Template:Positioning and mounting your owl box

Positioning your Owl Box

Trees overlooking fields are ideal locations for barn owl boxes and from our experience a copse seems to be perfect. With our night vison camera we regularly see an owl fly to a nearby tree, sit there for an hour, then move to another tree for 30 minutes, before eventually settling on the box, and then another 15 minutes on and around the box before eventually entering the box. A lone tree or post would not enable them to exhibit this behaviour.

Avoid placing a barn owl box near to powerlines.

You owl box needs to be at least 6 metres above ground on a post or open tree. The entrance hole should face north and not obscured by branches or leaves. We've found it useful that the east side of the box is not in shadow as this allows the early morning sun to warm the box. Ideally the box should be level, even though the owls seem to have been perfectly happy in our wonky box!

Mounting your owl box

Fitting your owl box up a tree or post is going to be a two person job. Your completed barn owl box will be far too heavy to carry up a ladder and extremely awkward to manoeuvre, especially 6 metres up a ladder. We found the easiest way to get the box up the tree was to use a block and tackle system (£8.95 Amazon UK - 2023) - this makes lifting the box into the tree a trivial job. Rather then screwing or bolting the box to the tree, the second time we fitted a box we just used two ratchet straps (£8.25 for 2 Amazon UK - 2023) to hold the box to the tree. They will never rot or rust and can easily hold the required weight. You might want to paint them first or find a duller colour; orange is a bit gaudy!

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  A pulley system makes fitting you owl box easier (£8.95 Amazon UK - 2023)
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  Ratchet straps are ideal for permanently securing your owl box to the tree (£8.25 for 2 Amazon UK - 2023)

Owls are territorial, but...

As with most birds of prey, barn owls are territorial so nesting boxes should be placed at least 200 metres apart; with the following exception...

Last year we took part in an evening nature walk with Nigel, a local gamekeeper from Church Farms, Stow Bardolph. He has 50 years experience so knows a few things about barn owls.

After Nigel told us how owls are strongly territorial, we mentioned that we had put a second owl box up in the same copse, only 15 metres away from the original box and thought we would need to remove it. He said that we had inadvertently done our nesting parents a favour by adding a second box. The parents will have somewhere to escape to when the young fledglings start becoming noisy and boisterous! Since learning this, we've often seen the parents visiting the second owl box!

Even so, we eventually had to remove the second box because its position in the trees meant we could not protect it from cats in the same manner we had with the first box. The way the trees were so close together meant that a cat could easily jump from one tree to another to access the box.