Col's Last Owl Boxes
“I have counted owls every spring for thirty-eight years. There are fewer every year, and I can prove it.”
Why a seventy-three-year-old central Victorian wildlife carer is letting his last hand-built owl boxes go at a fraction of their worth, before the shed door shuts for good.
A moth owl in the doorway of one of Col Brennan’s boxes. The bird cannot cut this hole for itself — and almost nothing left standing in this country is old enough to have grown it one.
A moth owl weighs about as much as a golf ball. The one that came out of the sawdust in the paddock next door to Col Brennan weighed forty-eight grams, sat blinking in the wood chips with her feathers full of them, and had nowhere within a kilometre to go. The tree she had hatched in was lying beside her. It had taken something like a hundred and forty years to grow the hollow she was born in. It came down in about forty minutes.
One morning’s work, one saw, entirely legal. And the only hollow within a kilometre was on the ground by lunchtime.
Nobody did anything wrong that day. The tree was dead, it leaned over a fenceline near a track, and it came down the way thousands of dead trees come down across this country every week — sensibly, legally, and without anybody once thinking about what was living inside it.
That is the quiet end of Australian wildlife loss, and it has been running for two hundred years. Col Brennan has thirty-eight springs of nest box cards that say the same thing every year: fewer birds than the year before. Our night birds are not disappearing out of the paddocks because they are weak, or sick, or rare. They are disappearing because the holes are gone.
No hollow, no owl. It is very close to that simple.
The bird that cannot cut its own front door
A cockatoo can chew itself a doorway. A pardalote can dig a tunnel into a creek bank. A moth owl can do neither. It is what ecologists call a secondary hollow user: it lives, raises its young and sits out the daylight inside a hole that something else made first — or, far more often, inside a hole that nothing made at all, and that a tree simply grew on its own over the course of a century.
That is the part most people have never been told. A eucalypt does not produce hollows because a bird asked it to. It produces them slowly, by accident, through fire scars and termites and dropped limbs and the fungus that works its way into the wound afterwards. A hollow big enough for a moth owl takes upwards of a hundred years to open up. The big ones — the ones a boobook or a cockatoo needs — take a hundred and fifty, sometimes two hundred.
Which means the whole future of a great many Australian animals rests on one thing being left alone: old wood, standing. And old standing wood is the first thing a tidy century removes. A dead tree looks like a hazard and an eyesore, so down it comes — off the block, out of the paddock, away from the track. Every hollow it held goes with it, and so does every hollow it would have grown over the next fifty years.
In central Victoria the damage was done in a single generation, and you can still see it from Col Brennan’s shed doorway. The box-ironbark forests around Maldon were cut over for the diggings from the 1850s onwards — mine props, firewood, boiler timber, sleepers. The old photographs show a ridge with a hundred wide-crowned trees standing well apart. What grew back is ten thousand skinny ones packed shoulder to shoulder, and not one of them has been standing long enough to rot a hole in itself.
And the handful of hollows still out there are not sitting empty. Starlings take them. Common mynas take them. Feral honeybees fill them with comb and hold them for years. A moth owl looking for a doorway in September is not just short of options — it is queued up behind everything else in the district that needs one.
- A moth owl cannot excavate its own hollow. It depends entirely on what an old tree gives it — and old trees are exactly what two centuries of clearing took out first.
- A eucalypt hollow large enough to be usable takes more than a hundred years to form. The bigger ones take a hundred and fifty to two hundred. Nothing can shorten that.
- In New South Wales alone, 46 mammals, 81 birds, 31 reptiles and 16 frogs depend on tree hollows. The loss of hollow-bearing trees is a listed Key Threatening Process.
- Australia-wide, more than 300 native vertebrates need a hollow — and around 45 per cent of the country’s forest has been cleared since European settlement.
- The moth owl itself is not endangered. It is the most common nocturnal bird in Australia. The limit was never the bird. It was the doorway.
Sources: NSW Scientific Committee, “Loss of hollow-bearing trees” Key Threatening Process determination; Australian Government hollow-ecology reviews; Parks Victoria box-ironbark forest histories; BirdLife Australia.
This is the part that makes Col Brennan put his head in his hands. The birds are willing. The bush is still there, more or less. The moths are still coming to the light. The one missing piece is a hole of the right size, set high, in dry timber, facing the right way.
A hole. That is the entire problem. And it is the one part of it an ordinary person can actually fix in an afternoon.
Thirty-eight years of putting the hollows back up
Col Brennan in the shed on his block above Maldon, central Victoria. The card index behind him has a line for every box he ever hung.
