WildCare Articles

The Barn Owl Trust and Waitrose WildCare

In 2008, Waitrose sponsored the supply of a Barn Owl nestbox to every Waitrose Select Farm. These were constructed to the Barn Owl Trust design and their occupancy has since been monitored. Of the 60 nestboxes erected, 10 became occupied within a year, which is fantastic! Following that success, the Barn Owl Trust has teamed up with Waitrose WildCare to establish a new Barn Owl monitoring project that will cover Waitrose dairy farms with occupied nestboxes during the 2010 breeding season.

The Barn Owl Trust was originally established by a small group of volunteers and became a registered charity in 1988. Since then the Trust has been working hard to protect and conserve Barn Owls and their environment. The Trust carries out detailed monitoring of the wild population within their main geographical area of Devon and Cornwall. By recording breeding sites it has been possible to carry out some pretty amazing Barn Owl conservation projects as well as innovative research. They currently have over 16,000 records of wild Barn Owls and record all the sites where practical and/or advisory work to encourage Barn Owls has been carried out - more than 1,600 at the last count.

The Barn Owl is a beautiful farmland bird that has suffered serious decline due to reduced food supply and loss of habitat caused by changes in farming practices. In addition, the loss of old barns to make way for modern agricultural buildings has meant that the number of available nest sites has also decreased. As a result it is estimated that there are only 4,000 breeding pairs left in Britain.

The Barn Owl Trust works with farmers and landowners to encourage Barn Owls by managing their land to provide suitable habitat and supplementing nest sites with nestboxes. The provision of nestboxes for use by Barn Owls is one of the most important conservation measures and one of the easiest to implement. To a large extent, Britain's Barn Owl population has become dependent on the provision and maintenance of nestboxes due to the lack of more natural sites.

The Trust’s priority is to ensure that existing nest sites continue to be occupied and that they produce more young to repopulate other areas. By monitoring Barn Owl nests it is possible to determine site occupation and nesting success.

One of the monitoring methods used is ringing. This involves fitting a tiny metal ring on one ankle of each bird. Normally it is only the young in the nests that are ringed. Ringing is a vitally important tool for population monitoring, research, and most importantly, conservation. Each ring is uniquely numbered and provides a reliable and harmless method of identifying birds as individuals. This is part of the national ringing scheme organised by the British Trust for Ornithology. Ringing and the subsequent recovery of ringed birds provide a wealth of information on survival as well as mortality.

David Ramsden MBE, Head of Conservation at the Barn Owl Trust said ‘We congratulate Waitrose and their customers on the success of the nestboxes and look forward to further increases in Barn Owl numbers.’

For more information on Barn Owls check out barnowltrust.org.uk

14/01/2010