By Alan Wells, founder of Pitcombe Rock Falconry Owl Box Project

Extraordinarily little is known about the good work carried out by Pitcombe Rock Falconry for the good of our wild owl population.

Tucked away in Pitcombe near Bruton is a small falconry centre run by a dedicated team of volunteers who specialise in the rescue and rehabilitation of birds of prey. Apart from taking in these birds to help them on the road to recovery and potentially release back to the wild, I maintain a vital owl box project to help support the local owl population providing boxes for them to roost and hopefully nest.

Three of our native owls frequent boxes or hollows in trees or rock faces so at Pitcombe Rock Falconry I provide boxes for all three: barn owls, tawny owls and little owls. All the boxes are made in house using proven designs and they have a life span of about 10 years. As well as making the boxes I survey all possible sites for their suitability, then install the box ensuring it is secure and in exactly the right place to attract an owl.

The service does not stop there – I then continually inspect the box looking for signs of habitation. Having an appropriate licence issued by the British Trust of Ornithology (BTO) I can examine the box and take recordings of occupation, feeding information on to the BTO, allowing a bigger national picture of our wild owl populations, however this has been disrupted this year for obvious reasons.

Pitcombe Rock Falconry currently has more than 120 owl boxes covering Somerset, Dorset and Wiltshire with a current target of 200 by the end of 2021. You will be surprised just how varied owl box locations are and we have found that owls will occupy boxes quite close to human population, which gives us the benefit of placing web cams in these boxes enabling us to get realtime monitoring. We have established and located owl boxes in orchards and vineyards, where the owls keep the rodent population down and the growers increase yields from trees and vines surviving rodent attack at the roots not to mention eating the fruit as well.

If you are interested in supporting our owl box project you can contact us through our website: prfalconry.co.uk.

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