Barbed Wire Birdhouses May Save Cactus Wren

"David Olson and his colleagues will hike into Orange County's coastal sage reserves lugging 100-pound, 9-foot-tall jumbled frameworks of PVC pipe bristling with barbed wire and metal needles. Olson, director of science at the Irvine Ranch Conservancy, will look for domed nests of woven grass tucked into dense cactus patches. When he finds one, he'll place his contraption nearby. Setting an iPod to coastal cactus wren, the scientists will broadcast a series of "char, char, char" notes. If they are lucky, a brown-and-white bird will flit out of the brush and perhaps make the tangle of piping and barbed wire its home.

Olson's fake cholla are part of a last-ditch effort to save the coastal cactus
wren. It's a manmade solution to a manmade problem -- frequent wildland fires."

Read the whole thing at High Country News

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