Many years ago I worked as an environmental consultant for developers looking to meet and/or skirt federal and state regulators. People used to tell me I was on the leading edge of environmental work – where the rubber met the road.
It didn’t feel that way. Mostly I felt like I was a speed bump for powerful and amoral people who wanted to build expensive homes. But the most amoral of all – the characters that to this day make my blood run cold – were not working on the site, but rather under it.
A widespread and powerful criminal organizations of burrowing owls.
Now, I know what you are thinking. The idea that all burrowing owls are part of some kind of crime family mafia is a hurtful and inaccurate stereotype. Plenty of them are legitimate businessmen (very few convicted burrowing owls are females, though there are notable exceptions). And besides, the notion of a burrowing owl crime family is charming and even a little cute.
But you would be so, so wrong.
Let me paint a picture for you. You are an honest, hardworking ground squirrel, coming home from a long, hot day of gathering tubers for your family. As you come over the rise and spot your burrow, you realize there is something wrong.
Two huge, hulking birds are stationed in front of your home – the burrow you dug with your bare claws for your children and their children. Perhaps it’s a mistake. Perhaps they are in the wrong place. Without causing a fuss, eyes to the ground, you cautiously walk to the left around the biggest bird, who’s wearing a double-breasted pin-striped suit and sunglasses.
Silently, he steps to his right and blocks you.
So you go right, aiming past his sneering buddy in a track suit and wearing gold chains. You lock eyes and he steps in your way. A little dirt sprays out of the hole. Inside you can hear the sounds of a third owl digging out your borrow.
What do you do? It’s three against one. They are huge and menacing and can fly. Two more times you try to slink or slip past the thugs at the opening but it’s no use. So you abandon your home. Left to the whims of fate and forced to live in one of the three other burrows you have dug (ground squirrels dig a lot).
It’s a scene I saw play out time and again on the worksite. You see, burrowing owls can’t actually dig their own burrows so they steal them. But it’s not just burrow-stealing. Burrowing owls have increasingly been tied to corruption, racketeering and even murder, not just where I was working in Northern California, but across their range.
Many of these charges have been hard to prove in court, because so few witnesses will step forward and those that do often disappear. In 2015, five Western fence lizards offered to testify against burrowing owls living near them but disappeared before the trial.
The next week, a fence lizard leg appeared at the mouth of a hole belonging to a prominent local owl (suspected of bookmaking and money laundering). Through his lawyers, the owl pointed out that it’s very common for his species to decorate their homes with lizard and beetle corpses to attract mates. And that drawing connections to the missing lizards was “slanderous, libelous, and borderline specist.”
I tried to get multiple lizards and ground squirrels on the record for this story but all declined to speak for fear that they or their family members might be targeted.
And it’s not just witness tampering and intimidation, burrowing owls have dug their gross little claws into every branch of our government as well. Take the site where I was working. On the 400-acre plot (now an active adult community) there were two protected species. One was the California tiger salamander, which is listed as threatened by the US Fish and Wildlife Service. The other was the vernal pool fairy shrimp, also threatened. The burrowing owl, on the other hand, was a species of special concern, which basically applies to almost any charismatic bird in California.
Yet the company I was working for bulldozed both shrimp and salamander while spending half a million dollars to relocate the owls.
And when one of the owls slipped past our relocation program (presumably because they got tipped off) and set up a nest on the site, all work had to avoid them for the next six months. But since the plan was to lower the whole site 50 feet, they ended up with a giant plateau in the center of the site and a family of owls in the middle of it, like something out of a Bugs Bunny cartoon.
Now I’m not saying anyone at USFW is taking burrowing owl money under the table or that someone at my company was passing information on to them – but it certainly would explain a lot.
Of course, corrupt officials say that the reason this species gets special protection is because of public outcry at dead owls, whereas no one cares about dead shrimp. But they would say that, wouldn’t they? And who is this public? To date, no one has investigated pro-burrowing-owl environmentalists to see where their money comes from.
Certainly I haven’t But I don’t think I need to do any kind of investigation to conclude that, without a doubt, burrowing owls are bribing public officials and manipulating public sentiment using paid actors as protesters. It seems pretty obvious.
Photo Credit: Warner Bothers, “No Parking Hare.”
Can’t get enough Snark? Why not graze on the terrifying tales of Snark Weeks past:
Snark Week 2017, featuring abusive blackbirds, an immense, near-spherical raccoon, and the vile creature that will gnaw on your soul – and then poop on it.
Snark Week 2016, featuring testicle-eating assassins, chihuahua terrorists, and the animals so vile they come out of the womb with horns.
Snark Week 2015, featuring flesh-ripping alien fleas, bovine murderers, and the unfairly beloved animal whose terrifying extra neck vertebrae allows them to turn their terrifying neckheads 270 degrees.
Snark Week 2014, featuring squirrels hell bent on world domination, more feral roosters, and a furry virus that has spread across the United States to total devastation.
Snark Week 2013 – the very first! – featuring the ant that kills cows, the bird responsible for five deaths and $425 million in damages, and an animal so vicious he is known only as Little Red Bastard.
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