Raptor patrol out in force in Sisters

U.S. Forest Service personnel took to the trees earlier this month to install a pair of artificial raptor nests at Sisters Middle School and Sisters High School to help combat the runaway mice, gopher and ground squirrel infestation.

Climbers scaled a massive ponderosa pine to set up a sheet of hogwire and sticks to entice raptors to set up housekeeping high in the branches.

Leland Bliss, director of operations with the Sisters School District, saw this as a way to stay in compliance with current pest control legislation prohibiting the use of deadly poisons and, at the same time, help school kids understand the cycles of nature and its impact.  

"Oregon Senate Bill 637 passed this year, an integrated pest management (IPM) law requiring that all schools must have a comprehensive pest management program in place by June 2012," he explained.

"An IPM is responsible for controlling sage rats, ground squirrels, mice and spiders, anything that falls into that pest category.

The idea is to mitigate those pests using natural means.

We started a year ago to implement this plan, and one of the main things to change is we're not using poison anymore to kill the sage rats and instead, decided to install artificial predator platforms in the trees.

We hope they are inviting enough to attract hawks or owls to use the area as their hunting grounds."

Forest Service climbers didn't charge the school district a dime to come out, using it as a training exercise instead. Each platform was placed about 50 feet up on a pine, which is the tree raptors seem to like the most, and spaced a half-mile apart.

Rima Givot, science teacher at Sisters High School, is integrating the experiment into her biology class.   

"We're using the project with the students attempting to determine a population density to establish a baseline in the vole rodents on school grounds," she said. "The goal is to try and not use poison to get rid of them. Some of the voles we can deal with, but the situation is out of control. I hope the students can gain some data to see if, in the future, changes occur if the raptors do come in and nest. So it's a two-to-five-year project and they just put the nesting platforms in and it may be some time before the birds decided to use them; it's not a given."

A vole is a tiny rodent, similar to a mouse, that has 5-10 litters of babies per year and grows to maturity in a month, generating exploding populations wherever they live. Burrowing in and around vegetation, they are extremely destructive to the landscape, killing young plants and trees.

"This is a great opportunity for the kids to study nature in a real field environment and get out of the classroom for a bit," said Givot. "They'll be looking at tunnels and making maps and observing their droppings. Since voles tend to come out at night, we may try to put out two cameras as an option to record them. We'll start in a couple weeks, sometime in May. They're doing a similar program over at the middle school, but theirs is focusing more on the squirrel problem."