In 2012, one of our founding Coalition Members began development of what was to be their Barn Owl Maintenance Program (BOMP). Their motivation for this was to find nesting barn owls with owlets, that could be used to foster the orphaned barns that were being admitted into their licensed rehabilitation center’s wildlife hospital.

With the sole purpose of trying to locate active nests inside barn owl boxes, they began a search that led them to find deplorable living conditions for barn owls occupying various nest boxes installed by a variety of barn owl box companies. While some of the boxes explored had a great box design, most of the boxes had a very poor design, offering only cramped space where owls could barely move around inside the box.

This owl box is too small, creating cramped conditions. As you can see in this video, this female is nesting on the dead remains of another owl.

Other boxes were unsafe and had not ever been cleaned out. Barn owls defecate, urinate and cough up large pellets inside the box. This is especially true for a nest box full of owlets. Because some of the boxes were either built using a poor design, old or falling apart; many of the boxes had damp and moldy debris in them. On many occasions, deceased chicks and or adults were found inside these boxes. In all of these deplorable conditions, the barn owl boxes were either abandoned or still being occupied despite these very poor conditions.

Many of the boxes we serviced had damp and moldy debris in them. Although these conditions are unhealthy for the birds, instinct will drive them to nest there anyway. For this reason, it’s critical that annual maintenance be performed.

This led to the belief that there were few people who understood the need for maintenance of these boxes and it was found that the owls using the boxes must have been pretty desperate as they are natural cavity nesters. Some additional findings were that many of the boxes were in poor locations and were not being used or were also attracting predators that can predate on young and adult owls occupying these poorly designed and placed boxes.

With these issues in mind, they begin to try and find solutions for these concerning problems. It was soon discovered over a 6-year period, that there were not many people even aware of these problems, much less doing anything about it. But soon that would change.

One lucky day, this wildlife organization, Sonoma County Wildlife Rescue, found out about Dr. Matt Johnson, a professor at Humboldt State University, who had been doing research in Napa County for two years with his graduate students. They were researching the barn owl box occupancy percentages in vineyards and the mortality rates of owlets, hunting ranges and other fascinating research. It was discovered after contacting Dr. Johnson, that he had published several papers with his graduate students that had extremely valuable information from his research. Click here to see those research papers.

The other great thing that happened was that Napa Wildlife Rescue’s Board President, John Comisky, was interested in starting a barn owl maintenance program for his wildlife center in Napa. With much excitement, Sonoma County Wildlife Rescue founded the BOMP Coalition in partnership with co-founders Dr. Matt Johnson of Humboldt State University and John Comisky of Napa Wildlife Rescue.

Their mission was to create a coalition of wildlife professionals with a shared commitment to operate Barn Owl Maintenance Programs with the highest standards, ethics and practices.

One of their most important goals was to help other wildlife organizations or individuals start their own programs to help provide a revenue stream to sustain the work and support other not-for-profit work that benefit wildlife.