Tees Valley Wildlife Trust supporting the local barn owl population

Barn owls for future generations

The organisation: Tees Valley Wildlife Trust delivers long-term programmes designed to counter biodiversity loss, provide solutions to the many challenges facing wildlife and the environment, and  engage all sectors of the community in the natural world.

The initiative: Funding has been provided to support volunteer barn owl workers as they monitor, maintain and build the local population of this protected bird species. The workers have identified a nest box network for barn owls across East Cleveland, and monitor the boxes to understand the population dynamics and breeding success. To increase awareness and understanding of barn owls the volunteers run sessions with young people, such as cub and beaver groups, to inspire future generations of volunteer barn owl workers. Further sessions can now be run with support of the Sofia Construction Community Fund and regular newsletters will be produced to update landowners and the wider community on the work of the barn owl volunteers.

Feedback from Tees Valley Wildlife Trust

The funding in 2021 helped us to:

• Helped us support the costs of our volunteers travel to monitor and maintain all the owl boxes in the network for the 2021 breeding seasons 
• Purchased the rings needed for the owlets as part of studies on owl age and movement 
• Let us provide advice and assistance to landowners on owl conservation measures 
• Enabled us to replace some of the older and dilapidated boxes in the network avoiding the loss of known breeding sites 
• Supported a volunteer to obtain his statutory owl licence  
• Kept volunteers working on owl pellet analysis during the covid pandemic 
• Let us deliver a session on owls to a local school and a talk on barn owls to a community group. 
• Worked towards achieving our goal of ensuring  barn owls are around for future generations in East Cleveland 

May 2021 / January 2022