Ron's Last Owl Boxes
“Nineteen eighty-six, that road: eleven owls in seven miles. Last spring, same road, same day: one.”
Why a seventy-four-year-old Herefordshire owl ringer is letting his last hand-built boxes go at a fraction of their worth, before the workshop closes for good.
The gatepost owl. Fifty years ago you counted them on the drive to market. In England they are now down more than three quarters.
Ron Preece keeps his notebooks in a biscuit tin, and the one he wants you to see is the oldest. Every Thursday for forty years he drove the seven miles from his smallholding into Bromyard for market, and every Thursday he counted the little owls sitting out on the gateposts. It began as a habit. It ended as evidence. On a spring morning in 1986 he wrote down eleven. Last spring, on the same road, on the same day of the week, all the way through April and May, he wrote down one.
Those owls did not move away. Nothing chased them off. Nobody poisoned them off that road.
They simply ran out of holes to live in.
It is one of the quietest wildlife failures in this country, and hardly anybody has noticed it happening, because the thing that vanished was never dramatic. It was just an owl on a post that everybody drove past.
The bird that cannot cut its own front door
A hollow limb takes sixty years to form and about ten minutes to remove. Every one that goes is an address struck off the list.
A woodpecker chisels its own home. A blackbird weaves one in the open. A little owl can do neither. It is what ornithologists call a secondary cavity nester: it nests, shelters and sits out the winter inside holes that something else made first — an old woodpecker chamber, or the soft rot that opens up in the trunk of an ancient tree.
Which means the whole future of the bird rests on one thing being left alone: old, decaying, untidy wood. And untidy wood is the first thing a tidy century takes out.
In this country the old wood was mostly orchards. Not the fenced blocks of dwarfing rootstock you drive past now, but traditional orchards — big standard trees, grazed underneath, left to get old and holed and awkward. That is little owl country, and it has been disappearing for a hundred years. A review by the National Trust, using People’s Trust for Endangered Species and Natural England data, put the loss of traditional orchards across England and Wales at eighty-one per cent since 1900. Of what survives, nearly half in England was found to be in declining condition, mostly because nothing is being replanted.
The bird understands none of that. It only knows that the doors along its lane keep being bricked up.
- Little owls in the UK are down seventy-eight per cent since 1995 — one of the steepest long-term declines of any bird tracked by the national survey.
- Traditional orchards in England and Wales are down eighty-one per cent since 1900. That is where the hollow trees were.
- A little owl cannot excavate its own cavity. It depends entirely on holes something else left behind — or on old wood that people now clear on sight.
- Cavities are not only for nesting. Little owls shelter in them right through the winter, tucked in out of the wet. No hole means no shelter in January either.
- The tawny owl was moved onto the amber list in 2015 on evidence of long-term decline. This is not one species having a bad decade.
Sources: BTO/JNCC/RSPB Breeding Bird Survey (JNCC official statistic); National Trust orchard review with PTES and Natural England data; BTO Birds of Conservation Concern.
This is the part that makes Ron Preece put the tin lid back on. The birds are willing. The voles and the beetles are still out there. The one missing piece is a hole — set high, in dry timber, in the right place, facing the right way.
A hole. That is the entire problem. And it happens to be the one part of it a single person can actually fix in an afternoon.
Forty-one years of ringing owls in one valley
Ron Preece in the lean-to above Bishop’s Frome. Forty-one years of ring numbers are in the tin on the shelf behind him.
I drove out to the Frome Valley on a wet morning in early spring, past hop kilns and red fields, and found Ron Preece at the door of a lean-to built onto the side of a stone barn. He is seventy-four. For forty-one years he held a British Trust for Ornithology ringing permit, and he used it on every owl this country has.
Barn owls up in the rafters of the cider barns, when the cider barns still had rafters. Tawny boxes in the wet woods. Long-eared owls counted in the shelterbelts in January with the torch off, standing still in the cold until his eyes came round. By his own ledger he ringed more than nine hundred birds, and every one has a line: ring number, weight, the tree, the date.
But the bird he kept the longest notebook on was the small one. The gatepost owl. The one you see in daylight, squat and cross-looking, watching you the way a farmer watches you.
Inside the lean-to there is one strip light, a bandsaw with the handle worn to a shine, chisels on the wall in the order he uses them, and an old marmalade jar of owl pellets on the sill that he kept for the school parties that used to come up from Bromyard. Through the window there are four apple trees. There were nine acres of them when his father had the place.
He runs a thumb around a fresh entrance hole on the bench, checking the edge the way he used to check a fledgling’s wing.
“A little owl doesn’t cut its own doorway. It takes what an old tree gives it. And an old tree looks untidy, so down it comes. No hole. No owl. It really is that simple, and nobody wants it to be.”
Somewhere in the nineties he stopped pretending that ringing was enough. If the valley would not grow the owls a hole, he would cut them one.
Why he still builds every single one himself
One man, one worn bandsaw, most of a day per box. There is no second pair of hands in this workshop.
