That summer, on June 30th, I volunteered alongside other Googlers as part of Google Serve 2016 to cut brush at a burrowing owl habitat in Shoreline Park.

The first step to understanding a problem is first understanding what is already being done about it.

While cutting brush was a fun experience and, I'm sure, impactful to help the owls, I realized there was no sense of progression or ownership that would give me the incentive to keep returning and investing in the land by understanding how effective what I'm doing is. None of the current opportunities available to help the owls offered this.

Phil Higgins, Mountain View City's biologist, identified a plot of land near a burrowing owl nesting site within Shoreline Park that we could plant California natives at and maintain over years.

That's when Burrowing Owls Billows was created.

While there were burrowing owls in Shoreline Park when my project began, there were 0 owls at Burrowing Owl Billows.

In Shoreline Park, there were 4 burrowing owls in 2016. Last counted, Fall of 2020, there were 21❗