencies involved. It did not, however, disclose how many owls were moved, the precise coordinates of the receiving site, or whether the artificial dens were installed directly within an active solar facility’s footprint, in a buffer zone, or on a separate parcel of public land nearby. No specific solar farm or project name has been identified in the public record tied to this effort, meaning the connection between the relocated owls and a particular installation remains a reasonable inference from the broader pattern of solar-driven displacement in the region rather than a confirmed detail.
More critically, no long-term survival data from this specific effort has appeared in the public record as of May 2026. Measuring translocation success in burrowing owls is notoriously difficult. The birds are small, mobile, and in some parts of their range partially migratory, though Arizona’s desert populations tend to be year-round residents. Determining whether relocated individuals survive, breed, and produce offspring that return to the same artificial burrows demands years of banding, camera monitoring, and field surveys.
Neither the BLM nor the Arizona Game and Fish Department has published outcome data tied to this operation in any source reviewed for this article. No peer-reviewed study or independent wildlife survey evaluating the effort has been identified, either. Federal land management agencies routinely commission biological assessments before approving energy projects on public land, and those documents often contain baseline population counts and required mitigation measures. If such an assessment exists for the solar development that triggered this relocation, it has not surfaced publicly.
That gap matters because the science on artificial burrows is mixed. Some wildlife biologists have found that relocated owls abandon man-made dens within weeks if the surrounding habitat lacks sufficient prey or if the burrow design fails to replicate natural conditions closely enough. Artificial structures can also concentrate predators or expose owls to human disturbance when placed too close to roads or active facilities. On the other hand, well-designed installations in suitable habitat have shown strong occupancy rates over multiple breeding seasons in studies from California, Florida, and other western states, particularly when paired with temporary fencing and supplemental feeding during the adjustment period.
Without site-specific monitoring results from Arizona, it is not possible to say which outcome applies here.
Unanswered questions for owls and solar in the desert
Arizona approved more utility-scale solar capacity between 2020 and 2025 than in any comparable stretch in the state’s history, according to filings with the Arizona Corporation Commission. Much of that construction has landed on BLM-managed desert, intensifying the overlap between energy infrastructure and burrowing owl habitat. The Phoenix District’s translocation is one response, but it is unclear whether similar relocations are happening systematically across multiple project sites or whether the agencies have set regional population targets for the species.
Conservation groups have pushed for standardized mitigation protocols that would require solar developers on federal land to fund artificial burrow installation, pre-construction surveys, and multi-year post-release monitoring as permit conditions. Some developers have adopted those measures voluntarily; others have not. The BLM’s account does not specify whether the translocation described was a permit requirement, a voluntary initiative, or a response to a habitat-loss complaint.
For now, the Arizona effort stands as a documented but unfinished case study. The agencies moved the owls. They built the dens. Early monitoring suggested the birds stayed. What remains to be seen, as of spring 2026, is whether a population of nine-inch-tall raptors can hold territory and raise chicks in plastic pipes while solar panels hum overhead, and whether anyone will be tracking them long enough to find out.
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*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
