A solar farm designed to fight climate change became an unexpected refuge for an endangered owl when scientists discovered that panels cast the perfect shadow for ground-nesting predators to hunt.
By Science Blog Editorial Team · Edited by Brendan Brown
Published September 13, 2026 · How we edit
Follow Science Blog on Google
The burrowing owl is the owl that ignored the job description. Nine inches tall, long-legged, active in daylight, it lives not in trees but underground — in tunnels dug by ground squirrels, prairie dogs and badgers, on flat open ground where it can see everything coming.
Arizona has spent a century deleting that habitat: first the digging mammals, then the farmland, and lately the desert itself, paved over for subdivisions and — in one of the energy transition’s small ironies — solar farms. When a Phoenix-area housing development broke ground on a colony’s home in early 2025, the nonprofit Wild at Heart Raptor Rescue faced its perennial problem: owls in hand, nowhere left to put them. The agricultural lands it had used for a quarter-century of relocations were themselves vanishing.
The answer came from the industry doing some of the paving. Longroad Energy offered about 250 acres tucked between two arrays of its Sun Streams complex — a sea of panels spanning thousands of acres of desert near Tonopah — and Greg Clark, Wild at Heart’s burrowing owl coordinator of nearly 27 years, took the gamble at a scale he’d never tried.
In March 2025, the crew drove nine owl pairs and one single male — nineteen birds — the 50 miles from the doomed housing site to the solar land, and lowered them into 40 artificial burrows — buried plastic chambers and tunnel pipe with concrete-block-armored mouths, built to Wild at Heart’s tested spec, down to the four-inch entrance the owls prefer.
Relocating a burrowing owl is mostly a fight against its homing instinct, so the protocol ran like a witness-protection program. Each pair spent its first weeks under netting so it couldn’t simply fly home. Lights were rigged to pull in night insects. Defrosted mice arrived daily while the colony found its bearings — with Longroad funding monitoring and feeding through the whole breeding season, months beyond the 30 days the nonprofit can usually afford.
Then the owls voted. One month in, every female had laid eggs. “This is working,” Clark said. By late June, 36 chicks had hatched; within three months, 29 owlets had fledged — from nine founding pairs, the most productive relocation the group had ever run at such a scale. Clark weaned the colony off the mouse deliveries, and droppings full of insect parts confirmed the birds were hunting for themselves. They stayed through the winter without another free meal.
The result stops being surprising once you see the site the way the owl does.
A burrowing owl’s entire security system is sightlines: flat, open, sparsely vegetated ground where nothing can stalk it unseen. A utility-scale solar farm is exactly that — graded, low-cut, fenced against most large predators — with bonus features no prairie offers: the shaded ground beneath the panels, where Clark says the owls hunt insects and “loaf” through the desert afternoons, using the arrays as a continent of awnings. The fence line doubles as a perch; the panels’ drip lines concentrate the greenery that concentrates the bugs.
The experiment has since grown instrumentation and ambition. Motion-activated cameras now watch the colony’s 30 active burrow mouths around the clock — roughly 40 owls as of this summer, the founders plus their Arizona-born chicks — while ten miles away Clark runs the next test: the Mesquite Wildlife Oasis, where gravity-fed irrigation grows patches of flowering desert plants to farm the moths and grasshoppers the owls eat, a prototype for making solar land not just tolerable but nourishing.
One good year is one good year, and everyone involved says so; survival, site fidelity and second-generation breeding are the numbers that will decide whether this is a model or a lucky season. The deeper tension is also real: solar development is simultaneously a driver of the owls’ eviction and, here, their landlord — the same footprint problem wearing a friendlier face.
But the stakes are bigger than one colony, because the collision is permanent. Western burrowing owl numbers have been sliding for decades as diggable, open ground disappears, while the Southwest’s flattest, openest, most fenced-off new landscapes are all solar farms — millions of acres of them coming. If a panel field with cheap plastic burrows can turn displaced owls into 29 new ones in a single summer, then the industry eating the desert floor is also, potentially, the largest owl-housing authority in the West. The birds, for their part, have registered no objection. They took the free mice, kept the eggs coming, and settled into the one feature of the place that matters to an owl: ground where nothing sneaks up on you — with electricity, incidentally, being made overhead.
Follow Science Blog on Google
Add us as a preferred source to see more Science Blog reporting in Google.
Standards
Articles on Science Blog are edited and fact-checked before publication. We use AI tools in the newsroom. See our editorial standards and masthead.
Written by
Articles published under the Science Blog byline are produced and reviewed by our editorial team before publication. See our editorial policy for our review process and standards.
Clear science for curious people
A Brown Brothers Media publication. All rights reserved © 2026.
Clear science for curious people — free PDF, then our science email.
Also available via RSS.

source