Making a home for barn owls
Friday, April 8, 2016
With old wooden barns disappearing from the farm landscape, barn owls are going homeless. A biologist from Elk Grove, Calif., appears to have fixed that.
Mark Browning has developed a low-maintenance plastic nest box. On a 100-acre vineyard in 2012, barn owl pairs occupied 18 of these nests, rearing 66 young and eating an estimated 10,000 voles, rats and pocket gophers in one season alone.
According to PR Newswire, the boxes are used by departments of natural resources in Illinois, Wisconsin, Missouri and South Carolina, also by several Audubon chapters and thousands of vineyards and orchards. It has also been featured on America's Heartland on PBS.
The Barn Owl Box Company (https://www.barnowlbox.com/), based in Pittsburgh, Pa., is now developing boxes for screech owls, kestrels, bluebirds and song birds in general.
This all begs the question: where did barn owls live before there were barns? BF