How Burrowing Owls Found a Home on an Arizona Solar Farm

This summer, more than a dozen Burrowing Owls hatched in an unusual habitat: in plastic underground tunnels within the footprint of a sprawling, 10,000-acre solar energy complex outside of Phoenix, Arizona. The owlets played with clods of dirt and were curious about the camera that monitored their movement. Their parents—around the size of small bread loaves atop stiletto legs—scared away kit foxes, coyotes, and roadrunners that attempted to steal the nutritious mice that a human overseer delivered each day.

Installed by the company Longroad Energy and the raptor rehabilitation center Wild at Heart, the setup was an experiment to help a struggling population. In March, nine owl pairs (and one bachelor) were caravaned from a housing development about 50 miles away, where the colony's natural tunnels were slated to be wiped out, to 40 artificial burrows on the solar farm. Their question, says Greg Clark, Burrowing Owl habitat coordinator at Wild at Heart, was: Would the relocated birds successfully reproduce in this new locale, surrounded on all sides by solar panels?

While such a place might not seem like an ideal breeding site, these birds of prey are running out of options. Since the 1960s, their numbers have dropped by more than a third in the United States, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service lists them as a species of conservation concern. In the West, the owls typically occupy tunnels dug and abandoned by small mammals like ground squirrels and prairie dogs, but housing and agricultural development, habitat fragmentation, and other threats have made such sites increasingly scarce. 

When a Burrowing Owl colony is about to be paved over or otherwise disturbed, scientists and conservation groups like Wild at Heart have established practices for trapping and moving the birds to safer areas. Typically, Clark will choose relocation sites near irrigated farmland, where the birds can hunt insects and rodents that scurry between crops. But agricultural land in the West is also waning as it’s bought up for more profitable development. 

“We've run up against the limit now,” Clark says. Today, he ends up driving owls to sites 60 to 100 miles from where they originally nested—a task he says is too costly and time-consuming to sustain in the long term. But Burrowing Owls aren't too picky about where they live and don't require a lot of space, so even small portions of land are helpful. “We can do this at spotty locations,” he says. 

That's where the collaboration with Longroad Energy came in. In recent years, utility-scale solar energy has rapidly expanded across Arizona's flat, sunny expanses. On one hand, the industry's growth adds to the challenge of dwindling habitat for sensitive desert wildlife, says Tice Supplee, Audubon Southwest's former bird conservation director and a current consultant. On the other, she says, renewable energy projects that help reduce emissions can slow climate change—a threat that put hundreds of U.S. bird species at risk. Many conservationists are looking to help companies find a balance: a way to build clean energy, while also making space for wildlife.

“That's a pretty big land use change, and it’s important to see where we can maximize energy production, but also maximize benefits to wildlife, their habitats and ecosystems,” said John Ennen, senior scientist for solar at the nonprofit Renewable Energy Wildlife Institute (REWI). 

Arizona law requires a wildlife survey before energy projects are built. At the Sun Streams 2 project site, which Longroad Energy acquired from the company First Solar in 2021, the survey revealed eight Burrowing Owls, says Deron Lawrence, Longroad’s vice president of environment. They called Wild at Heart, which ferried the owls to a farm to keep them safe—and that's when Lawrence also learned Wild at Heart was running low on relocation space. 

After construction was complete, Lawrence wondered if they could welcome the species back. Longroad offered the group around 250 acres nestled between Sun Streams 2 and Sun Streams 3 for its Burrowing Owl relocation work. Clark jumped at the opportunity. He had rehomed owls to solar farms before—but never at this scale. Both hoped to show that a solar site with the right habitat could be a safe place for a colony. They got to work installing burrows and placing a breeding pair in each one (at first surrounded by netting so they wouldn’t fly back to their former home). They also set up lights to attract insects and fed the owls defrosted mice daily as they adjusted to their new digs. 

For this experiment, the company funded monitoring and feeding through the breeding season. (Normally, Wild at Heart only has the capacity to do this for 30 days.) One month in, all the females had laid eggs. “This is working,” Clark said. By late June, 36 chicks hatched. Within three months, 29 owlets had fledged, and Clark slowly weaned the birds off their meal deliveries to encourage the birds to start hunting on their own. He began seeing insect carcasses in their scat—an encouraging sign. At the end of August, Wild at Heart stopped feedings altogether.

In building the Sun Streams solar complex, comprised of several projects, energy developers also had to consider threats to declining desert songbirds called thrashers. Knowing the area overlapped habitat for four thrasher species—Bendire’s, Sage, Crissal, and LaConte’s—conservation groups including Audubon Southwest and the Maricopa Bird Alliance advocated for setting aside thrasher habitat during its planning. In 2021, however, Maricopa County denied the Alliance's request to protect key areas through zoning restrictions, since none of the species were endangered. Nevertheless, the Audubon chapter continued to work on behalf of the birds. The group partnered with field biologists to conduct a thrasher survey in 2021 and presented the results to First Solar, the owners of the site at the time. 

Although the Alliance didn't get all the land set aside that they wanted, says Mark Horlings, the chapter's former board member, the ultimate project included dedicated wildlife corridors with habitat for thrashers, as well as openings in its fences to let small animals pass through and protections for nests during construction. Unofficial data since then have found thrashers still present, although the group hasn’t carried out a more formal survey. 

As solar energy expands in the Southwest, scientists, companies, and government officials are also looking at the bigger picture to help solar developers minimize their impacts—for example, by avoiding key habitat or migratory routes, creating vegetation between clustered solar arrays, and avoiding construction during breeding season. Arizona is drafting solar development guidelines to help protect wildlife like Burrowing Owls, “so that they can remain on the landscape and not be moved super large distances,” says Kenneth Jacobson, raptor management coordinator at Arizona Game and Fish. 

In a 2025 study, Arizona State University researchers mapped out where ideal utility-scale solar sites—flat, sunny areas with easy plug-in to local energy grids—overlap with important habitat for sensitive species throughout California, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas (the study found, for example, prime solar sites have a 13 percent overlap with Burrowing Owl habitat in these states). The nonprofit REWI is also currently developing a database to help the solar industry access information on biodiversity when deciding where to site projects. Meanwhile, a research and advocacy coalition, the Desert Thrasher Working Group, has also created guidelines for solar design to mitigate impact to thrashers. 

At the Longroad relocation site, the Burrowing Owls still appear to be doing well. Most of the young have fledged and dispersed, which is typical, while three pairs of adults remain. Clark has a grander vision going forward: working with solar developers to actively grow vegetation to attract insects and rodents for Burrowing Owls to eat, providing long-term habitat. As of now, Lawrence says he doesn't have plans to do that, but he is talking with Clark about a potential design for a solar panel that would capture water from the humidity in the air to help grow vegetation. 

Clark hopes he can work with more solar companies, which have funding and motivation to help Burrowing Owls, to continue to protect the birds he loves. “If we can convince enough solar farms to buy in on this,” he says, “that’s what we’re gonna do."