The Breeding Centre
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Located on 25 acres of land in Langley, BC, the Breeding Centre houses the owls in 28 aviaries and has buildings for our office, incubation and hand-raising, and our rodent colonies.
Our office is home base at the NSOBP. Here we do everything from answering emails, to monitoring our nest cameras, to preparing the owl diets, and having meetings.
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Our Incubation and Hand-Raising building is where all owl eggs and chicks are cared for by our biologists and interns. The building is kept as clean as possible and is only open for public viewing outside of breeding season.
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Our rodent building is home to about 100 rats and 300 mice and provides food for the owls. Everyday we spend about three hours in this building feeding and cleaning our rodent colonies. Their health is of the utmost importance as it directly affects the owls. By producing our own owl food we know that it is of the highest quality, and allows us to feed live mice for hunting.
Even though the owls are in captivity, we strive to keep them as wild as possible. Our aviaries are large, 40 feet long x 20 feet wide x 24 feet high, and filled with trees, rocks, logs and stumps. The aviaries are spread out on the 25 acre semi-forested property to give each owl its own little territory, something we've found is very important for breeding for the males. Each pair is given two enclosures that are connected, so they have lots of room to fly and get some alone time if needed. They are also provided with two nesting sites so that they can choose for themselves where they will lay their eggs.
Click on the video below for a walkthrough of Jay and Bella's aviaries!
Our camera system provides an amazing view into the world of the owls. We watch for feeding and courtship behaviours on the aviary cameras, and monitor eggs and chicks on the nest cameras. Below is a gallery of some of the images we see on camera.
