Happy New Year, Dean. You don't have to go so far afield to find examples of land owners improving habitat for the benefit of Barn Owls. In 2002 Chris Dowse, the recently retired Estate Manager for Sutton Settled Estates, put up over 20 Barn Owl nest boxes and provided suitable feeding habitat by providing field margins and rough grassland on predominantly arable land. The Estate is in the Binbrook area and the boxes have been annually monitored by the Mid Lincs Ringing Group. To date, 140 Barn Owls have succesfully fledged over the past 10 years. However, this number pales into insignificance when you consider the amount of Barn Owls that have benefitted from the incredible time and effort put in by Bob Shepherd, Alan Ball et al. and a multitude of sympathetic land owners in the south of the county. Farmers and landowners often get a bad press from birders but certainly not in this case.
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