Ron does not call it a product. He calls it “a hole an owl can live in.” And he builds them slowly on purpose, because he spent four decades watching exactly how the cheap ones fail. Most owl boxes sold in garden centres are designed by people who have never once watched a bird try to use one — wrong proportions, wrong timber, no way of ever cleaning it out. He has taken enough of them down off trees 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 to roughly 9.5 centimetres, set high in the face of the box, on a jig Ron made so every hole lands in the same place. Wide enough for a little owl to slip through, tight enough that it is not simply handed over to something bigger. “The size of that one opening and the height you set it at,” he says, “decides whether anything ever moves in. I’ve bored it thousands of times and I still measure it 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 deliberate. A magpie cannot lean in far enough. A grey squirrel’s arm stops well short. “The deep ones raise owls,” he says. “The shallow ones raise trouble.”
Untreated, unpainted pine and nothing else. No stain, no sealant, no colour. A treated box carries a chemical smell that reads as an alarm to a bird, and a painted one sits in a tree shouting “new” for three seasons. Bare pine breathes, and it weathers down to the same silver-grey as an old orchard limb. “People paint them green to be tasteful,” Ron says. “The owl reads that as keep out.”
The front is hung to swing down 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 and shed feathers comes out in about two minutes, none of the usual ladder-and-screwdriver faff. It matters far more than it sounds. A bird will pass straight over a box packed with last year’s mess. “Brush it out in late summer,” he says, “and you’ve a fresh hole ready for the next pair. That’s the difference between a box used once and a box used for fifteen years.”
The inside wall under the doorway is left rough sawn, with a low ledge across it. The reason is blunt: young owls leave the box before they can properly fly. On fledging day they have to climb that wall to reach the opening. A smooth interior is a trap that strands them at the bottom. “That ledge isn’t a nice touch,” Ron says. “It’s the difference between fledging and not. So it goes in every one, even now.”
The owl that weighed a hundred and forty-eight grams
He weighed every bird he ever handled on his wife’s kitchen scales. He can still tell you what most of them came in at.
There is one bird Ron talks about more than the other nine hundred, and she does not have a name in the notebook. She has a weight.
In 1998 a chick came down in a hay cut on the Bishop’s Frome road. A scrap of a thing, dehydrated, half-feathered. A hundred and forty-eight grams on the kitchen scales. He hand-reared her through that summer, and when she was ready he put her into the first box he ever built, four metres up the near Tom Putt apple tree behind the barn.
She nested in it six springs running.
From the bench outside the workshop door he could hear her over the top of the orchard on summer evenings — that flat, plaintive call little owls have, more of a complaint than a hoot, the noise this county used to make after dark.
“She’s the reason I made the rest of them. So somebody else has an owl on their gatepost. That’s all this ever was.”
Why these are the last of them
The saw throws up a cloud and he goes out and sits on the wall until it passes. Twenty boxes used to be a fortnight.
Ron can still cut a board dead straight. He has done it long enough that his hands find the line without much help. What he cannot do any more is stay at the bench.
Forty years of pine dust, and nobody wore a mask then — nobody so much as thought about it. He has chronic obstructive pulmonary disease in both lungs. The bandsaw throws up a cloud and he has to walk out into the yard and sit on the wall until it clears.
“Twenty boxes used to be a fortnight,” he says. “Now it’s most of a winter, and I’m honest enough to know that’s the wrong way round at my age.”
He handed the ringing permit back last spring. The ladders were the part he could not argue with any longer, and he is too straight a man to pretend otherwise. The boxes on the bench are the last work his hands and his lungs can still finish together.
“There’s sixty-three left. There’s no apprentice and there’s no second batch. There’s a stack, and then there’s a broom.”
That is what is in the lean-to right now: sixty-three finished boxes, stacked under the window that looks out at the four apple trees. When they have 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-south-east, before the weather turns. That is the only instruction Ron actually cares about.
By any fair reckoning one of Ron’s boxes should cost several times what he asks. The timber, the boring, the hand-cut ledge, the fitted hook — it is most of a day at the bench for each one, and comparable hand-built nest boxes sell for a great deal more. Hannah, who set the shop up for him, told him to put the price up. He would not have it.
“If I charge what the hours come to, somebody buys one and stands it in the porch as an ornament,” he says. “I don’t want them in porches. I want them four metres up an apple tree, facing east-south-east, before the weather turns.”
Little owls do not only nest in the boxes. They shelter in them right through the winter, tucked in out of the wet. He wants them up and weathered now, so that a box has stopped smelling of his workshop by the time a bird goes looking in February.
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 county stopped doing: leave an owl a hole.
“Take one, put it up properly, and give an owl the door we stopped leaving it. Do that and I’ll sleep well enough when the bench is empty.”
What people are seeing again
“Put it up on the old damson at the bottom of the garden in November, facing east like the card said. Nothing all winter, and then in February there was a face in the hole every afternoon at about four. My daughter checks for it before tea. I wasn’t expecting to feel the way I did when we first saw it.”
“I’d bought two owl boxes from garden centres over the years and neither was ever touched. One came apart in its first winter. This is built like a piece of furniture, and the cleaning flap alone tells you it was made by somebody who has actually taken one down off a tree.”
“Bought it for my dad, who’s fed birds his whole life and had decided the little owls had gone from his lane for good. He rang me the evening one turned up on it. Eighty-one years old and whispering down the phone so as not to put it off.”