Tune into one of the live feeds from the Port of Stockton and you might catch an ivory, heart-shaped face filling the frame — a curious barn owl settling inside its wooden nest box.
The box is one of twenty stationed high between the port’s industrial warehouses, each perched on a wooden rod; a small refuge where native owls can lay their eggs and raise their young.
And down below, at one of three nest boxes fitted with cameras on a recent Thursday morning, a cluster of the owls’ human caretakers craned to peek at the ghost-like raptors in action.
“He was standing in front,” said one — Jeff Wingfield, deputy director of the port’s environmental programs and public outreach department, as he squinted at the live feed on his phone of a resting male barn owl.
Moments earlier, said owl had been “showing off his tail” from inside the port’s most westward nest box just before Wingfield and two others from his staff, Julia Ulm and Steven Bender, had arrived.
“The owls are funny,” said Wingfield, speaking with an obvious affection for the raptors. “They’re very inquisitive. You’ll see them around the camera — bobbing their head and like checking out to see what it is.”
For twenty years, Wingfield and his environmental team have maintained the owl boxes, a project that began with just a couple handcrafted by Wingfield and Bender.
Eventually, they installed video cameras at some nest sites — a suggestion from the port’s director who, Wingfield said, probably doubted that a single owl family could eat as many as 2,000 rodents.
“Maybe it was because he didn’t believe me,” said Wingfield with a laugh. “Whatever the case, we ended up putting it on our website.”
The project first started in the early 2000s, Wingfield said, shortly after the port had taken over Stockton’s historic “Rough and Ready Island,” which served as a 1,400+ acre naval base in the 1940s.
“Some of the buildings were not even safe,” Wingfield said. “We were gonna tear them down because they were just a problem.”
While inspecting the naval buildings for asbestos and lead-based paint, Wingfield and Bender had each discovered the owls sequestered inside.
“It was pretty intimidating,” said Wingfield as he remembered owls “trying to get out,” one even “coming at” him, during an inspection of the old naval buildings. “It’s something you remember forever.”
Today, the birds have taken to the sheltered nook enclosures, the same birds and their offspring returning year after year to nest, Wingfield said.
One of several owl boxes at the Port of Stockton in Stockton, CA
“It’s better to have them out here, in nature, then up in all the buildings where they’re getting disturbed all the time,” Wingfield added, noting that the boxes are kept in the port’s quiet outskirts.
Since the project started, up to 2,000 barn owls have hatched inside the nest boxes, Bender said a colleague once estimated. A typical clutch size — the number of eggs a bird lays in a nesting attempt — is typically about four, Wingfield said, with some nests at the port having had as many as seven eggs.
March and April are when the female owls are typically “all on eggs” for about a month before the chicks break out, Wingfield said. At this stage, the male owl starts stockpiling rodents for his soon-to-arrive hatchlings.
“He just keeps going,” Wingfield said. “He’ll get a whole pile of rats, or gophers or something.”
Three weeks after hatching, the “owlets” (as Bender calls them, Wingfield prefers “baby owls”), begin learning to fly. Some manage a few flaps before falling, then climbing back up the nest box’s long pole, described Wingfield, a scene viewers can also watch from the live feed’s exterior cameras.
The mound of dead rodents (sometimes, smaller birds) in time turns into scattered pellets — regurgitated bones and fur the owls could not digest. Bender is usually the one tasked to clean up the nest boxes in September once the owls have left.
“It’s really cool. It can be gross,” said Wingfield, recalling a time when Bender had “juices drip down his face.”
“But it’s nature,” he added with a shrug.
What started as a way to support the local barn owl population and naturally keep rodents from weakening the port’s levees has since become a “cool way to connect with the community,” Ulm said.
An owl puppet that is given out at educational demonstrations at the Port of Stockton in Stockton, CA.
“Programs like this make working at the port fun and fulfilling,” said Ulm, who also helps with the project’s outreach in schools, which includes bringing miniature owl finger puppets and letting students dissect the bird’s leftover pellets.
Inside each box, framed just before the owls’ nest, a placard reads “Ours to Protect” — a testament to the port’s “care” for the Delta, Wingfield said.
“We want to provide more than just port operations. We’re trying to be better,” said Wingfield, responding to environmentalists’ criticisms of the harbor’s ecological footprint. “Make nature a part of our operations.”
A cellphone shows a video feel of one of several owl boxes at the Port of Stockton in Stockton, CA.
(I see owls in 2 of the 3 boxes right now. They're snoozing.)
It's got the right form down, but that confidence could use work.