Barn Owl Tyto alba
Case 5
Older nestling Barn Owls fledged from nest box with supplemental feeding
A
brood of five young Barn Owls were removed from an attic that was being
remodeled in Mt. Hope, a tiny rural community in Lawrence County, Alabama. A
neighbor named Steve Fisher rescued the birds, which had been dumped in the
yard, and members of the Wildlife Center’s Raptor Network relayed them to
Birmingham. The birds were approximately 4 to 5 weeks old. Since they appeared
to be healthy, I contacted Steve Fisher and arranged to bring the nestlings back
up and install a nest box in the yard of the house where they had been found.
When I arrived, however, the neighbor was not available, and we could not to
install the nest box on his property without permission. Steve Fisher’s house
was about a half block away, so we installed the box on the roof of a shed in
his yard. This is a good deal farther than I like to go when relocating a Barn
Owl family, but it was the only option available to us. We played the
food-begging calls of the juveniles on the game caller, first in the yard of the
house where the owls had been nesting, and then in Steve Fisher’s yard near the
nest box. There was no response at either location. Later, Steve mentioned that
he had seen a dead Barn Owl on the street a few days earlier. We concluded that
this must have been one of the parents of our nestlings.
It
was a lovely summer evening, and the area was perfect Barn Owl habitat—broad
green pastures stretched in all directions, dotted here and there with huge old
shade trees.
I hated to take
the birds away from this ideal spot, since they would be fledging in less than
two weeks. All they needed was minimal assistance to make it through the four
to six weeks before they would become independent. With Steve’s assistance, I
decided to try hacking the birds from the nest box located on the roof of Steve
Fisher’s shed. Steve agreed to feed the owls every day until they fledged, and
to go on putting food in the nest box until the birds stopped coming back. I
put a generous helping of mice in the nest box with the baby owls, and left an
immediate food supply with Steve. By great good fortune, the Wildlife Center’s
rodent supplier, Steve Waldrop, lives in the next county, and he agreed to
deliver frozen rats to Steve Fisher every week until the birds were
independent. Steve Fisher kept me posted on the progress of the birds by
email. All of the owls fledged, and Steve was able to watch them hunting in the
fields around his house. The young birds continued to visit the nest box for
food for several weeks after fledging.
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