The Hollywood Reporter has some interesting background information on the movie Hoot: "TV director Shriner’s first feature is a ‘Hoot’"
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr/columns/grove_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1002313535
Talking recently to Shriner about how the movie reached the screen, he explained, "It all began about 2 1/2 years ago in Key West. I met with Carl Hiaasen and Jimmy Buffett over a fish sandwich. Jimmy had bought the rights to ‘Hoot’ the book from his fishing buddy Carl. Carl had made a film once before called ‘Skinny Dip’ that left a little bit of a bad taste in his mouth in terms of how it eventually came to the screen. He was concerned that the movie stayed somewhat true to the book. So our promise over that fish sandwich was, ‘Yes, let’s get a script that we all like and then we’ll go out and shop it.’ Jimmy said, ‘How do you do that?’ And I said, ‘Well, the best way would be to have a script that we like and I would be willing to write that script under the condition that I direct the movie.’
Looking back at production, Shriner recalled, "The movie’s about protected burrowing owls that are basically a thing in Florida that when you find them you have to stop construction. And when we wanted to start shooting the movie (we were told), ‘You can’t get the owls. They’re protected … Through Carl’s connections and Jimmy’s connections we were able to find some owls that were in rehab. They were actually injured owls. One had a broken wing. A couple of them had some problems. One had been hit by a car. So only at sort of the eleventh hour were we able to come up with these real owls. "We were like in mid-June (and saying) ‘What are we going to do?’ We were in a bind and through the National Wildlife Federation and some of Jimmy’s contacts we were able to get a waiver to train these owls and use these rehab owls because the real ones are protected and obviously you can’t mess with them.