This Owl House

See what I did there? I freely admit that, like many of my generation, I adore the PBS program This Old House. I’ve watched that show for over 30 years and it’s been airing for much longer than that. To me it is the most compelling “reality TV” show out there. No rivalries or competitions, just real people showing how they “do what they do” in a constructive and supportive setting. I won’t go on about this show other than to submit that, in addition to helpful home improvement instruction, it serves as a tremendous source of inspiration for us non-professionals. It provides encouragement that we can do this stuff too, and has prompted many of us to better understand our homes and take a stake in their upkeep. It is a treasure, actually.

Now, the house that concerns me, today, is for a resident that I hope to attract to my neighborhood, the barred owl. I am deeply interested in wildlife conservation, and have a soft spot for raptors, but I have never spent much time thinking about owls. I see owls flying near our home in Harvard, MA and have heard a Great Horned Owl saying “something” (repeatedly) at all hours of the early morning. So, prompted by a local TV news story where, in the adjacent town of Bolton, a homeowner was confronted one morning by a barred owl siting in his fireplace, I decided to set down my furniture work and build an owl house. Apparently, owl nesting season is happening now, and the real estate market is hot!

After some book & online research I found that many owls will nest in man made houses, which are pretty much unadorned, big wooden boxes. The box dimensions help select for your “owl of choice”, and barred owls are among the biggest such nesters in North America. This house would be roughly 2 ft. tall, 14 in. square with a 7 inch opening. The remaining structural features to consider are the roof and hole “style”, some means of access to facilitate cleaning, and the tree-mounting mechanism. With a rough idea of design I procured the wood : 22 linear feet(!) of 7 in. x 7/8 in. shiplapped pine panelling; a left-over cedar board from an Adirondack chair project of Andrew’s; and a plywood scrap. I planned to make the roof out of rot-resistant cedar and the floor out of 3/4 in. plywood, while acknowledging the longevity risk of using cheaper pine for the rest of the structure. Add some screws and hinges and it comes to about $25.00 in materials.

For the build, each face of the elongated cube had to be glued together from either 2 or 3 component boards. The ship lap edge made this an easy task, using waterproof wood glue with an extra bead of Gorilla Glue® to ensure integrity in “the wild”. The roof pitch was cut on both sides using my track saw, and the arch of the entry hole cut on a bandsaw using a shop-made, circle-cutting jig. A couple dados along the side walls allowed the floor to slip in nicely. I recessed the floor board 3/4 in. from the bottom edge of the sides to prevent water seepage and added a coat of paraffin wax to the interior walls and ceiling as a means to foil hornets. I learned these tips during the “research” phase, and hereby extend my thanks! to those who pay their lessons forward for others. I also learned that barred owls do nothing to build a nest. So to keep the eggs from rolling around and to provide some insulation for the hatchlings it is advised to add a few inches of wood chips to the bottom. It would also be prudent to have an easy way to clean out old feathers, detritus and squirrel-borne junk. Given that this chore would be executed on a ladder 15 feet above the forest floor I felt that hinging the roof to open (prescribed in many plans) would make it too awkward to then reach back down 2 feet to clean the bottom so I opted to cut-out a 7 x 7 in. hatch on one of the sides into which I inserted a small door. That should work better. Finally, the house was assembled using stainless steel screws, and the countersink holes filled with cedar plugs.

Overall, I like the look and sturdiness of the piece. And whoo wouldn’t? (See what I did there?)

Now, to mount this beast ...