{"id":785092,"date":"2026-09-28T08:26:09","date_gmt":"2026-09-28T08:26:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/785092\/"},"modified":"2026-09-28T08:26:09","modified_gmt":"2026-09-28T08:26:09","slug":"tees-valley-barn-owl-chick-numbers-exceed-expectations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/785092\/","title":{"rendered":"Tees Valley barn owl chick numbers &#8216;exceed expectations&#8217;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Wildlife campaigners on Teesside are celebrating a bumper year for the barn owl population.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">The Tees Valley Wildlife Trust has been running a project to boost the number of birds, which has been in decline due to a loss of nesting habitats, by installing nest boxes sponsored by the public.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Volunteers have been putting rings on owlets to track their location and survival. Last year they ringed 270  chicks, so far this year they have done 541.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Colin Gibson, lead volunteer for the project said the 2026 breeding season had &#8220;exceeded all expectations&#8221;, with the success being put down to a mild winter, dry summer and the specially-designed boxes.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Gibson, who has been involved with the project for the past 15 years, said: &#8220;We knew we were in for an interesting year when we found birds had reached breeding condition and started laying two to three weeks early.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;We&#8217;ve also seen larger clutch and brood sizes, up significantly from the long-term average of 3.0 birds per brood to 3.7 this year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Wildlife campaigners on Teesside are celebrating a bumper year for the barn owl population. The Tees Valley Wildlife&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":785093,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[90,56,54,55,4407],"class_list":["post-785092","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wildlife","tag-science","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom","tag-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/785092","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=785092"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/785092\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/785093"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=785092"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=785092"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=785092"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}