Thinking with Owls: an ASU-Waterloo Burrowing Owl Collaboration

This project encourages ongoing relationships between community colleges, community stakeholders, and area partners invested in the continued success of owl (and ecological) conservation and preservation. Due to increased development throughout Arizona, owls are often pushed out of their nesting grounds and are then moved to other spaces by humans in hopes that the birds will choose to nest in them. Conservationists have designed artificial burrows for this purpose, and locally, these  can be found at sites as diverse as the Rio Salado and the Tucson Electric Power Plant. Burrowing owls have also been relocated to the ASU Polytechnic campus with mixed success over time, and ASU West is being considered as a potential site for rehoming in the future. Given this campus-based initiative, and because of the mixed success of human-made habitat for owls, ASU has a rare opportunity to intervene. To this end, researchers from the University of Waterloo, who are familiar with the constraints and affordances of habitat design for species at risk, have approached the Institute for Humanities Research to propose a cross-disciplinary project: a living laboratory that will bring together students and researchers across disciplines in a mixed methods intervention that combines environmental humanities, field biology, and critical design.