By Laura Bennett · Prince Edward County, Ontario

“I’ve held six thousand saw-whet owls in my bare hand. Not one of them could make its own nest hole.” — Why a sixty-eight-year-old Ontario owl bander is letting her last hand-built owl boxes go at a fraction of their worth, before her workshop closes for good.

A Northern Saw-whet Owl on the Point in October. Ninety grams of bird, and it just sits there.

The first time Arlene Callander held a saw-whet owl, she expected it to fight. It didn’t. She opened her hand, and the little owl just sat there on her palm. It was smaller than a pop can. Its yellow eyes looked at her as if she was the strange one.

That was a cold night in October 1995, on Prince Edward Point, at the tip of Prince Edward County on Lake Ontario. Every fall, thousands of these tiny owls fly south along this shore in the dark. Arlene has gone back every October since. Thirty-one autumns. By her own notebooks, she has weighed, banded and let go more than six thousand of them.

And in all those years, one thing has stayed with her. “Every one of them flies off into the dark,” she says. “And every one of them needs a hole in a tree to sleep in. I always wondered where they’d find one.”

An Owl Can’t Dig Its Own Home

Old apple trees, rotted hollow, were where the small owls lived. Most of them are gone now.

Most people think owls live in trees. Small owls don’t. They live inside trees, in a hole. And here is the part almost nobody knows: an owl can’t make that hole. A woodpecker can. An owl can’t. It has to find an old woodpecker hole, or a tree that has gone soft and hollow with age.

Those are exactly the trees people take down first. A dead maple looks untidy, so it goes for firewood. A split apple tree is a hazard, so it comes out. Nobody means any harm. But every one of those trees had a hole in it, and the owl that slept there now has to look somewhere else.

In Prince Edward County you can see it from the road. This was apple country once. The old orchards were full of hollow trees, and the hollow trees were full of screech-owls. Today many of those orchards are vineyards. The grapevines are very neat. There isn’t one hole in them.

The Teacher Who Started Building Them in 1998

Arlene in her garage near Cherry Valley. The car hasn’t been inside since 1998.

Arlene taught Grade 4 in Picton for thirty-three years. In 1998 she built a nest box with her class from a pattern in a library book and hung it on a fence post behind the school. That spring, a screech-owl moved in. Twenty-four children took turns at the window.

She never stopped. Since then she has built more than nine hundred owl boxes in her garage on a gravel road outside Cherry Valley. She built them for neighbours, for farms along the Loyalist Parkway, for the conservation area, and for anyone with an old orchard who would let her up a ladder. Every box is in a binder on her kitchen table: the date, the tree, which way the hole faces, and what moved in.

“People want to feed birds,” she says, running a thumb around the edge of a fresh hole without looking up. “That’s nice. But a small owl doesn’t need a feeder. It needs a place to sleep out of the wind.”

Four Things Arlene Learned From Nine Hundred Boxes

Plain pine, no paint, and a hole the right size. Small details decide whether an owl moves in.

A cheap box from the garden centre and one of Arlene’s look alike in a photo. On a tree, they are not the same. Here is what goes into every one:

• “The Saw-Whet Doorway.” The entrance is 9.5 cm (3¾ in) across and set high on the front. That is big enough for a saw-whet owl, a screech-owl or a kestrel. It is too small for a raccoon to squeeze in, and too small for a big owl to take over.
• “The Deep Drop.” From the hole down to the floor is a full 33 cm. A raccoon, a crow or a blue jay can reach in. They can’t reach the bottom. The eggs sit safely out of reach.
• “The Bare-Pine Rule.” No paint, no stain, no varnish. A painted box smells wrong to an owl for a whole season. Plain pine turns the same soft grey as an old maple branch by spring.
• “The Fall Clean-Out Door.” The front opens on a single hook. The old nest comes out in two minutes every September. A box that never gets cleaned fills up with squirrels or starlings, and the owls never get it back.

The Knot That Blinks

For twenty-six summers, a screech-owl looked out of this hole in Arlene’s apple tree.

At the bottom of Arlene’s yard stood an old Northern Spy apple tree. For twenty-six years an Eastern Screech-Owl lived in a round hole in its trunk. On summer evenings it sat in the opening with only its grey face showing. Her grandchildren called it “the knot that blinks.” Every May there were owlets on the branch.

In the ice storm of 2019, the tree split in half. What was left had to come down. Nobody’s fault.

“I put a box up on the fence post that same week,” she says. “Nothing came. Not that spring, not the next. It took four springs before a pair moved in. Four springs. That’s how long an owl will keep looking for a hole before it gives up on a place.”

One Icy Rung in February

Sixty-four boxes on the bench. The ladder stays on the wall now.

Arlene has never built a box she didn’t hang herself. That was always the rule. Building was the easy half. The other half was four metres up a ladder: hanging the box, checking it in spring, cleaning it out every fall.

Last February she went up a ladder to clean a box on a farm near Wellington. There was ice on the bottom rung. She fell about two metres onto frozen ground and broke her hip.

She has a new hip now, and it works fine. But the surgeon was clear: no more ladders. Ever. She can still stand at the saw for an hour. An owl box takes a day.

“I’m not going to build boxes I can’t put up,” she says. “So I finished the ones that were already cut. Then I turned the light off.”

There are sixty-four boxes stacked on her bench. There will be no second batch.

“I Don’t Want Them in a Front Hall”

Where Arlene wants every box to end up: four metres up a tree, facing east, before the snow.

Arlene has priced her last boxes at a fraction of what the wood and the hours cost her. Her grandson Liam, who banded his first saw-whet with her when he was nine, told her she was giving them away. She knows.

“If I charge what they’re worth, somebody puts one on a shelf as decoration,” she says. “I don’t want them in a front hall. I want them four metres up a tree, facing east, before the snow comes.”

The timing matters. Small owls start looking for nest holes in late winter, in February and March. A box that goes up now, in the fall, has the whole winter to weather and lose its new-wood smell. A box that goes up in April is too late for this year.

She isn’t running a sale. She is handing over a job she can’t do anymore. Anyone who hangs one of her last boxes this fall gives a small owl the hole an old tree used to give it.

“By March There Was an Owl in the Hole” — What Readers Say About Arlene’s Boxes

Sent in by a reader in Guelph: “She sits in the hole every afternoon.”

• ★★★★★

  “Hung it on the old maple in October, facing east like the card said. By March a little grey screech-owl was sitting in the hole every afternoon. My grandson checks for her before the school bus.”

  Doug M., Guelph
• ★★★★★

  “I’d bought two cheap boxes before and nothing ever used them. One came apart in the first winter. This one is solid, and the clean-out door tells you somebody who actually climbed ladders made it.”

  Linda R., Peterborough
• ★★★★★

  “Bought it for my dad, who was sure the owls had left his road for good. He phoned me the night he heard one calling from it. Seventy-nine and whispering so he wouldn’t scare it off.”

  Karen T., Belleville

Before You Order — What People Ask Arlene Most

More From the Backyards They Went To

• ★★★★★

  “Heavier and better made than I expected. Easy to hang with the bracket, and the door really does open in two minutes.”

  Ron S., Barrie
• ★★★★★

  “A kestrel pair raised four young in it this summer, on the side of our barn. We watched them every evening.”

  Sandra P., Stratford
• ★★★★★

  “You can tell a person made this, not a machine. Worth far more than I paid.”

  Gary W., Cobourg