Cape Coral Burrowing Owls Don't Hoot

By Beverly Ahlering Saltonstall

Cape Coral, Florida is home to the largest population of the Florida subspecies of the Burrowing Owl in the world. People come from all over the world to view and photograph these beautiful little owls. This book is the only non-fiction book written specifically about the Cape Coral Burrowing Owls. It gives the history of Cape Coral and how the owls got there, it talks about the owl's diet, habitat, reproduction, senses, feathers, flight, and more. It tells the reader how to find the owls and the laws and ordinances in place to protect the owls. There are personal stories by the author, where to stay when visiting Cape Coral, and even tips on how to drive in Cape Coral with its extensive 400-mile canal system.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Beverly Ahlering Saltonstall
• Release date: Jun 20, 2021
• ISBN: 9781005756444

Beverly Ahlering Saltonstall

After moving to Cape Coral over 20 years ago, Beverly encountered her first Burrowing Owl and was hooked. She is a founding member of Cape Coral Friends of Wildlife and serves as Chair of the Community Outreach Committee. Beverly is a frequent speaker about the Burrowing Owls at local schools, colleges, Audubon organizations, and service organizations such as Kiwanis, Lions, and Rotary International. She has appeared on the Wink TV morning show, the FGCU radio program, and has been on a NatGeoWild TV program. Beverly is also a tour guide for both the Annual Burrowing Owl Festival and the city-run Nature of Cape Coral bus tour.Beverly is a retired Registered Nurse and lives in Cape Coral with her husband Lloyd, two, Bichon dogs and spends a lot of time looking out her front window at the Burrowing Owls living on her front lawn.

Book preview

Preface

The two men waited for a moonless night, parked their car down the street, and inched slowly towards the empty lot ahead, scanning the area to be sure no one was watching them. Quietly they walked over to a small mound of dirt and began shoveling, trying to quickly fill in the small hole they found. Suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, a tiny bird came screeching over their heads, making every attempt to chase the two men away.

Back in the earlier days of Cape Coral, some people thought you couldn’t build on a property that had a Burrowing Owl living on it. They would go out in the middle of the night to cover up the burrows the owls had dug, so they could tell the City there were no owls on the property when they wanted to build a home or business.

Thanks to the dedication of Sue Scott, Carol Keifer, and Jackie O’Connell, who got the ball rolling to protect the Burrowing Owls of Cape Coral, this practice occurs with somewhat less frequency. This book is dedicated to them and Cape Coral Friends of Wildlife and all its members who work so tirelessly to help the Burrowing Owls and all wildlife here in Cape Coral.

It is especially dedicated to Pascha Donaldson, who has done so much to get legislation and programs passed to help the owls and other wildlife in the City. And thank you to Carl Veaux, Cheryl Anderson, Bernadette McNee, and so many others who have made this a better place for the Burrowing Owls and all the wildlife of Cape Coral, which in turn has made this a better place for the residents and visitors of Cape Coral.

Last, but not least, I would like to thank Barbara Brown and Fran Yorkston for helping me out with this book.

To set the record straight, I am not a biologist or a scientist, nor am I a writer. I am a retired Registered Nurse who moved to Florida over 20 years ago. From the first time I saw a Burrowing Owl’s beautiful eyes, I was hooked, and I have been working with these birds ever since. They have dragged me out of my comfort zone into doing things I would never have imagined.

If you had asked me ten years ago if I would be a guest speaker at an Audubon Society meeting or a tour bus guide, I would have flat out told you that you were out of your mind. If you had asked me to if it was OK that NatGeoWild would film me for one of their TV shows, I would have asked you what you were smoking.

Today, I love talking to anyone who will listen to me about the owls. I speak to kindergarten classes to college students and take ornithologists, brain surgeons, and people from all over the world to see these owls. I love sharing my love for these owls with people and love seeing the enjoyment they get in seeing them for the first time.

This book is pretty much everything I know about Burrowing Owls that I can put in a book without getting in trouble for plagiarism. Neurology is too deep a subject to include, but I have included personal stories you may enjoy. I wanted to see that the Cute and Quirky Burrowing Owls of Cape Coral, Florida are remembered in a book, so I wrote it!

