Cal Poly Humboldt students study how barn owls are used in Lodi vineyards
LODI – In a tiny wooden box perched high off the ground at the Lodi Wine and Visitor Center is a family of six barn owls.
For owl parents Poppy and Yarrow, that's a lot of mouths to feed.
In an effort to study their daily life, professors and students at Cal Poly Humboldt started a new project.
"It's part of this broader research project we got going on with Cal State Humboldt to study barn owls and how they're used in our Lodi vineyards," Winemaker and Lodi Winegrape Commission Executive Director Stuart Spencer said.
Over the past 35 years, wine growers across Lodi have used barn owls to control rodents.
So much so, many farms have installed these owl boxes within the vines.
"A family like this can eat up to 3,500 gophers in one season," Spencer explained. "They're an incredible tool for dealing with rodent pests in your vineyards, and they hunt all night long. It's a great, sustainable way to manage rodents in the vineyard."
Using these boxes, researchers had an idea to put GPS tracking devices on the owls to study their behavior.
"This owl is going probably half a mile away from us here and feeding in some open fields to the west of us, and then circling back around, and you can see this incredible pattern of where they're hunting," Spencer shared.
There are over 170 owl boxes throughout Lodi.
On top of studying the owls' patterns, this research is key to understanding how the relationship between farming and wildlife is essential.
"We live in our vineyards, you know, they're going to be the healthiest when they're in balance with the overall ecosystem," Spencer said. "The more we can use natural predators like ours to control things in the vineyard, the better off the whole ecosystem would be, the better the quality of the grapes will be, the better the wine will be, and the better off we all are as a community."
You can watch the four baby owls in Lodi grow on a YouTube livestream provided by these researchers at Cal Poly Humboldt.
CBS Sacramento plans on speaking with these researchers and their process of tracking the owls in the coming weeks.
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