I drove up to Maldon on a clear, cold morning at the end of winter. Col Brennan met me at the roller door of a corrugated-iron shed that has been turning out nest boxes since before most of his neighbours moved to the district. He is seventy-three. For thirty-eight years he held a Victorian wildlife shelter licence, and for thirty-eight years he spent the other half of his time doing the thing he says actually mattered: putting hollows back into a forest that had run out of them.
Inside there is one fluorescent tube, a bandsaw with the handle worn to a shine, chisels hung on the wall in the order he uses them, and a dented tobacco tin of owl pellets on the sill that he kept for the school groups that used to come up from Castlemaine on a Friday. Through the doorway you can see the diggings — quartz tailings gone grey with lichen, and ironbark regrowth so close together you cannot walk through it.
By his own card index, Col has built and hung more than sixteen hundred nest boxes across central Victoria. Roadsides, reserves, school grounds, half the paddock trees between Maldon and Baringhup. Every single one has a card: the date, the tree, the compass bearing, and what moved in, checked each spring for as long as the ladder let him.
He did not set out to be the moth owl bloke. He started on a Landcare working bee in 1988, putting boxes up for sugar gliders, and never stopped. The moth owls found him. “People hear nest box and they picture a birdhouse,” he says. “It isn’t a birdhouse. It’s a hollow. A hollow is the one thing this country ran out of and nobody noticed, because you can’t see a hollow that isn’t there.”
He will tell you, if you ask, that it is not strictly an owl at all — it is an owlet-nightjar, a little family all of its own, closer to a frogmouth than to a boobook. He will also tell you that nobody out here has ever called it that. It is the moth owl, or the fairy owl, and it has been for as long as anybody has been out after dark with a torch. Forty grams of grey feathers and a face like a kitten, sitting in a doorway in the sun with its eyes half shut.
“A moth owl can’t cut its own doorway. Nothing can, except a cockatoo having a go. They take what an old tree gives them, and an old tree takes a hundred years, and we’ve got a forest full of hundred-year-old saplings.”
Why he still builds every single one of them by hand
Every box comes off the same bench, cut and bored and grooved by the same two hands. There is no second set of hands in this shed.
Col does not call it a product. He calls it “a hollow you can carry”. Every one is made the same way: one bloke, one worn bandsaw, the better part of a day of work in each box that leaves the bench. There is no crew, no machine stamping them out, no second batch sitting in a warehouse somewhere. There is a seventy-three-year-old who cuts every panel, bores every doorway and grooves every interior himself, the way he has done it through nearly forty winters.
He builds them slowly on purpose, because he spent thirty-eight springs climbing ladders to find out exactly how the cheap ones fail. Most boxes sold in garden centres and online were drawn up by somebody who has never once watched a bird try to use one — proportions wrong, timber too thin, painted a colour no animal wants to go near, and no way of ever opening it again. He has pulled enough of them down to know. His own box is the opposite: every part of it is the answer to something he watched go wrong. Five things matter, in his telling.
The entrance is bored by hand at roughly 95 by 95 millimetres, set high in the face near the roof line. That is wide enough for a moth owl, a rosella, a ringtail or an antechinus, and deliberately too tight for a brushtail possum to shoulder in and own the place. Set high, it also keeps the weather out. “The size of that one opening and how high it sits,” Col says, “decides everything about what ends up living in it. I’ve bored it a few thousand times and I still measure twice.”
Inside, it is a long way down — about 33 centimetres from the lip of the doorway to the floor where the clutch sits. That drop is not an accident. A currawong cannot lean in far enough. A kookaburra cannot reach the bottom. A goanna’s arm stops well short. “The deep ones raise birds,” he says. “The shallow ones just feed whatever finds them.”
Untreated, unpainted pine, 20 millimetres thick — nothing else. No stain, no sealant, no colour. A freshly painted box smells like a chemical warning to a bird, and a dark one cooks like a ute cabin through a forty-degree week. Raw timber breathes, weathers to the same soft grey as an old ironbark limb, and disappears into the tree. “People paint them up nice and green so they look right on the fence,” Col says. “The bird reads that as keep out.”
The whole front is cut and hung by hand to swing open on a single fitted hook — the joint that takes him longer than the rest of the box put together. After the season, a year of pellets, feathers and leaf litter comes out in about two minutes, with none of the usual ladder-and-screwdriver carry-on. In this country that is not housekeeping. An unchecked box is how a pair of starlings or a swarm of feral bees end up owning it permanently. “Clean it out in February with a hand broom,” he says, “and you’ve got a fresh hollow by spring.”
The inside wall under the doorway is left rough-sawn, with low grooves Col cuts across it by hand, one pass at a time, on every single box. The reason is plain enough: young birds leave the hollow before they can fly properly. On the day they go, they have to climb that wall to reach the opening. A smooth interior is a bucket. “That ladder isn’t a nice touch,” Col says. “It’s the difference between a bird getting out and a bird not getting out. So I cut it into every one, even now.”
