First up was a Barn Owl box made and supplied by my buddy Shaun, gratefully received and taken to its positioning on site, I set about fixing it to a telegraph pole.
After cutting the pole to the required length, 3.8m out of the ground and 1.2 down, I connected the box to it, 4 screw bolts through the box into the pole and then 4 brackets screwed and bolted externally and it’s pretty solid.
It’s going in shortly so looking forward to this, especially how quickly the other Barn Owl pole box was adopted at another site last winter, 10 days if I remember correctly. I very much doubt it will happen again that quickly, as before I will place a Trail Cam to monitor it, however you never know............
The 2nd project was renewing some ply on an oldish box I made around 4 years ago, really exposed to the weather it has taken a battering with the ply flaking badly (crap ply) as you can see. To undertake this work I had the help of Paul.
As I have said before, I am very lucky to have some very good mates around me who help me no end, I also love it as I can boss them about a bit.
The replacement ply was for a successful peregrine box this year which fledged 2 juveniles, ironically they ignored it in 2020 but accepted it this year, they can be fickle and sometime there is no reason it seems.
I use 12mm ply simply down to the fact of lifting the box after, 18mm ply on a big peregrine box is bloody heavy moving it about on your own, however the 12mm ply tends to warp and fray easier.
In this case we put a back and 2 sides over the old stuff and fixed it with 70mm screws, a new timber at the front and fresh substrate and good to go. Peregrines are not house proud and as boxes go, this was one of the messiest ones I have seen for quite a while. I can only think they had no caching spots local, quite a lot of prey was inside the box, hidden away from the prying eyes of the local Corvids.
The rest as they say is up to the peregrines, fingers crossed she likes the renovation.
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