1/20/2024 0 Comments Barney once upon a time vimoI am curiously aware of our human need or even compulsion, consciously or not, to anthropomorphize animals among other things. That was until we saw Barney that night on our walk. The other box was listing badly and I had just recently been considering taking it down because it reminded me of the failed and, what I thought, hopeless project. Eventually one of the nesting boxes rotted and fell down during a wind storm. I continued my efforts to improve the health of the land by using compost, planted hundreds of trees and small native shrubs, and pulled invasive plants. It seemed that I had the perfect habitat-open agricultural land and fields, mixed with forest. There were barn owls on the island but for some reason they weren’t interested in my nesting boxes or this land. I did some exploring around the island and tried to find the notorious barn owls behind the elementary school and the ones by the private grass-strip airport. Immediately after reading the article, I ordered two large wooden boxes that high school students were making as a fundraiser and eagerly put them up at a specific height off the ground and facing away from the prevailing wind as directed. Some particular species of birds are a farmer’s best friend-the pollinators, aerial feeders, and rodent controllers.Ībout that time I read and learned about barn owls and how farmers in California were successfully putting up nesting boxes to attract owls to their orchards to control rodent populations without needing to use pesticides. It is not exactly Capistrano but exciting nonetheless to have a constant patrol of swallows who were born here and migrated thousands of miles to return here, working above the land, nabbing potentially crop-damaging insects. Again, their numbers have increased dramatically. I also open up the bay doors to our barn on or around the spring equinox each year to make the space available to barn swallows. I have been feeding year round ever since and the number of hummingbirds has swelled. One of the first things I did when we moved to the property was put up a hummingbird feeder. I must admit to blundering around as a rookie farmer my first year, although I was very aware of the weight of my new stewardship responsibility for the land this initially included a unique and unexpected relationship with birds. Amazingly, as an adult, and in the most serendipitous way, we found and started an organic vegetable farm and a family, on an island in the Salish Sea. It is one of those unexplained childhood fantasies where, in retrospect, you feel like the future is luring you toward a specific ecological niche, a place the earth wants you to tend and care for. I felt chills erupt on my arms and I guessed that the sound was possibly a courtship song by a male barn owl and, quite possibly, we had just disturbed his partner checking out our owl box as a potential nesting site.Īs a kid I always longed to live on a farm on an island. It sounded like Santa Claus and his sleigh being pulled by reindeer-a strange, jingling sound-up by the road. A few nights earlier, on a similar evening stroll, I heard the most intriguing, magical sound I have ever heard. Like pieces of a puzzle quickly coming together, I started to make connections from some recent odd but significant events. I definitely saw the owl and knew it to be a barn owl, but my internal skeptic reared up and doubted whether the owl had been perched on the deck of our owl nesting box before being surprised by our evening wander. It was a cool evening in March 2017 and we were out for a final farm walk of the evening with Gus, the blocky-headed, cream-colored golden retriever. “Look! An owl!” my partner exclaimed with surprise and excitement, pointing at a large, white bird the size of a seagull gliding away from us into the dusk. Hope calls for action action is impossible without hope. Hope just means another world might be possible, not promised, not guaranteed. By: Mark Timken, owl painting by Beatrice Timken
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