Keep Barn Owls in Berkeley (KBOIB) is a small, dedicated band of birding enthusiasts who seek to preserve the small population of Barn Owls that makes Berkeley its home. The presence of these amazing birds provides opportunity to educate and inform the community of the
Barn Owl’s integral role in urban ecosystems.

"It's official! Last night the Berkeley City Council approved a resolution sponsored by Betty Olds and Dona Spring, designating the barn owl as our city bird. I was at Old City Hall for the event but did not make it into the Council chamber, which was packed with young jocks lobbying for the Derby Street baseball field.

"So Berkeley joins the company of San Francisco (whose almost-extirpated city bird is the California quail), Portland and Seattle (the great blue heron, in both cases), and Chicago (the peregrine falcon). The only other North American civic bird I was able to locate via Google is the beautiful and outlandish roseate spoonbill, adopted by Port Aransas, Texas." ...

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"... Barn owls, unusually for birds of prey, don't seem put off by the human presence. Cavity-nesters in the wild, they'll use man-made structures or ornamental street trees. They seem to have a particular liking for palms, nesting up inside the fronds. According to Cathy Garner, who runs that Fresno program, the scarcity of barns and dead trees has prompted more and more barn owls, rural and urban, to switch to palms. Several of the Berkeley nest sites I'm aware of are in palm trees, usually of the Canary Island date variety.

Unfortunately for the owls, some Berkeley property owners have decided they don't want them in the neighborhood. This year alone, two palms that historically hosted owl nests have been felled-one near Bancroft and Edwards, another on Curtis-and there may be more that I haven't heard about. Some of the responsible parties have claimed liability concerns, but I suspect the real reason is the noise: young owls can make quite a racket when begging for food, and keep it up most of the night..."

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"Behind their ghostly faces is one of the most elaborate sound-detection systems in nature, a model for research that led to the human cochlear implant. Channels in the facial ruff direct sounds to asymmetrically-placed ears: the opening of the right ear is tilted upward, the left ear downward. With different paths for high-frequency sounds from above and below, the owl can triangulate on the elevation and horizontal direction of the source. Sounds register in an aural map of three-dimensional space in the bird's midbrain, allowing it to target its prey in total darkness.

"That would mean house mice and rats for these urban owls. California studies show small mammals comprising 95 to 99 per cent of a barn owl's diet, but the mix varies: in rural areas, voles (67 per cent in one Alameda County sample), pocket gophers, deer mice, and shrews predominate. You can tell what owls have been eating by dissecting the pellets, containing the hard parts of their prey, that they regurgitate at roost sites. North Bay naturalist Stan Moore says there's a commercial market for barn owl pellets for science classes: "They're graded like chicken eggs." ...

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