To promote The Screech Owl Companion, the Hachette Book Group is offering an awesome giveaway:

Grand Prize Package

Win a fantastic prize pack featuring everything you need to learn about screech owls and celebrate this spectacular species.

Enter to win and let your love for owls soar to new heights!

• The Screech Owl Companion by Jim Wright and Scott Weston
• Squirrel-resistant Screech Owl Nesting Box designed and built by Scott Weston.
• Audubon Little Owls 2024 Mini Wall Calendar 
• Screech Owl Puppet  

You can enter the giveaway here:

Screech Owl Book & Nestbox Giveaway 

(Hurry! Contest ends on Nov. 15.)

I am reposting this column from 2010 by popular demand, with an added link to The Screech Owl Companion.

Squirrels invading Screech Owl nesting boxes are like early stages of a forest fire: If you can fight them early enough, and persistently enough, you have a chance of putting them out. 

   One minute your Screech Owl is chilling in the box (left), and the next minute a squirrel has moved in with extreme prejudice.

    You cannot let the squirrel have a chance to get attached to her new digs. You as the landlord have to evict the squatter asap.

   In the eviction process,  I have found that a nesting box video cam attached to your TV or DVR is half the battle.

    Thanks to the mini-cam, and a three-pronged attack, I have had good success in evicting these bushy-tailed rodents.

   (Note: No squirrels were injured in the making of this blog post.)

               Photo by Barbara Dilger

My latest column for The Record is about the secret lives of White-throated Sparrows. (I did not write the headline that accompanies the column in the print edition of The Record.)

You can read it here:

A friend writes:

My daughter and I saw something very strange this morning when we were having breakfast. 

Flocks of birds (mostly Robins) gathered on the roof of her red Subaru in our driveway. It looked like a clip from the movie, "The Birds."

The birds kept flying in continuously and appeared to be having a huge convention with a delectable breakfast. To our knowledge, there wasn't any food on the roof for them to feast on.

The birds remained there for 35 minutes or more, and we could not tell if they were feasting before migrating south or preparing for bad weather due in this area over the weekend.

Can you explain?

For folks who can't get there these days...