Name-a-Day Calendar, February 2: Florida Atlantic Owls
Page 88 of 365
Chosen in: 1983-ish
Chosen by: University administration
There’s surprisingly little information on this nickname for how new it is. Here’s what we do know.
The Boca Raton Airport was built in 1936 about 2.5 miles inland from the Atlantic coast of Boca Raton. In the years that followed, as is true for many airports, the surrounding area became a haven for burrowing owls. Most of the burrowing owl’s natural predators are scared of airports, but the noise and flying objects don’t faze the owl, giving it mostly free rein in the general vicinity.
In 1961, Florida Atlantic University was established immediately adjacent to the airport. The raucous teens and 20-somethings didn’t scare the owls away either and in 1971 the Audubon Society designated Florida Atlantic’s campus a burrowing owl sanctuary. When the school began founding athletics programs in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, the school named them the Owls in what was apparently a rather unceremonious fashion. I can find nothing on when exactly this change took place but newspaper archives seem to be pretty consistent in regularly calling Florida Atlantic the Owls beginning in 1983.
Normally, this is where I’d relay some fact about the mascot or something (they actually have two) but instead I’d like to write another fact about owls and airports because they apparently go together like peanut butter and jelly. Did you know that snowy owls are also common around airports because they often mistake the large concrete runways for the arctic tundra they usually call home? Airports hate this because it threatens both the owls themselves and the humans around the airport, but the tundra is usually where snowy owls breed, so they don’t like leaving without a fight. I learned this, and now you have too!
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