TUNE IN TO ONE OF THE LIVE FEEDS from the Port of Stockton and you might catch an ivory, heart-shaped face filling the frame — a curious barn owl settling inside its wooden nest box.
The box is one of 20 stationed high between the port’s industrial warehouses. Each is perched on a wooden rod, a small refuge where native owls can lay their eggs and raise their young.
On a recent Thursday morning, a cluster of the owls’ human caretakers craned to see the ghost-like raptors in action while watching a live-feed camera fitted into one of three nest boxes.
“He was standing in front,” said Jeff Wingfield, deputy director of the port’s environmental programs and public outreach department, as he squinted at the live feed on his phone of a resting male barn owl.
Moments earlier, Wingfield said the owl had been “showing off his tail” from inside the port’s most westward nest box before he and two others from his staff — Julia Ulm and Steven Bender — had arrived.
“The owls are funny,” said Wingfield, speaking with an obvious affection for the raptors. “They’re very inquisitive. You’ll see them around the camera, bobbing their head and, like, checking out to see what it is.”
Thousands of rodents later
For 20 years, Wingfield and his environmental team have maintained the owl boxes, a project that began with only a couple of boxes handcrafted by Wingfield and Bender.
Eventually, they installed video cameras at some of the nest sites — a suggestion from the port’s director, who probably doubted that a single owl family could eat as many as 2,000 rodents.
“Maybe it was because he didn’t believe me,” Wingfield said with a laugh. “Whatever the case, we ended up putting it on our website.”
The project first started in the early 2000s, Wingfield said, shortly after the port had taken over Stockton’s historic Rough and Ready Island, which served as a 1,400-acre naval base in the 1940s.
“Some of the buildings were not even safe,” Wingfield said. “We were gonna tear them down because they were just a problem.”
While inspecting the naval buildings for asbestos and lead-based paint, Wingfield and Bender discovered some owls sequestered inside.
“It was pretty intimidating,” said Wingfield as he remembered owls “trying to get out,” one even “coming at” him during an inspection of the old Navy buildings. “It’s something you remember forever.”
Today, the birds have taken to their newer sheltered nook enclosures, with the same birds and their offspring returning year after year to nest, Wingfield said.
“It’s better to have them out here, in nature, than up in all the buildings where they’re getting disturbed all the time,” Wingfield said, noting that the boxes are in the port’s quiet outskirts.
Since the project started, up to 2,000 barn owls have hatched inside the nest boxes, Bender said. A typical clutch — the number of eggs a bird lays in a nesting attempt — is four, Wingfield said, with some nests at the port having had as many as seven eggs.
March and April are when the female owls are typically “all on eggs” for about a month before the chicks break out, Wingfield said. At this stage, the male owls start stockpiling rodents for their soon-to-arrive hatchlings.
“He just keeps going,” Wingfield said. “He’ll get a whole pile of rats, or gophers or something.”
Owlets take wing
Three weeks after hatching, the baby owls — or owlets — begin learning to fly. Some manage a few flaps before falling, then climb back up the nest box’s long pole, Wingfield said, a scene viewers can also watch from the live feed’s exterior cameras.
The mound of dead rodents (and sometimes, smaller birds) in time turns into scattered pellets — regurgitated bones and fur the owls could not digest. Bender is usually the one tasked with cleaning up the nest boxes once the owls have left in September.
“It can be gross,” Wingfield said, recalling a time when Bender had “juices drip down his face.”
“But it’s nature,” he added with a shrug.
What started as a way to support the local barn owl population and naturally keep rodents from weakening the port’s levees has since become a “cool way to connect with the community,” Ulm said.
“Programs like this make working at the port fun and fulfilling,” said Ulm, who helps with the project’s outreach in schools. This includes bringing miniature owl finger puppets and letting students dissect the bird’s leftover pellets.
Inside each box, framed just before the owls’ nest, a placard reads “Ours to Protect” — a testament to the port’s care for the Delta, Wingfield said.
“We want to provide more than just port operations. We’re trying to be better,” Wingfield said, referencing environmentalists’ criticisms of the harbor’s ecological footprint. “Make nature a part of our operations.”
This story originally appeared in Stocktonia.
