News on our Owl Project

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We’re very excited to announce that South Oxfordshire District Council (SODC) has granted us funding for 12 months for our new owl project!

Thank you very much to SODC!

The funds cover East and West Hagbourne parishes but as a three parish group we’ll be finding other funds to make it a full HUGS project, including Upton parish.

Why owls?

Having a healthy owl population is a sign of healthy countryside. Owls are top of the food chain, so helping owls means helping all of the wildlife on our land / in our gardens.

What’s involved?

We’ll be providing and enhancing habitat for owls (including nest boxes) and encouraging lots of wildlife-friendly gardening. Little Owls and Tawnies can be regular visitors to gardens looking for prey or somewhere to roost.

Your help is key

We want you to keep sending in your emails about hearing and seeing owls this year please. You’re already helping us to identify which owls we have and where - which is fantastic! If you can, please use the what3words app on your phone or add in your postcode in the email. Keep sending us your owl emails please to lusowls@btinternet.com.

Nest boxes installed

Lu Barton, our owl specialist, is using your owl sightings to survey areas where they are likely to be roosting / hunting. With landowner permission, Lu and her small team will then be installing nest boxes. Next, Lu will monitor the boxes across the year for activity and feed the data back to the British Trust for Ornithology.

We’ll be putting up boxes for -

  • Little Owls

  • Tawny Owls

  • Barn Owls

More info about these three species on our owls page.

Wildlife Garden Competition

We want to make our parishes even more owl-friendly so will be running a wildlife garden competition for everyone to enter. We’ll give you lots of ideas on how to help wildlife!

Enhanced habitat

We’ll also be doing some planting in the three parishes. This includes planting more trees and shrubs for our future owls!

And for more immediate help for owls, we’re encouraging -

  • Less / no chemical use on the land / gardens

  • Leaving grass longer for voles and other prey species to live in

  • Taller hedges especially bordering roads (to reduce deaths of owls and other bird species)

  • Enough hedges and trees to roost / nest in

  • Corridors of habitat, whether that’s trees, hedgerows or rough, unmanaged grass / verges to link areas for wildlife, including owls

Volunteers

We would love to work with lots of volunteers on this project. Government guidelines for managing the pandemic are obviously making that impossible still.

But please do email us at hugsustainability@gmail.com and we can add you to our mailing list and let you know when we’re able to get outdoors together.

p.s. many thanks to David Bird and Ron Blackburn for their beautiful photos

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2021 Wildlife Garden Competition

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HUGS AGM 2021