Orphaned baby barn owls find new home at Washington State University

After their nests were destroyed, 15 orphaned baby barn owls from central Washington found their new home in Washington State University’s Horticulture Center.

The owls were left defenseless after the haystacks supporting their nests were removed.

Barn owls are named for their habit of nesting in barns, and they are specifically drawn to small nooks in bales of hay. In a news release, WSU wildlife veterinarian of 10 years, Dr. Marcie Logsdon, said the destruction of nests as hay is processed is one of the leading causes for barn owl chicks becoming orphans.

Previously, orphaned baby barn owls were sent to the Blue Mountain Wildlife facility in the central Washington area, but the location closed down earlier this year. A few months ago, the 12 now-fledgling owls were the first sent to WSU following the closure, and three more featherless nestlings arrived early Wednesday. WSU has created a new hack site, or nesting area, to facilitate the birds’ growth. So far, the site consists of two high, mounted wooden nesting boxes.

“The really exciting thing about this is that this is the first year that we had our own hack site that we were able to raise and release these barn owls in,” Logsdon said. “It’s a technique that works especially well with barn owls because as babies they stay in the cavity nest … until they are pretty much fully flighted.”

Keeping the baby owls in the box as they develop is important, as there is a particular concern with baby barn owls imprinting on human caretakers. In caregiving methods without nest boxes, caretakers must wear ghillie suits to disguise themselves and present food to the nestlings via an owl puppet, Logsdon said.

Barn owls require a lot of parental care as they grow, Logsdon said, with a single baby owl being able to consume up to 10 mice per day. With clutches commonly consisting of four to 10 baby barn owls, the parents are able to stagger the hatching of their eggs to help them keep up with high food demands.

“It’s a way to help the parents raise absolutely as many babies as they can find food for, because the biggest baby owl eats first and it goes down the line. And so they can raise huge numbers of babies that way,” Logsdon said. “It’s a wonderful, wonderful method of rodent control for things like orchards, which is one of the reasons why we’re so excited to be able to set this up with the WSU orchard.”

The WSU orchard is a part of the Horticultural Center of the university created in 2018, with the goals of providing research, teaching and outreach opportunities.

Grant Glover, wildlife biologist and farmer on the WSU orchard, said barn owls and other raptors such as kestrels are beneficial in agricultural settings due to their preying on destructive small animals such as mice and voles.

“Barn owls are extreme generalists, and they tend to tolerate other owls well so they generally can have higher densities of barn owls than other species of owls,” Glover said.

A study on barn owls in vineyards estimated that 3,466 rodents could be caught and consumed by one family of the raptors in a single year.

This, along with their ability to live in close confines with one another, makes them an attractive alternative to harmful rodenticides or other forms of pest control for some farmers.

Before the owls can serve as pest control for the orchard, though, Glover has been tasked with the important role of mimicking the owls’ parents as they grow and learn to catch their own prey.

“Right now, their parents would still be helping them,” Glover said of the 12 owls that have fledged. “Even when they’re on their own, they’ll still beg for food from mom and dad, and they’ll come feed them and whatnot. So I think that’s probably what’s going on here. Now that they’re fledged, we leave some mice on top of the box every night just to kind of fill that role that their parents would have.”

Although there are of course no guarantees with wild owls, Glover has hopes that the birds raised in the boxes will return to lay eggs of their own once they have matured and found a mate, increasing the population at the orchard. Aside from agriculture, Glover said that bringing more owls to the area may be good for the environment in terms of raising biodiversity.

“Just the history of European settlements, conversion of wildlands to agriculture, cities – that always ends up in a reduction of wildlife,” Glover said.

“That’s value to me. Just, offsetting some of the impacts of agriculture, and increasing the sustainability of our operations while also helping to, if we can, restore some of our populations closer to what they had been previously.”

Logsdon said that the next steps for the hack site will be to increase the number of owl boxes to support existing owls and act as homes for future orphaned ones, and to also look into setting up boxes for kestrels.

Kestrels are particularly beneficial for agricultural lands, as they scare off invasive birds like starlings, Glover said. Due to the closure of the central Washington shelter, WSU’s Veterinary Teaching Hospital has been receiving more animals in need – sitting at about 765 patients in 2024 after just more than 600 for all of 2023, according to Logsdon.

WSU’s Wildlife Rehabilitation Center is nearly entirely funded by public donations, Logsdon said.

For the barn owls alone, it can cost up to $900 to supply a single owl with enough feeder mice to reach adulthood.

“Feeding 10 to 20 babies, it definitely starts to add up and place a strain on our resources,” Logsdon said.

“We are always very grateful for anyone would consider donating to help feed these guys.”

Donations can be made online to the Wildlife Care and Support Fund.

For Logsdon, rehabilitating the owls is more about the animals themselves than any agricultural or environmental impact.

“There is nothing more rewarding than being able to release an animal back to the wild that otherwise would have died,” she said.

“I guess the only thing that makes it a little bit more rewarding is if we’re able to involve the people who found the animal, who cared enough to bring it in to us.”