| Field
Updates
March 3, 2008 The research portion of the owl project is just resuming after a
year’s hiatus. I took some time away from the field to finish
my post-graduate degree and start a family. We recently received a
grant from the World Owl Trust to collect long-term breeding data
for Mackinder’s eagle owls. This grant is particularly exciting
for us as ours will be the first Kenyan study to collect this data
for this species. We are eager to assess long-term viability of this
population of owls that lives so close to human activities. Apart
from our work with Mackinder’s eagle owls, we are pursuing funding
to start a project to study the African grass owl. Paul Muriithi recently
discovered a population of these owls near our current study area.
There have been no prior studies of the African grass owl in Kenya
and very few studies have been done elsewhere in Africa. This species
requires dense grass cover for nesting and grasslands are one of the
most imperilled habitats in Kenya, thus the urgency of our study.
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