TodayConservation eyed for state’s barn owls
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A pale flier swoops on silent wings under cover of darkness and snatches a meadow vole scurrying through a pasture.
It’s a barn owl — a creature seldom seen by Pennsylvanians.
Because they’re quiet and nocturnal, spotting a barn owl has never been easy. But a decrease in statewide numbers of the medium-sized owl has made sightings rarer still.
An initiative begun last spring by the Pennsylvania Game Commission aims to conserve their dwindling numbers.
Officials encouraged
Daniel Mummert, a biologist with the game commission’s south-central office, says he’s received 60 to 70 calls since the effort began.
"It’s led to close to 20 active nest sites that were found," Mummert says. "That’s just for the south-central part of Pennsylvania."
Most barn owls in the state are found in the grassland habitat of southeastern and south-central Pennsylvania, Mummert says.
Rodent eaters
About 70 percent of their diet consists of voles, but they also dine on shrews, mice and rats.
Because a typical family of barn owls will eat about 3,000 rodents during the course of a breeding season, the birds are incredibly valuable to farmers, Mummert says.
As their name implies, they commonly nest in structures such as barns, silos and abandoned buildings. But they also will nest in holes in trees, rock crevices and even burrows in river banks.
"We’re really excited about how many nest sites we’ve found so far," Mummert says. "We weren’t expecting nearly as many as the ones we’ve found."
It’s all because of private landowners calling to let them know they have them, he says.
Victims of sprawl
But that doesn’t mean barn owls are plentiful.
"It appears that barn owl populations have been decreasing over the past several decades," Mummert says. "They really are a rare species in our state."
One of the biggest reasons is a loss of habitat as housing overtakes farmland and as farming practices change.
Ramsay Koury, a Camp Hill resident and regional coordinator for the second Pennsylvania Breeding Bird Atlas project, says the owls were never very common in heavily forested Pennsylvania.
"They’re common out west," he says. "It depends where you are."
Unlike other species of owls, barn owls do not hoot. Instead, they make long, hissing shrieks.
Their hearing is so keen they can locate and capture a vole hidden under a layer of snow or vegetation.
They typically begin their nocturnal hunts about an hour after sunset and end an hour before sunrise.
Nest boxes provided
"If someone believes that they have barn owls nesting on their property, I’m happy to visit with the landowner," Mummert says. "If I think a nest box would help, I provide them with a nest box."
A properly located box keeps predators away from the nest, offers better protection from the weather and provides a better platform on which to lay eggs, he says. He can help monitor active nests.
To determine if a barn owl is on their property, people can look for owl pellets, dense regurgitated pellets of undigested fur and bone about one to two inches long, in barns, silos, abandoned buildings and below possible roost sites.
For more information about the owls, Mummert can be contacted at (814) 542-8759.
