I stake property corners for a living, which means I spend most of my working week standing in Cape Coral front yards. Somewhere along the way I picked up a habit that has nothing to do with surveying. I count the PVC.
If you have not noticed them yet, you will now. Short white pipes, usually four of them set in a rough square, often with a wooden T-shaped perch planted nearby. They turn up in front lawns, on vacant lots, along the edges of ball fields and swale lines. Each one marks a burrowing owl burrow.
The city and its volunteers have marked more than 2,500 of them. Cape Coral is home to roughly 1,000 nesting pairs of Florida burrowing owls — the largest population of that subspecies anywhere in the state. Not the largest in Lee County. The largest in Florida.
That is an unusual thing for a city this size to be able to say, and it usually gets one line in the tourism copy and then gets forgotten. I want to spend a post on the practical end of it instead, because it lands directly on the work we do: putting a 14-foot inflatable and a set of 18-inch steel stakes into somebody's front lawn.
What the white pipe actually means
The owls, their eggs, and the burrows themselves are protected from harassment and disturbance under Florida law. The Florida burrowing owl is a state-designated Threatened species, and the PVC is not decoration. It is a buffer marker.
The City of Cape Coral gives crews working near a marked burrow a simple instruction: stop all work within a 10-foot radius of the burrow outside nesting season, and within 33 feet during nesting season. The city defines that nesting window as February 15 through July 10. Outside those dates the 10-foot number is the one that governs.
That guidance is written for utility crews and contractors, not for somebody throwing an eighth birthday party. We treat it as the party rule anyway, and I would suggest you do too. A blower running for five hours and twenty kids landing on the grass is not less disturbance than a man with a shovel — it is arguably more.
Two numbers worth keeping somewhere. If a burrow on your lot needs protection from construction or lawn equipment, the city's Planning Division takes reports at [email protected]. If you believe owls are being actively harassed, that is the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission wildlife alert line at 1-888-404-3922.
Ten feet is bigger than it looks in a front yard
A 10-foot radius is a 20-foot circle. On paper that sounds modest. Stand in a Cape Coral front yard and pace it out and you will find that a 20-foot circle eats most of the open grass between the swale and the front of the house, which on the majority of lots I shoot is the flattest, most level, most usable ground on the entire property. It is also, not coincidentally, exactly where the owls want to be. They like open, low, mowed turf with a clear sight line in every direction. So does a bounce house.
Run the footprint math before you commit to the front. Our 14-foot Classic Castle is $199 for the day, and 14 feet is the unit, not the setup. Add the stake ring, add the blower and its hose, add the couple of feet on every side where kids actually land coming out the door, and you are asking for something closer to a 20-foot square of clear ground. If the marked burrow is anywhere in that strip, the front yard is done. It is not a matter of squeezing.
Three practical notes from doing this on actual lots:
- Measure from the burrow entrance, not from the perch. The T-perch is placed where the owls will use it, which is near the burrow but not always on top of it. The PVC square is your better reference, and the hole in the middle of it is the actual center.
- The stakes are the hard limit, not the vinyl. An 18-inch steel stake driven inside the buffer is precisely the thing the marker exists to prevent. Anchor points sit outside the footprint of the unit, so the unit itself has to sit further off the burrow than most people assume.
- A hard surface changes the answer. On turf we stake. On a driveway or a slab we ballast — weight at every anchor point the manufacturer specifies, sized to the unit, not estimated. A driveway setup does not put a single piece of steel in the ground, which is sometimes the cleanest way around a front-yard burrow without giving up the front of the house.
The other honest answer is the side yard or the back. We have written before about where an inflatable actually fits on a Cape Coral lot, and on most standard lots there is a second option once someone has walked it.
Why this is a September conversation and not an April one
Nesting season runs February through July. The birds you see standing on a mound in April are raising chicks, and by late spring you get the version everybody photographs: four or five juveniles lined up outside the entrance looking mildly annoyed.
What happens next is the part that matters for anyone planning a yard. Those young owls leave the parental burrow and go looking for their own, and they do that in the fall. Which means right now, in the back half of September, burrows are appearing in yards where there was no burrow in June. If you last checked your lot in the spring, you have not checked your lot.
The fall is also the window when residents can do something about it on purpose. Cape Coral Friends of Wildlife runs a starter burrow program, and volunteers installed starter burrows for more than 60 residents this year. The related Cape Coral Wildlife Trust has preserved 91 lots to date, most of that benefiting burrowing owls and gopher tortoises that lose ground every time a vacant lot gets cleared.
If you want to dig one
The instructions are genuinely simple, which is part of why the program works. Cape Coral Friends of Wildlife publishes them, and volunteers will come do it for you if you call (239) 980-2593.
- Pick an open spot in the lawn with a clear view, ideally between the swale and the front of the house. Away from trees, shrubs, and buildings. Somewhere that does not hold water after a storm.
- Dig an entrance hole 8 to 12 inches deep with a hand trowel or small shovel, angled at about 45 degrees.
- Pile the excavated dirt outside the entrance. The mound is not leftover spoil — it is part of the structure, and the owls use it.
- Set a wooden T-perch nearby. That is what draws their attention from the air.
- No pesticides or herbicides on that yard, and no rat poison anywhere on the property. An owl that eats a poisoned rodent gets the poison.
- Then wait. Sometimes a few weeks. Sometimes a few years.
If you would rather just go look at some first, the city lists Saratoga Lake Park at 170 SE 4th Terrace as a burrowing owl viewing spot. Standard etiquette is to stay at least 20 feet back and not linger.
The part that is a little awkward for us
I should say the obvious thing out loud. A starter burrow in the front lawn takes that strip out of rotation for anything we would set up there, potentially for years. Our business is marginally easier in a city where nobody digs one.
I would still rather you dig it. I was born here. I have watched the vacant lots on my own street go one at a time, and the birds standing on those mounds are not going to relocate to a nature preserve because we finished the plat. The 91 lots the Wildlife Trust has managed to hold are the exception, not the trend.
The workable middle is just being deliberate about which side of the lot you commit. If the south side of the front yard is where the party tent and the inflatable have gone every April for six years, put the starter burrow on the north side. Those two things do not have to compete for the same 400 square feet, and on most Cape lots they do not have to.
If you have a marked burrow in the front yard and you are not sure what you are left with, send me the address before you book anything. Between the plat and ten minutes on the lot I can usually tell you exactly what fits and where, and it costs you nothing. (239) 212-0011.
About the author
Christopher Johnson — Co-owner, SWFL Amusements LLC
Chris is co-owner of SWFL Amusements and a professional surveyor by day. He spends his working hours mapping Southwest Florida properties, which means he knows the canal-front quirks, the older Cape circuit grid, and which intersections back up during snowbird season. He proudly lives in Cape Coral, where he was born and raised.