Inside a box that worked. The deep cavity and the hand-cut climb-out wall are the two things that make this possible.
The chick in the sawdust
For thirty years there was a moth owl working the light on Col’s back verandah. Not a shy bird either. It would drop off the crossbar of the clothesline onto a moth, sit there eating it in front of him while he had his cup of tea, and go again. His grandkids called it the cat with wings. He never named it, because he assumed it was a different bird every few years, and it almost certainly was — three decades of moth owls coming out of the same tree.
The tree was a dead red gum in the neighbour’s paddock, forty metres from the back step. In the spring of 2018 it came down as a hazard tree.
“There was a chick in the sawdust,” Col says. “Forty-eight grams. Sat there in the chips blinking at us. And the two blokes with the saw were as cut up about it as I was — they hadn’t done a single thing wrong. They just took down the only hollow within a kilometre, and none of us thought about it until it was on the ground.”
He reared her on the kitchen bench on a diet he had to look up, and called her Poss, because a ringtail had come out of the same tree the same morning. When she was ready he put her into the first box he ever built specifically for a moth owl, four metres up a yellow box on his own block, facing east. She used it for six springs.
“And nothing’s been back to that verandah light since,” he says. “Eight years now. Same light. Same moths. You don’t miss a bird while it’s there. You miss it afterwards, and that’s the rotten part, because by then you can’t stand the tree back up.”
“I built the rest of them so somebody else gets to have one on their light. That’s all this has ever been.”
Forty-eight grams on the kitchen scales. Col wrote down the weight of every bird that ever came through the shed.
Why this is the last of them
He can still cut a board dead straight. Boring the doorway clean is the part the hand can no longer do.
Col can still cut a board dead straight. He has done it long enough that his hands know the line without much help from his eyes. What his right hand cannot do any more is feel the timber.
Thirty-eight years of Australian sun on the back of a hand that was never inside a sleeve. In March they took a melanoma off it and grafted the back of his hand from his thigh. The graft took. The hand did not come back the way it was.
“The strength’s there,” he says, and flexes it, and it works, which is somehow worse. “It’s the feel that’s gone. You bore a ninety-five-mill hole through green pine by feel — you can hear it wandering, but you feel it first. I can’t feel it. And a doorway with a rough lip is how a young bird tears a feather out on the way through.”
He handed his shelter licence back the same month. Holding a frightened bird without full sensation in one hand was never something he was going to chance, and he is too straight to pretend otherwise. The boxes are the last work his hands can still finish properly.
“When the stack on that bench is gone, that’s it. There’s no apprentice and there’s no second batch. I counted them twice, so I’d know exactly how many I had left in me.”
What is in the shed right now is what is left. Fifty-eight finished boxes, stacked on the bench under the window that looks out at the diggings. When they go out the door, the bandsaw stops for good.
He’d rather they were up a tree than in his pocket
By any fair accounting, one of Col’s boxes should cost two or three times what he asks for it. The timber, the boring, the hand-grooved interior, the fitted hatch — it is the better part of a day at the bench per box, and comparable hand-built nest boxes sell in this country for a good deal more. Steph, the ranger who set the shop up for him, told him to put the price up. He would not have it.
“If I charge what it’s worth, somebody buys one and stands it in the hallway as a bit of country decor,” he says. “I don’t want them in hallways. I want them four metres up a tree, facing east, before the weather warms up.”
The timing is not sentiment. Moth owls, rosellas and ringtails go looking from September through to December. A box wants to be up, weathered and smelling of nothing by then — not screwed to a trunk in the week the birds have already settled for somewhere worse.
That is the whole of it. He is not running a sale. He is handing over a job he can no longer do, and asking whoever takes a box to do the one thing this country stopped doing two hundred years ago: leave something a hollow.
“Take one, put it up properly, and give something the hollow this country quit growing. Do that and I’ll sleep fine when the shed’s empty.”
Four metres up, facing east, before the weather warms up. That is the only instruction Col actually cares about.
What people are seeing after dark
“Put it up on the big yellow box out the back in August, facing east like the card said. By late October there was a moth owl sitting in the hole most afternoons with its eyes half shut. The kids check for it before school. I wasn’t expecting to feel the way I did the first time we saw it.”
“I’d bought two nest boxes online before this and neither was ever touched — one of them came apart in the first wet winter. This is built like a bit of furniture. The drop-front alone tells you a real person who’d actually climbed a ladder made it.”
“Bought it for my dad, who’s fed birds his whole life and reckoned the little owls had gone off his road for good. He rang me the night a pair turned up on it. Seventy-nine years old and whispering down the phone so he wouldn’t scare them off.”