{"id":914,"date":"2017-01-10T19:59:17","date_gmt":"2017-01-10T19:59:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/carmarthenshiremeadows.com\/?p=914"},"modified":"2017-01-10T19:59:17","modified_gmt":"2017-01-10T19:59:17","slug":"barn-owls","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/185.53.59.222\/~carmsmeadows\/2017\/01\/10\/barn-owls\/","title":{"rendered":"Barn Owls"},"content":{"rendered":"

Many thanks to Andrew Martin for the following brilliant inspiring post and photos, about how to encourage barn owls to nest on our land …<\/p>\n

Thanks for the post about birds, Julian, and yes it looks like a buzzard to us.\u00a0 Lovely to see the woodcock as well.\u00a0 We’ve seen one fly up from the bank on the edge of our meadow once.<\/p>\n

A big deal for bird conservation, that meadow group people might like to consider, is putting up a nest box for barn owls.\u00a0 There is excellent advice on the website of The Barn Owl Trust. Click here<\/a><\/strong><\/em> for more.<\/p>\n

This includes designs for them (both for inside buildings and outside on trees)\u00a0 and where to site them.\u00a0 The point is, grassland not grazed down to lawn height will probably support a population of field voles.\u00a0 We are also lucky in Carmarthenshire in that there is not much arable farming, so there has not been the same move towards pulling up hedgerows to create huge fields as in other parts of the UK.\u00a0 Sheep especially like hedgerows for shelter, and hedgerows are also areas of maximum activity for small mammals such as woodmice, bank voles and shrews.\u00a0 So smallish fields that are not intensively grazed are really exactly what barn owls need for good hunting.\"barn-owl-box\"<\/a><\/p>\n

In winter 2014\/15 we (with the aid of a tree surgeon we know) put a home-made barn owl box up in an oak tree on the edge of our meadow.\u00a0 The usual advice is that it will probably be there for a couple of years before it is used.\u00a0 To our surprise, a barn owl started roosting in it not long after we’d put it up, and to our even greater surprise a pair had a late brood in it in 2015.<\/p>\n

\"OLYMPUS<\/a>
OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

This summer they didn’t nest in the oak tree box, but they did in another box we put up inside an outbuilding, so they seem to readily use artificial nest sites if provided.\u00a0 It may be that in this county, it’s availability of nest sites that is limiting their breeding, rather than suitable hunting habitat.\u00a0 Another advantage of having them nesting in a box by your meadow is that you can collect and analyse their pellets to see what they have been eating.\u00a0 The Mammal Society publishes a useful key to identifying small mammal remains in owl pellets. Click here<\/a><\/strong><\/em> for more.<\/p>\n

Hours of fun on the long winter evenings!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Many thanks to Andrew Martin for the following brilliant inspiring post and photos, about how to encourage barn owls to nest on our land<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":927,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"gallery","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,17],"tags":[32,52,77],"class_list":["post-914","post","type-post","status-publish","format-gallery","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-nature","category-wildflower-meadows","tag-barn-owl-nest-boxes","tag-carmarthenshire-meadows","tag-dietary-intake-of-barn-owls-from-examining-their-pellets","post_format-post-format-gallery"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/185.53.59.222\/~carmsmeadows\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/914","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/185.53.59.222\/~carmsmeadows\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/185.53.59.222\/~carmsmeadows\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/185.53.59.222\/~carmsmeadows\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/185.53.59.222\/~carmsmeadows\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=914"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/185.53.59.222\/~carmsmeadows\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/914\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/185.53.59.222\/~carmsmeadows\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/927"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/185.53.59.222\/~carmsmeadows\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=914"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/185.53.59.222\/~carmsmeadows\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=914"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/185.53.59.222\/~carmsmeadows\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=914"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}