The Owl of Peace: Nature Conservation Across the Borders of the Middle East

At Sde Eliyahu Collective Farm in Israel, a Jordanian farmer holds a barn owl. Image credit: Hagai Aharon

In 1982, the Tel Aviv University Zoo in Israel gave ornithologist Yossi Leshem an unusual gift: 15 barn owls. The zoo has too many barn owls, and Leshem says he has a place to use them. He loaded the birds into a truck and carried them all the way north to a collective farm in the Hula Valley. Farmers there have been plagued by rat infestations, and in some years the sharp creaks of voles echo throughout the fields.

At the time, Leshem, who worked at the Israel Society for The Conservation of Nature, was concerned that in order to control these pests, farmers would overuse the rodenticide sodium fluoroacetate (or compound 1080). Because of its toxicity to grizzly bears, goshawks and bald eagles, the Drug was banned in the United States 10 years ago; in Israel, the drug can kill migratory birds and native egrets. Leshem thought that barn owls like to prey on rodents in farmland, and that they can get close to humans, so this may be a solution: they can naturally control voles.

That year, however, the farmer with whom Leshem planned to work was recruited for a campaign in Lebanon, where he was killed. Leshem was also involved in that war, but he was not deterred. The following year, he restarted the experiment with the help of another farmer who installed boxes for owls at the Sde Eliyahu collective farm in the Beit Shean Valley in southern Israel. At a time of growing arab and Israeli political tensions, the study brought scientists from both sides together. "Birds have the power to bring people together because they have no borders." Leshem, who still works at Tel Aviv University, said.

In January, researchers from the Middle East, the Mediterranean and North Africa gathered at a Resort in jordan's Dead Sea to survey barn box nests on local farms to discuss their results and plan to "incubate" similar projects in Egypt, Cyprus, Greece, Tunisia and Morocco. Conservation biologist Sara Kross of California State University in Sacramento, USA, says the project has benefited farmers, biodiversity and socio-political networks.

Natural control

The start of the Barn Owl project has not been smooth sailing. The first barn owl were imported from Europe, and they were not adapted to the hot climate of Israel, resulting in some chicks being suffocated. But after about 15 months, the project expanded across the Beit Shean Valley, covering 16,000 hectares of farmland, said Shaul Aviel, a farmer at Sde Eliyahu Collective Farm who started the project with Leshem.

Aviel says the first sign of success was in the date orchard. Voles climb up date trees and nest there, and dates that have been bitten by rats can no longer be sold because they are contaminated with their saliva. But after the start of the Barn Owl project, the loss of the jujube garden disappeared. Aviel said the project "made a 100 percent difference" in wheat, date, olive and pomegranate fields. But these owls don't protect all crops, for example, rodents have found irresistible alfalfa shoots.

Israeli farmers began to use the barn owl widely, but Leshem realized there was still a problem with the project. After being raised in nest boxes in the Beit Shean Valley, they fly into the Jordan Valley, which is jointly owned by the Palestinian Territory and Jordan. When barn owls fly over national borders, they are sometimes poisoned by rodenticide.

In 2002, Leshem began meeting and collaborating with Abu Rashid, a retired Jordanian general and key architect of the 1994 Israel-Jordan peace treaty. By 2008, after some setbacks from more political conflicts in the region, Leshem, Abu Rashid and Imod Atrash, director of the Palestinian Wildlife Society, had received funding from the European Union and the U.S. Center for International Development to launch the cross-border research project.

The researchers laid out barn owl nest boxes in three areas of the Jordan Valley and then trained and educated local farmers and communities on the project. There are now thousands of barn owl nest boxes in Israel, and hundreds more in other parts of the region. Atrash said that although some mischievous children have destroyed some nest boxes in the Palestinian territory.

Abu Rashid said that while there were initial doubts about the bird, as the ghostly white owl was considered an ominous symbol in many parts of the Middle East, most farmers have changed their minds now after seeing the results of the project. In the Middle East, a pair of barn owls hunt between 2,000 and 6,000 small mammals each year. "Farmers can feel their benefits during the annual harvest." He said.

Less pesticides

The advocates of the Barn Owl Project said that overall, the results have a very profound impact. Yoav Motro, an ecologist at the Israeli Ministry of Agriculture in Bedagan, said that previously the use of rodenticide would increase or decrease with the rampancy and depression cycle of voles in nature, but since the project began, the use of SFTA 1080 has decreased by an average of 40 to 60 percent.

Without the use of rodenticide, he said, other natural rodent predators in the field, such as tea falcons, foxes, jackals and badgers, also gradually returned. Yoram Yom-Tov, a zoologist at Tel Aviv University, says the best illustration of the effectiveness of barn owl is that farmers concerned about yield per hectare choose to use them instead of chemical sprays.

The researchers also learned about the hunting habits of the owl through the project. Motti Charter, a wildlife ecologist at the Shamir Institute at the University of Haifa, once placed radio transmitters on barn owl and found that they would fly 4 to 7 kilometers away from the nest box every night to search for prey, which was far more than the 500 meters that Israeli scientists initially thought. Experiments in other countries have produced similar results.

At the Dead Sea conference in January, Ornithologist Alexander Re Roulin of the University of Lausanne in Switzerland reported an unpublished study showing that white may have improved the success rate of barn owl hunting. Rats have a light-afraid nature, so they are prone to "dumb chickens" when they see the ghostly white light of the barn owl. Roulin, who started working on the project after meeting Leshem at a conference 8 years ago, found that the effect was enhanced on moonlit nights. Because the moonlight will make the feathers of the barn owl brighter, thus making the voles stiffer for longer.

Experiential transmission

Israel, Jordan and Palestine are not the only countries that control rat infestation with barn owl, although it is the origin of the only international cooperation project spanning these three countries. Charter said Malaysian farmers have been controlling rodents with barn owl on oil palm plantations since 1988, although the government has also encouraged the use of rodenticide.

In California, Kross said, some farmers have begun protecting orchards, walnut trees, vineyards and other crops with barn owls and tea falcons. The use of birds as a biological control method dates back to the United States in the 19th century, according to an 1899 review that was defined as "bird research from a dollar and cent perspective" as part of the economics of birds, she said. But after the insecticide spread, the idea was shattered. Now, the operation is gradually returning through word of mouth.

Kross and other scientists are watching with interest the results of experiments in the Jordan Valley. "It's a really good project." Javier Vinuela, an ecologist at the Spanish Institute of Hunting Resources, said. In Spain, Vinuela is working with the NGO GREFA, which has set up about 2,000 barn owl and tea falcon nest boxes to control rodent populations.

Inspired by Israel's experience, Argentina and Uruguay have also launched small-scale experiments, Charter said. Elena Markitani, a development officer for bird life at the Cypriot NGO, said in 2015 they placed 27 barn owl nest boxes in an experimental field in Cyprus in cooperation with Israel, and this year's goal is to install about 60.

Overall, Roulin said, scientists involved in the Jordan Valley project avoid talking about politics. But they are very wary of the political resonance of their work. Last year, Roulin, Charter, Abu Rashid, Leshem and others published a paper titled "Nature Knows No Boundaries': The Role of Nature Conservation in Peacebuilding," in which they argued that measures such as the Owl Project help to coordinate conflicting communities and build trust without adding sensitivity to the root causes of conflict. "In a conflicted area, a routine project like this or some other would help because the bottom line is that politicians have failed." "I understand that I can't solve the Middle East problem myself, but I can do my part," Leshem said. (Jinnan compiled)