Google Serves

The year 2019 started strong with my brother attending to help for the first time with weeding. He'd also worked at Google but now both of us pursed our passions using the stock we'd sold. He loves competing and teaching Lindy Hop. I love saving the burrowing owls.

Phil let me use the sweep net at the next data collection: a milestone!

Probably because of the New York Times article released a year prior, Google donated money to the City of Mountain View to build another fence around the burrowing owl habitat in Shoreline Park.

It made me nervous, since it was big, black, ugly, and would plow right through Burrowing Owl Billows, forcing us to transplant plants in its way and preventing us from doing any plantings in the spring like we usually would. They didn't even build it around the entire habitat (as you can see in the photo on the bottom right with how it comes short of the sign).

Phil's team transplanted as many plants as they could, this included most of the California blackberries.

Despite my misgivings about the fence, Burrowing Owl Billows survived, and, in the spring, the penstemon planted at the first planting bloomed more beautifully than it'd ever done before.

It's not like I have a say in the fence anyway. My project is additive so that it can exist outside the restrictions of large corporations and the government, but that also means it has no power to change what they choose to do.

When we went to weed again, we discovered that the California native seeds we'd scattered at the planting in the fall of last year had grown into blooming flowers!

My dad helped me recruit volunteers from Google Serve to extend Burrowing Owl Billows with cardboard and woodchips.

There were a total of 50 volunteers between 2 2-hour sessions. We extended Burrowing Owl Billows from ~4000 square feet to ~6840 square feet!

Instead of collecting cardboard from Google's dumpsters, I used the money I'd fundraised to purchase rolls of cardboard because volunteers' effort is better spent with what we can't buy: shoveling, raking, watering, and transporting the wood chips to the billows. Well, I guess we could buy that, but then the community wouldn't develop a relationship with the owls and understand what it takes to save them.

I have never taken a more satisfying selfie.

Even more of the seeds we'd scattered were in bloom, along with many plants from the previous plantings, making the weeding experience not just cathartic, but beautiful.

Thanks, Google, for all your help with saving the burrowing owls!