Night Owls On Main Street

WAI T SBURG - The first giveaway was a pellet.

Nathaniel Farnam found it one day in late January when he came in to work on the Loundagin building next to the post office as he has for more than a year, helping turn it into a boutique hotel.

It was an unusual excre- tion. Most pellets of its kind are ovoids, about the size and shape of a chocolate Easter egg or formed like a little Almond Rocca log. This one was spherical, not the shape of what he thought it belonged to.

But when Farnam took it home and dissected it, finding the tiny bones, teeth, hair and other indigestible parts of a field mouse, his first hunch was right. The object had been ejected by an owl.

Farnam is well familiar with owl pellets. He used to have a side business in college searching the countryside for barn owners who would let him collect pellets to sell to universities for classes.

"They're worth money as teaching aids," he said. "A good barn could make you $1,000 a day."

Now Farnam owns Living

Space, a custom homebuilding business in Walla Walla. He wasn't completely surprised to find evidence of owls in the building, whose high interior spaces, not yet sheet rocked, have the kind of rafters that make it look and feel like a barn to the owls.

Since the first discovery, he has found and collected dozens of the tar-colored pellets in the building.

Farnam first saw the stealthy intruders a week after he found the first pellet. He arrived early for work and saw two barn owls near the skylight high above the front entrance stairwell. One flew away, while the other one simply sat there and stared at him like the Phantom of the Opera.

It's not uncommon to hear or see owls in or around Waitsburg. Bar owner Jim German said a family of great horned owls has been shacking up in one of the larger trees in Preston Park for some time, and he can hear them at night from the upstairs windows in his Main Street building.

Barn owls, whose Latin name is Tyto alba (meaning "white owl"), are the most common of their species in the world. They can be found almost anywhere except polar or desert regions, and they go by many other names that describe them in some way: Silver Owl, Demon Owl, Ghost Owl, Night Owl, Church Owl, Rat Owl and even Cave Owl and Hobgoblin Owl.

Farnam's first reaction was one of bemusement.

"I thought, 'Cool, owls,'" the veteran contractor said.

But he quickly realized a downside to having the squatters at his construction site .

First, they wouldn't leave. Like nocturnal teenagers, they would sleep through the racket of machine tools and the loud eclectic music Farnam's crew enjoys without as much as batting an eye.

Then he was reminded that pellets aren't the only owlish secretion.

"If they didn't poop on our tools, I would be happy to let them stay," said Farnam, who has been in construction for two decades and has dealt with lots of dead cats, bats and rats under floors and in walls, but never anything quite so exotic and alive as a moon-eyed owl.

Owls relieve themselves in black and white. One kind of secretion is urine-like, turned white by a high content of uric acid. The other is brown, but there isn't too much of it since owls regurgitate what they can't digest in the form of the pellets Farnam found.

Sure enough the framedin second story is littered with chalky splatter like spilled primer and accents of brown droppings.

At first, Farnam and his crew tried to tighten all the plywood boarding inside the hotel's giant windows, but it didn't work. At least one of the troublemakers was seen flapping down Main Street close to the midnight hour last week like some winged ghost floating above the bright street lights. Their silent flight is legendary, as is their piercing cry.

His buddy could be heard screeching behind the plywood inside the building. The opening left high above the boards must have been just big enough to squeeze by, Farnam said. The owls were gone the following morning, but returned later in the day, and the crew had had enough of being pummeled from above and decided to evict them, then button up the building real well so they couldn't return.

It's against the law to kill or hurt raptors. Not that it's in Farnam's nature. Still, he wanted to make sure nothing untoward would happen as the crew chased the animals through the high rafters in the hopes they would fly out through the window from which they had removed the plywood.

Five guys using a variety of gentle "shooing" methods at their disposal, including a lengthy yellow level, spent more than an hour encouraging the birds to leave the premises, but it wasn't until Farnam finally cornered and gently grabbed one of them that they "got" their eviction memo.

He was surprised how light the animal was, much of it puffed-up feathers. One of the workers caught the capture on video and put it on YouTube (youtube.com/ watch?v=UyU1o78zumQ)

The trespassers finally sent on their way, Farnam thought the owl saga was over. The crew covered all the front windows so even a mouse might have a tough time getting in, but this weekend the hobo owls came back.

"The plastic must have blown off in the back," Farnam said, noting it has been windy in the area recently, which may have lifted the temporary window covering .

Their return wouldn't surprise anyone who has trained a barn owl as a pet in the United Kingdom, where it's legal, and owners say they are notoriously stubborn.

But sooner or later, the construction crew will have closed off all entries, and the owls will have to find a real barn for roosting, Farnam said. "Hopefully, this will be the last chapter."