TWENTY two new barn owl boxes have been put up across the borough to encourage more of the birds to nest and breed.
Eight have been added to new locations, while 14 older ones were carefully replaced with new boxes, being careful to make sure they were not in use by local owls.
Barn owls have distinctive heart shaped white faces surrounded by a fawn coloured ‘hood’.
The birds can turn their heads a full 180 degrees to see in both directions, and because of their specially adapted feathers, can glide silently to catch small mammals without alerting them to their presence.
Not typical ‘hooting’ owls, they make, instead, eerie screeching and hissing calls.
Any hooting owls heard by residents in the borough are more likely to be tawny owls.
Wokingham Borough Council has been working alongside Blackwater Valley Countryside Partnership and Wildlife Conservation Partnership for more than 20 years to increase the barn owl population across the area.
All the newly installed and replaced existing boxes will be surveyed in the summer to see how many barn owls have taken up residence and produced eggs and chicks.
Most breeding pairs now rely on man-made nest boxes, so making sure they’re replaced when needed helps to maintain the population.
The project has been funded by contributions that developers have to pay to offset the impact of development across the borough, and uses council-owned and privately-owned land.
For information, visit: bvct.org.uk and urbanperegrines.co.uk
