Col's Last Owl Boxes
“I have counted owls every spring for thirty-eight years. There are fewer every year, and I can prove it.”
Why a seventy-three-year-old wildlife carer from Victoria is selling his last hand-built owl boxes for far less than they are worth, before his shed closes for good.
A moth owl in the doorway of one of Col Brennan’s boxes. The bird cannot make this hole itself.
A moth owl weighs about as much as a golf ball. One morning, a baby moth owl sat in a pile of sawdust next to Col Brennan’s farm. She blinked up at him. Her home was lying on the ground beside her — an old dead tree, cut down that same morning.
One saw, one morning. The only owl hole for a kilometre was gone by lunch.
Nobody did anything wrong. The tree was dead and it leaned over a fence. So it came down, like thousands of dead trees do every week in Australia. Nobody thought about what lived inside it.
This is happening all over the country. Col has written down the owls near his home every spring for thirty-eight years. Every year, there are fewer. The birds are not sick. They are not weak. They are losing their homes.
No hole, no owl. It really is that simple.
The bird that cannot build its own front door
A cockatoo can chew a hole into a tree. A moth owl can’t. It has to find a hole that is already there — and those holes are made by the tree itself, very slowly.
Here is the part most people never hear: a gum tree needs about a hundred years to grow a hole big enough for a moth owl. Bigger owls need even older trees.
So the owls need old trees. But old dead trees look messy and dangerous, so people cut them down. Every hole in that tree is lost. And so is every hole it would have grown in the years to come.
Around Col’s home in Maldon, most of the old forest was cut down during the gold rush. What grew back is thousands of thin, young trees. None of them are old enough to have a hole.
And the few holes that are left? Starlings, mynas and wild bees often take them first. The moth owl has to wait in line.
- A moth owl cannot make its own hole. It needs an old tree to give it one.
- A tree needs more than a hundred years to grow a hole that birds can use.
- In Australia, more than 300 kinds of animals need tree holes to live.
- The moth owl is not rare. There are plenty of them. What they are missing is a place to live.
Sources: NSW Scientific Committee; Australian Government hollow-ecology reviews; BirdLife Australia.
This is what makes Col so frustrated. The birds are there. The bush is there. The moths are there. Only one thing is missing: a hole of the right size, in the right place.
And that is the one thing an ordinary person can fix in one afternoon.
Thirty-eight years of giving the owls their homes back
Col Brennan in his shed near Maldon, Victoria. He has a card for every box he ever hung.
I visited Col on a cold morning at the end of winter. He met me at the door of his old tin shed. He is seventy-three. For thirty-eight years he looked after hurt wild animals. And in his spare time, he built homes for birds.
Inside the shed there is one old saw, a wall of tools, and a tin full of owl pellets he used to show school kids. Out the window you can see the thin young trees of the old gold fields.
Col has built and hung more than sixteen hundred nest boxes. On roadsides, in parks, at schools, on farms. For every box, he wrote a card: where it hangs, and who moved in.
“People hear nest box and think of a birdhouse,” he says. “It isn’t a birdhouse. It’s a tree hole. And a tree hole is the one thing this country ran out of. Nobody noticed, because you can’t see a hole that isn’t there.”
The moth owl is a tiny grey bird with a face like a kitten. Strictly speaking, it isn’t a true owl — scientists call it an owlet-nightjar. But out here, everyone calls it the moth owl or the fairy owl. On sunny days it likes to sit in its doorway with its eyes half shut.
“A moth owl can’t make its own door. It takes what an old tree gives it. And an old tree takes a hundred years.”
Why he still builds every single one by hand
Every box is cut and built by the same two hands.
Col calls his box “a tree hole you can carry.” He builds each one alone, by hand. No factory. No helpers.
Most nest boxes from shops are built wrong. The wood is too thin, they are painted, and you can never open them to clean. Col has climbed enough ladders to know. Five things make his box different:
Col cuts every door hole by hand to 95 millimetres, high up near the roof. Big enough for a moth owl. Too small for a big possum to push in and take over. “That one hole decides who moves in,” Col says.
From the door down to the eggs is 33 centimetres — longer than a school ruler. Kookaburras and lizards can’t reach that far. “Deep boxes raise birds,” he says. “Shallow ones just feed the hunters.”
Thick, plain pine. No paint, no chemicals — ever. Birds stay away from the smell of paint, and dark boxes get too hot in summer. “A painted box says keep out,” Col says.
The whole front swings open on one hook. Cleaning takes about two minutes a year. That stops starlings or wild bees from moving in for good.
Baby birds leave the box before they can really fly. So Col cuts small grooves inside by hand, like a ladder, so they can climb out. “Without it, a box is a bucket,” he says.
Inside one of Col’s boxes: a moth owl with two chicks, and the climb-out ladder up to the door.
The baby owl in the sawdust
For thirty years, moth owls came to the light on Col’s back porch every night. They caught moths while he drank his tea. His grandkids called them “the cats with wings.”
The owls lived in a dead tree in the neighbour’s paddock. In 2018, that tree was cut down.
“There was a chick in the sawdust,” Col says. “Sitting there, blinking at us. The two men with the saw felt as bad as I did. They didn’t do anything wrong. None of us thought about it until the tree was on the ground.”
Col raised the little owl on his kitchen table. He called her Poss. When she was ready, he put her into the very first box he built just for moth owls. She lived in it for six springs.
“But nothing has come back to my porch light since,” he says. “Eight years now. You don’t miss a bird while it’s there. You miss it after it’s gone.”
“I built the rest of them so someone else gets to have an owl at their light. That’s all this has ever been.”
Col weighed and wrote down every bird that ever came through his shed.
Why these are the last ones
His hand is still strong. But it can no longer feel the wood.
Col can still cut a straight board. But this year, something changed.
Decades of Australian sun hurt the skin on his right hand. In March, doctors had to operate. The hand healed, but it was never the same.
“The strength is there,” he says, and makes a fist. “But the feeling is gone. You cut the door hole by feel. I can’t feel it anymore. And a rough door can hurt a young bird on its way out.”
That same month, he stopped caring for hurt animals. He did not want to hold a scared bird with a hand he can’t feel. These boxes are the last work his hands can still do well.
“When that pile on the bench is gone, that’s it. No helper, no second batch.”
There are fifty-eight boxes left in the shed. When they are gone, the saw stops for good.
He’d rather see them in a tree than make money
Each box takes Col most of a day to build. Honestly, it should cost two or three times more. Steph, the park ranger who set up his online shop, told him to raise the price. He said no.
“If I charge too much, someone buys one just to decorate their hallway,” he says. “I don’t want them in hallways. I want them up in a tree before spring.”
The timing matters. Moth owls look for a home from September to December. The box needs to be up before they start looking.
Col isn’t running a sale. He is passing on a job he can no longer do.
“Take one, hang it up properly, and give a bird a home. Do that, and I’ll sleep fine when the shed is empty.”
High up in a tree, facing east, before spring. That’s all Col asks.
What people are seeing after dark
“We hung it on the big tree out the back in August. By October a moth owl was sitting in the door most afternoons. The kids check on it before school every day.”
“I bought two cheap nest boxes online before this. No bird ever used them, and one fell apart in the first winter. This one is built like good furniture.”
“I bought it for my dad. He thought the little owls were gone from his road for good. He called me the night two of them showed up — seventy-nine years old and whispering so he wouldn’t scare them.”