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OPM (Owl Pest Management)

"I don't want her to hear this part," says Dennis Christiansen, a seventh-grade science teacher at Fresno's Tenaya Middle School, putting his hands over Rosie's ears, and then whispering, "They're not that wise. But they're the best at what they do."

Rosie is a barn owl, too badly injured to return to the wild. And what barn owls do so superlatively well is kill pocket gophers and other rodent pests. A growing owlet can eat its own weight in rodents nightly. For the past 13 years, Christiansen and other Fresno and Clovis teachers have partnered with licensed wildlife rehabilitator Cathy Garner to enlist these ghost-faced predators in helping farmers and growers cut back on their rodenticide use.

Garner founded the Fresno Wildlife Rehabilitation Center 31 years ago. She provides schools -four this year-with orphaned barn owls that students help raise for release. "Gayle Peck at Red Bank Elementary School in Clovis wrote an entire curriculum around the owls," Garner remembers. "It covered science, language, music, everything, and won a national award."

About 50 orphans each year come in from all over the San Joaquin valley. With fewer barns and hollow trees, many barn owls now nest in palm trees, and they're often blown out. "Once the Highway Patrol brought some in," says Garner. "Someone hit a palm tree and knocked a whole nest of barn owls out." Others are picked up by wildlife agencies or private citizens.

"We get them before they can fly," Christiansen explains. "The owls we have now, in mid-April, look like little fat old men-too fat to get up and walk around." Eating flash-frozen mice and surplus chicks donated by poultry growers, they bulk up, then drop to their one-pound flying weight.

"For the kids, it's love at first sight," he adds. "The teachers become celebrities: 'You're the guys with the owls.'" Some students initially balk at preparing the owlets' meals, but "we'll have a few kids volunteer, and within half an hour the girls are battling the boys to do it." The students also tease apart owl pellets to learn about the birds' diet, and sharpen their math skills by charting the owls' growth. Physical contact with the birds is kept to a minimum, except when weighing and measuring them. "We keep them in groups so they'll stay wild and not bond with their caretakers," Christiansen says.

Students are transformed by caring for the owls. Garner remembers Angel De La Cruz, who was involved in gang activity and already expelled from one school: "He had a crusty exterior but a soft center, and a real affinity for birds of prey." When told he could continue working with the birds only if he broke with the gang, his family refinanced their home to have the gang tattoos surgically removed from his knuckles. De La Cruz became the first male in his family to graduate from high school, and went on to a good job and a family of his own. Another student returned from living on the streets of San Jose to work with Garner's program, and stayed clean and sober for the owls. "We've also had straight-A students, one of whom is now in U.C. Davis' veterinary program," Garner says.

After their stint in school, the owls are moved to a mew-a flight cage. "Then we release them in outlying areas where gopher damage to vines and orchards is heavy," Garner explains. "One pistachio grower was spending $45,000 a year on gopher control and not even making a dent. He wanted to start with 200 nest boxes for barn owls. Several farmers and ranchers in the San Joaquin Valley have been able to reduce rodenticide costs by tremendous amounts by using owls." The owls won't always stay where they're released-banded Fresno graduates have been found as far away as British Columbia-but others settle just a few miles from their release site.

"The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service told us ours was the first program they'd encountered where everybody wins," says Garner. "The students have a tremendous learning experience-and parents tell us it's amazing how kids suddenly begin to do their homework. Classroom discipline improves. The owls get incredible care. The farmers and ranchers benefit, and find common ground with environmentalists." And fewer pesticides enter the San Joaquin watershed, and ultimately the Estuary, as farmers trade chemical warfare for the services of nature's stealth bombers.

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