Ron's Last Owl Boxes
“I’m afraid I started building these twenty years too late.”
Why a seventy-four-year-old owl expert from Herefordshire is selling his last sixty-three hand-built owl boxes at a special price, before his workshop closes for good.
A little owl on a Herefordshire gatepost. Fifty years ago you saw them on every country road. Since 1995, three out of four have gone.
In 1986, Ron Preece counted eleven little owls on the gateposts between his farm and the market town of Bromyard. Last spring, on the same road, he counted one.
The owls were not poisoned. Nobody chased them off.
They simply ran out of places to live.
Across the UK, little owls are down seventy-eight per cent since 1995. Hardly anyone has noticed, because it happened quietly. One empty gatepost at a time.
The bird that cannot build its own home
A hollow branch takes sixty years to form and ten minutes to cut down. Every one that goes is one less home.
A woodpecker carves its own nest hole. A little owl cannot. It needs a hole that is already there — usually inside an old, hollow tree.
In England, those old trees stood in traditional orchards. Since 1900, eighty-one per cent of them have been cleared. Every tree that came down took an owl’s home with it.
The owls have not given up. There are still mice and beetles to eat. What is missing is simple: a dry, safe hole, high off the ground.
- UK little owls: down 78 per cent since 1995.
- Old orchards in England and Wales: down 81 per cent since 1900. That is where the hollow trees were.
- A little owl cannot dig its own hole. It only uses holes that are already there.
- Owls also shelter in these holes all winter. No hole means no shelter in January either.
Sources: BTO/JNCC/RSPB Breeding Bird Survey; National Trust orchard review.
A missing hole. That is the whole problem. And it is one a single person can fix in an afternoon.
Forty-one years with the owls of one valley
Ron Preece in his workshop above Bishop’s Frome. Forty-one years of notes sit in a tin on the shelf behind him.
Ron is seventy-four. For forty-one years he tagged wild owls for the British Trust for Ornithology. More than nine hundred birds, each one written down: weight, tree, date.
The one he loved most was the little owl. The small, cross-looking bird you see on gateposts in daylight.
His workshop is a small lean-to on the side of a stone barn. One bandsaw, worn smooth. Chisels on the wall. A jar of owl pellets on the windowsill. Outside, four apple trees. When his father ran the farm, there were nine acres of them.
“A little owl doesn’t make its own front door. It takes what an old tree gives it. And old trees look untidy, so they come down. No hole, no owl. It really is that simple.”
In the nineties, he decided counting owls was not enough. If the valley had no holes left, he would build them.
Why he still builds every single one himself
One man, one bandsaw, most of a day per box. There is no second pair of hands in this workshop.
Most owl boxes in garden centres are made by people who have never watched an owl use one. Wrong size, wrong wood, no way to clean them. Ron has taken plenty of them down off trees. His box fixes five things he saw go wrong.
The entrance is 9.5 centimetres wide. Big enough for a little owl, too small for anything bigger. “I still measure it twice.”
The floor sits 33 centimetres below the entrance. A magpie or squirrel cannot reach the eggs. “The deep ones raise owls. The shallow ones raise trouble.”
Plain, untreated pine. No paint, no chemicals — owls avoid boxes that smell wrong. “People paint them green to look nice. The owl reads that as keep out.”
The front opens on one hook, so you can clean it out in two minutes. Owls skip a box that is full of old nest. “Used once, or used for fifteen years.”
The inside wall is left rough, with a small ledge. Young owls climb out before they can fly. On smooth wood they get stuck. “That ledge is the difference between fledging and not.”
The owl that weighed a hundred and forty-eight grams
He weighed every bird he handled on his wife’s kitchen scales. He still remembers most of the numbers.
In 1998, a baby owl fell out of its nest during a hay cut. It weighed a hundred and forty-eight grams. Ron raised it by hand that summer. When it was ready, he put it into the first box he ever built, high in the apple tree behind his barn.
She nested in that box six springs in a row.
“She’s the reason I built the rest of them. So somebody else gets an owl on their gatepost. That’s all this ever was.”
Why these are the last of them
When the saw throws up dust, he has to go outside and sit on the wall. Twenty boxes used to take two weeks.
Ron’s hands still work. His lungs do not.
Forty years of sawdust, and nobody wore a mask back then. Today he has a lung disease called COPD. Every time the bandsaw runs, he has to step outside and sit on the wall until he can breathe again.
“Twenty boxes used to take me two weeks,” he says. “Now it takes most of a winter. At my age, that’s the wrong way round.”
“There’s sixty-three left. No apprentice, no second batch. There’s a stack, and then there’s a broom.”
Sixty-three finished boxes, stacked under the workshop window. When they are gone, the bandsaw goes quiet for good.
He would rather they went up an apple tree than into his pocket
Four metres up, facing east, before the weather turns. That is the only instruction Ron really cares about.
Each box takes Ron most of a day. Hand-built boxes like this usually sell for far more. Hannah, a young ringer he once trained who set up the shop for him, told him to raise the price. He said no.
“If I charge what the hours are worth, someone buys one and puts it in the porch as decoration,” he says. “I don’t want them in porches. I want them four metres up an apple tree, before the weather turns.”
Owls look for winter shelter from autumn on. A box that goes up now has time to lose its workshop smell before February.
“Take one, put it up properly, and give an owl the door we took away. Do that and I’ll sleep well when the bench is empty.”
What people are seeing again
“Put it up on the old plum tree in November. Nothing all winter. Then in February there was a face in the hole every afternoon at four. My daughter checks for it before tea every day.”
“I’d bought two owl boxes from garden centres. Neither was ever used, and one fell apart in its first winter. This one is built like furniture. The cleaning flap alone tells you the man knows owls.”
“Bought it for my dad, who thought the little owls had gone from his lane for good. He rang me the evening one turned up. Eighty-one years old and whispering down the phone so he wouldn’t scare it off.”