| Barns Owls Used as Pesticides in Israeli
The seven barn owl chicks cuddled together in a wooden nesting box in Israel's Beit Shean valley were hissing with discontent, not knowing that they signal the success of a decade-long project to use the birds of prey as biological pesticides. It took ten years before an Israeli male and a Jordanian female coupled up and bread, said Ornithologist Dr. Motti Charter from Haifa University and the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel. The joint Israeli-Jordanian project promotes the use of barn owls to replace chemical pesticides, therefore reducing damage to the environment and conserving the natural life in this area. Beit Shean valley holds the largest population of barn owls in the world, some 25,300 pairs per square kilometre, with each eating between 2,000 to 6,000 rodents a year, Charter said. And for us it's a great success story because it shows, because of the Jordanians started thinking differently, started using the barn owls, they succeeded," he added. With the assistance of Israel's Society for the Protection of Nature and Jordan's General Mansour Abu-Rashid, farmers began to place nesting boxes in their fields for the barn owls to bread in. "For them, they do not know that the border is here and they probably met, you know, not like people at a bar or something like that, they met one night and decided to have -- that they fell in love and they started a nest here, " Charter said on Sunday (May 13). Recently, the Palestinian Authority launched a similar project, to encourage farmers to reduce the use of chemicals and instead use barn owls as biological pesticides. |
Friday 18 May 2012
Barns Owls Used as Pesticides in Israeli
