Barn Owls for Peace?

                                               Jordanian farmer with a barn owl. (Photo by Hagai Aharon)

 Everywhere we look and listen these days it seems that bad news is the only news. I had something of an antidote last week when I joined another excellent webinar from the UCLA Nazarian Center for Israel Studies. I have benefitted from a number of webinars with excellent presenters on various aspects of Middle East geopolitics including a brilliant explanation of what has unfolded in Iran.

The webinar last week was The Barn Owl Project: An Ecological Solution in Agriculture for Israel, Jordan and the Palestinians. If this sounds excruciatingly nerdy Ruth would agree and she slipped away before it even began. I found it informative and, dare I say it, hopeful. 

I've shared before that Israel is along the Rift Valley faultline stretching from the south of Africa to Europe and it is the flight path for half a billion migratory birds twice each year. It is a magnificent spectacle but fraught with peril for a number of reasons including habitat loss and the detrimental effects of pesticides on raptors. 

The webinar was about a project to introduce barn owls in Israel and other countries as natural rodent control so that farmers are less dependent on chemical pesticides. The Barn Owl Project involves farmers, the military, school groups and more and it has grown with great success. Here is the webinar blurb: 

Professor Yossi Leshem will discuss a groundbreaking initiative—begun in Israel and expanded to its neighbors—in which Barn Owls are used as biological pest-control agents of rodents in agriculture. The owls have significantly reduced the use of pesticides in agricultural fields, which severely harm wildlife and migratory birds. The Jordanians and Palestinians joined this project in 2002, and it has been highly successful from both an environmental perspective and in connecting peoples and religions within this region of conflict. In light of the project’s success, it has been joined by other countries around the world, including Morocco, Switzerland, Ukraine, Georgia, Italy, Germany, Zimbabwe, Cyprus, Greece, and the United States. Leshem will also describe the unique position of Israel as a locus of bird migration, where 500 million birds migrate from Europe and West Asia to Africa and back over Israel twice a year, which allows for many scientific studies on bird migration and protection.

It was wonderful to hear of school groups made up of Jews and Christians and Muslims enthusiastically learning about and supporting the project. Before the terrible events of October 7 2023 farmers would cross borders to learn from one another and the owls themselves find mates in Israel, Jordan, and th Palestinian territories. While barn owls have traditionally been considered bad luck in Arab cultures the project has changed the perspective.

Leshem, now approaching 80, has presented the barn owl initiative to global leaders, including the late U.S. President Jimmy Carter, former German Chancellor Angela Merkel and the late  Pope Francis.

At the beginning of the webinar Dr. Leshem showed an image of a barn owl with an olive branch rather than a dove as a symbol of peace. Why not? The peace dove seems to be ailing and we need all the positive images we can find these days.