Barn owl boxes installed

By Daniel Barringer, Preserve Manager.

Two barn owl boxes built by volunteer Art Zdancewic have been installed at Crow’s Nest and Green Hills. At Crow’s Nest we put it on the side of the hay barn facing out over the pasture and the meadows and wetlands beyond.

A barn isn’t the only place suitable for a barn owl box, according to Dan Mummert from the Pennsylvania Game Commission, who met with Art and me at Green Hills last year to look at ideal locations there.

Barn owl boxes can also be mounted on posts in open meadows. They don’t have to be as high as kestrel boxes, and since owls are nocturnal hunters and hawks daytime ones, they even can be located within the same habitat.

When an afternoon suddenly opened up last week Aubrey and I went over to Green Hills to put up the post we had planned to do for months. We have plenty of opportunities to dig holes—for sign posts, fences, nesting boxes or trees—at Natural Lands, so it didn’t take long. The best part is that Green Hills has so many fewer rocks to dig out than Crow’s Nest!