Ten years of monitoring of the tawny owl in Kharkiv Region
Tuesday, April 10th, 2012 Posted in Monitoring, Photos | No Comments »We already published information on attracting the Tawny Owl to artificial nest boxes in Kharkiv region at our web-pages. The present material is dedicated to experience of attracting this owl species to artificial nests and some results of studying its ecology.
MONITORING RESULTS OF USING NEST BOXES
IN NATIONAL NATURAL PARK “HOMILSHANSKI FORESTS”
If you remember, in 2001-2002 a group of Kharkiv ornithologists and bird lovers installed 55 nests boxes for the Tawny Owl in the oak grove in the territory of the present NPP “Homilshanski Forests”. Regular checking of nest boxes and bird observations in the area allowed to receive a lot of information how the Tawny Owl lives in the oakery.
In particular, our initial assumptions about decreasing bird numbers due to felling of old hollow trees were not confirmed. The bird density was rather high (4-6 pairs/km2), similar to the highest known figures among European populations, and bird numbers in the studied area kept stable for 10 years. With such a high density, a number of territorial pairs in the area exceeded the number of installed nest boxes. However, most pairs preferred natural hollows for nesting. Special studies to clarify to what extent the birds are supplied with hollows showed that the density of hollows in the area (1.9 hollows/10 ha) much exceeds the number of owl boxes (0.1 box/10 ha). Though this parameter much depends on the forest age, obtained results can be extrapolated to other forest-steppe oak groves of Eastern Ukraine.
