“It’s not the kind of thing many grad students want to spend their time researching.” But with thousands of vault toilets in remote areas across the country, significant numbers of individual birds are at risk, he said. “No one knows for sure how many birds end up in vault toilets,” said David Watson, the Poo-Poo Project coordinator (the name comes from port-o-potty owl project). Other cavity-nesting birds have been found in vault toilets, including American kestrels, wood ducks and a variety of woodpeckers. Since the incident with the boreal owl at the Boise National Forest, staff at Teton Raptor Center have seen photos of other trapped owl species - small ones such as saw-whet and screech but also large owls like great horned, long-eared and barn. They fly into the pipe and get trapped in the vault below, potentially meeting an unsavory end. The trouble is that to some birds, that vent pipe looks like a tree cavity, and tree cavities are places to nest, roost or cache food. The toilets are kept relatively fresh and odor-free thanks to vent pipes, which allow air to flow from the vault out through the ceiling.

Kind of gussied-up outhouses, vault toilets are permanent structures in areas without running water that store waste in a below-ground tank, or vault. If you’ve ever visited public lands out West, you’ve probably used a vault toilet. Smith had heard reports of owls being stuck in remote toilets before, and after seeing Foust’s photo, he decided to do something about it. That story, and the accompanying photograph, made their way through a network of biologists in the West and eventually ended up in front of Roger Smith, co-founder of Teton Raptor Center, a nonprofit raptor education, research and rehabilitation facility in Wyoming. He finally netted the bird, washed it off as well as he could with water from his truck, released it back into the woods and returned to his office with a story to tell. The bird remained still until the net got close, when it panicked and began flapping and jumping around in the chamber. He took a net out of his truck, held his nose and opened the cleaning door at the back of the toilet. The bird was calm, so Foust was optimistic he could secure a quick - and clean - rescue. Sure enough, once Foust opened the door and peered into the hole beneath the toilet seat, he saw the fiery eyes of a tiny boreal owl peering right back. Joe Foust knew he was in the right place from the note taped to the door: “Do not use toilet - owl inside.” He had seen some crazy things in his time as Cascade Ranger District wildlife biologist for the Boise National Forest, but a call about an owl in a campground toilet was a new one.

Vault toilet