Chapter 1

The Early Days

To understand how Cape Coral became the Burrowing Owl epicenter, one needs to know a bit about Florida’s history and the surrounding area. It is estimated that the earth is about four and a half billion years old, and Florida nearly 530 million years old. Florida was originally part of the Gondwana supercontinent, and as plate tectonics moved Gondwana westward, it collided with another continent, Laurasia, and formed the supercontinent of Pangea. The colliding of these continents sandwiched Florida between the Americas and Africa, so Florida shares the same soil structure as Senegal, Africa, unlike the rock formations found in North America.

Between 190 and 66 million years ago, the Florida plateau was underwater several times, explaining why the soil is mainly calcium carbonate or better known as limestone. Still today, two-thirds of the plateau that makes up Florida lies underwater. A huge aquifer lies underground, and the limestone’s gradual dissolving has been in part helped created wide-spread sinkholes across the State.

Fast forward to about 12-14,000 years ago, and you have the first archeological evidence of humans in Florida. With so much water in Florida, the early Native American tribes in Southwest Florida relied on hunting, fishing, and gathering as their mainstay diet. With the Europeans’ arrival in the 1500s, disease, wars, and slavery eradicated many tribes, and today only two Federally recognized tribes remain, the Miccosukee and Seminole Indians, both living on reservations.

Fast forward again to the 1900s in Southwest Florida. The native Calusa has been gone since the 1700s, and few people lived in the area that was to become Cape Coral. The area’s inhabitants were primarily fishermen, settlers, farmers, and some citrus growers. With the lack of air-conditioning, high humidity, heat, and mosquitos in Southwest Florida, and most of Florida, it was not a great place to live.

With the arrival of Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and Harvey Firestone to Fort Myers in the late 1800s, things began to boom. According to Florida Backroads Travel, "Southwest Florida heritage and history have been impacted simply by the fact that these three famous men chose to winter here. It brought huge national publicity to the region.

The history of Southwest Florida covers many different backgrounds. You will find old Florida country towns with a cattle heritage, as well as some affluent towns. In the 1920s, during Prohibition, Naples was reported to have 26 millionaires and 22 rum runners. Fast boats made runs from Cuba and the Bahamas to Naples for pleasure trips and nefarious reasons. From these humble beginnings, Southwest Florida has grown to a population of 1.3 million people.

In the 1950s, when I was a kid, I remember a joke going around where people would say in a low tone of voice, Hey buddy, you want to buy land in Florida? People would laugh, saying they were selling swampland! The swampland they were selling eventually became the thriving community of Cape Coral. The Rosen brothers, businessmen from Baltimore, flew down to southwest Florida to buy land to build the largest master-planned community in the United States. What they found was a peninsula off the peninsula of Florida itself. Lying to the west of Fort Myers, on the western side of the Caloosahatchee River, was a spit of land surrounded on three sides by water and nicely protected from the Gulf of Mexico by the barrier islands of Estero, Sanibel, and Captiva. To the east and south was the Caloosahatchee River, a recreational and commercial waterway. The Caloosahatchee River is a part of the Intracoastal Waterway (ICW). This water route runs from New Jersey down the east coast of the United States through Florida, connecting with the Caloosahatchee River and continuing to Brownsville, Texas. Boaters using this waterway can travel from New Jersey to Texas without going out in open water. Adding to this beautiful location was the fact that the fishing here was world-renowned, as people from all over came to Boca Grande, the Tarpon Fishing Capital of the World.

The Rosen Brothers thought this would be a wonderful place to build their Water Wonderland and purchased the 100+ square mile parcel of land for about $678,000, the price of a lovely home in Cape Coral today.

If you are interested in Cape Coral History, two reads must be on your list. First is Cape Coral’s history, Lies that Came True, by Eileen Bernard, and a story from Politico Magazine, with an incredibly long title, The Boomtown That Shouldn’t Exist, Cape Coral, Florida, was built on total lies. One big storm could wipe it off the map. Oh, and it’s also the fastest-growing City in the United States. The book, Lies that Came True can be found at the local libraries, and The Boomtown that Shouldn’t Exist article can be found by doing a Google search on the Internet.

This is my five-plus million-year history of the area in a nutshell.

Cape Coral’s Recent History

Cape Coral’s downtown area was swampy and