Giving a Hoot

For retired veterinarian Dick Clegg, protecting barn owls has been a three-decade labour of love

Text and photos by Isabelle Groc

In B.C.’S Fraser Valley somewhere near Chilliwack, night has fallen. Dick Clegg is getting ready for his nocturnal rounds. For nearly three decades, he has been at it, often several times a week, visiting farms sprinkled around the valley. Clegg, a large-animal veterinarian now retired, is not checking on livestock. Nor is he out on social calls. He is looking in on wild barn owls.

In a dark and quiet barn, Clegg silently climbs a ladder six to nine metres up into the rafters, to check on a nest box he built and installed. As he slowly opens it, a loud, guttural, snake-like hissing sound suddenly pierces the silence of the night. “They are such fierce predators, you have to take precautions when you handle them,” he says. He gently picks up the chicks and bands them before returning them to the box. He then travels to the next site, until the job is done and he can go home, often after midnight. birds for the first time as a kid in their barn. Years later, a friend introduced him to raptor banding in Saskatchewan, and Clegg thought he could also do something to help the barn owls living in his backyard.

With increasing urban development, the loss of farmland, and agricultural intensification in the Lower Mainland and Fraser Valley, where most of Western Canada’s barn owls live, the birds are rapidly losing hunting habitat. As old barns are torn down and replaced with modern structures, the owls also have fewer nesting options. Meanwhile, hunting in a highly fragmented urban landscape is riskier. Because they fly low, owls are often hit by cars when they cross roads to move from one grass patch to another or hunt in grassy areas along highways. “The owls have a very harsh life,” Clegg says.

While he believes that putting up nest boxes has helped the local population, what matters to him the most is educating people about the value of barn owls and how to protect them. When he visits farmers, Clegg speaks to them about how barn owls naturally control rodent populations and how they can help them clean up a rat problem. Commonly, anticoagulant rodenticides are used to control rats and other rodents; barn owls are increasingly exposed to those deadly chemicals when they eat poisoned rats. “Some farmers have decided that now that they’ve got owls, they are not going to use any more rat poison because that would hurt the owls. And they have done other things as well, like cleaning up their environment for things that the rats would want to eat and eliminating structures where they can nest,” says Clegg. “Now they are protective of their barn owls. Perceptions have changed; they look at the owls differently.”

Clegg remembers banding young owls in a farm in the presence of four family generations. “From the great-grandfather to the kids, they were all thrilled to get close to these owls,” he says. “It is fun sharing this with people.”a