Big boxes on the Lizard

Stuck in the middle of the usual winter storms, our winter mist-netting has been rather limited, so we've been occupying ourselves with our big nestbox projects. Thanks to funding from Paradise Park in Hayle, we've been able to start replacing old and siting new Barn Owl nestboxes around the county. This winter we've only put up eight new boxes, but with requests for boxes still coming this is just the start! This does take the number of sites we monitor up to 84 though, so it's going to be a busy summer...

Most of the boxes are being sited in large open barns in areas where we know Barn Owls frequent, so we're hopeful that take-up will be quite high. Below are just a couple of examples of the boxes we've put up, and you can see that this isn't always a simple procedure!

As an aside from the Barn Owls, we've also just started a project to put up Kestrel nestboxes, as many of the sites we visit have the potential to hold both species. This is a bit of a new thing for us, with the first Kestrel box going up at a farm on the Lizard yesterday. Unlike Barn Owls, Kestrels really do like a room with a view, so the box below is in the perfect location!

We know it looks wonky, but it's the photo - honest!

2016 Barn Owl numbers

With all the monitoring of first-brood Barn Owls now finished, we can get a good picture of how the season went. The table shows the standard figures we work out every year and it's clear that 2016 was a pretty dismal affair.

	2011	2012	2013	2014	2015	2016
Sites visited	32	34	32	44	41	47
Unoccupied	2 (6%)	7 (21%)	12 (38%)	11 (27%)	11 (27%)	12 (26%)
Occupied but no breeding	13 (41%)	2 (6%)	7 (22%)	7 (18%)	7 (12%)	8 (17%)
Average clutch size (where observed)	4.8	4.1	3.6	4.6	4.6	4.6
Average brood size (where observed)	3.1	3.1	2.4	3.5	3.5	2.8
Number of chicks ringed	33	46	19	63	70	47

Whilst the number of sites we monitor has increased (and will increase more with some very generous funding from Paradise Park), and occupancy remained average, productivity was very low. The average clutch size was similar to previous years but brood sizes were lower than the last couple of years. We also saw four complete failures which is still very unusual in the county.

We think this is due to the cold, wet spring weather, which meant that many birds were either not in good enough condition to breed, or did breed but didn't find the food to raise larger broods. We also found that many birds were developing very slowly, so several visits to ring chicks found that they were just too small, so extra visits were needed. This also meant that there were quite a few 'abandoned' chicks brought in to the Screech Owl Sanctuary; not all survived to fuully-grown, but those that did were also ringed by the group before release.

This poor season seems to have been mirrored across the west of the UK and we can only hope that this will improve in future years.