I have never seen an owl in California
Alex Godbe, carrying Wookie, is founder of the Hungry Owl Project, which built the boxes.
-------------------------
Owls used for natural pest control in San Rafael
Six plywood homes were built this month next to the futuristic, blue-roofed Marin County Civic Center as part of an innovative, and slightly desperate, attempt to persuade owls to police the building's rampaging rat population.
The wily rodents have been wreaking havoc on government property at the San Rafael center. The buck-toothed vermin, it turns out, are a delicacy to barn owls, a family of which can gobble between 3,000 and 5,000 a year.
"Barn owls are most beneficial to man in controlling rodents, because they are cavity nesters and are easy to attract," said Alex Godbe, program director and founder of the Hungry Owl Project, which built the owl domiciles in cooperation with the county. "They are superb hunters with large appetites. Also, the barn owl is nonterritorial, so you can attract as many owls to an area as there is prey to eat."
Thus the owl boxes, five of them mounted on 10-foot posts and one in a tree. The boxes, constructed on Sept. 10, have holes in the front and were placed on the west side of the Civic Center, where experts said the nocturnal birds would best be able to see and hear the rodents tiptoeing in the dark.
Read more:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/09/22/BAPT1L71HV.DTL#ixzz1YuLNSGIL