Free to a good family – of owls

We now have an owl house. It’s high up on the trunk of the “Bramblett” pecan tree in the back yard, waiting for an occupant. Or better yet, occupants. We first leaned about owl houses, or owl shacks from a newspaper article several months ago. A local ornithologist named Cliff Shackelford made a number of owl houses as gifts a couple of Christmases ago and the idea resonated with so many people that he now has a busy sideline making and selling owl houses. You can read all about it here. It’s an interesting web site even if you aren’t interested in putting up an owl house.

We were intrigued by the idea, thinking that it might add pleasure to those rare opportunities when we can comfortably sit on the back patio and drink coffee. Or just sit. We already feed most of the birds in North America out there, based on the seed hulls that cover the patio, and we’re going to add some hummingbird feeders at the back by Barbara’s office window. Plus, since owls like to eat snakes, maybe that is the solution for our Coral snake. Yes, “red and yellow kill a fellow.” Hmmm. I may have just effectively ended all visits by our grandchildren. Let me assure you, he is a very bashful snake. I read where some herpetologists never see a Coral snake in the wild in their entire careers. But that’s another blog topic.

Even though Mr. Shackelford lives in Austin, he lives way south in Austin – beyond Bubba land – and the shipping charges by mail were rather much, so we didn’t acquire an owl house until I noticed that you could buy them in the City of Austin store at City Hall. And that definitely is another blog topic. So house at hand, we trimmed some low branches to improve the fly-way for any home-seeking owl and nailed it up in the tree like this.

Mr. Shackelford claims that “Owls want to live in your back yard.” We shall see.