Conservation

Raptor Recovery Nebraska takes an active role in conservation. Without adequate places to live, there would be no point releasing a rehabilitated raptor.

Raptors face many serious problems:

• The loss of habitat for breeding birds and their prey has widespread impacts on populations in North America and South America.
• Raptors are persecuted by people who believe they are a threat to livestock or a threat to upland game birds like pheasants and quail.
• Raptors are long-lived and feed high on the food chain. Their exposure to chemicals like DDT and other pollutants accumulate over time, concentrating poisons.
• Collisions with man-made structures, like radio towers, fences, wind turbines, power lines, and moving vehicles cause many raptor injuries and deaths.

Barn Owl Recovery

In Nebraska, Barn Owls are a species of concern. Loss of nesting habitat has contributed to the plight of the barn owl. Barn owls prefer habitat which is primarily open country with intermixed grasslands, meadows, pastures, open woodlands, and cropland. These habitats provide barn owls with the mice, rats, gophers, voles, and other rodents which make up 95% of their diet. The steady decline of suitable habitat has caused the barn owl's population to decline. Sometimes, suitable habitat is readily available, but nest sites are not. When suitable nest sites are hard to find, regeneration of populations becomes difficult. Barn owls will readily utilize new nest sites, allowing them to maintain or increase breeding populations through the use of nest boxes.

RRN has worked with the Nebraska Game and Parks Commission to breed chicks for release and developed artificial nest boxes to help increase breeding populations in suitable areas. While breeding programs have ceased, the Center still uses non-releasable barn owls to foster orphaned chicks.

Over 300 captive-reared barn owls have been released in southeastern Nebraska in an attempt to re-establish a breeding population. Over 100 nest boxes have been installed all across the state to provide permanent nest sites to allow a depressed breeding population to grow. Most of these boxes have been adopted by breeding barn owls and annually produce young.

NEST BOX PLANS

Interested in building a nest box for a barn owl? Click on the link above..........

Peregrine Falcon
by Jeryl Hauptman

In 1988, the center, in cooperation with the Nebraska Game & Parks Commission and the Audubon Society of Omaha, set up a hacking program in Nebraska. 8 birds were released from the Woodmen Tower in Omaha, Nebraska. Nest boxes were placed on top of the building to encourage use by breeding birds. In 1989, 9 birds were released from the Woodmen Tower and the Mutual of Omaha building. In 1990, there were 4 birds released from the Mutual of Omaha building. Finally, in 1991, birds were seen returning to the nest site. No more birds were released this since, as adult birds would be quick to drive out any fledgings. Peregrine falcons have nested in Omaha since 1991. Once our educational peregrine, Papillion, was a casualty of the release project. After being released, the falcon bolted from the roof and disappeared. He was found a week later near Tekamah, NE, starving. He had not bonded to any specific locality and would not stay long enough in one place to learn hunting skills, he could not be released. Papillion is no longer with us but he was a valuable education bird and is missed.