Sometimes you see a barn and you know it has owls.
A helpful person had put up an owl box. Owls had accepted it. Not recently, judging by the size of the charnel scatter of debris below, full of fragile white bones of rodents.
An owlet looked out. I think it was worried, maybe horrified. But it wasn't too frightened to stare.
Not all barns are suitable for owl nesting. When a barn is otherwise good but has no owl box, owls may nest on a corner between rafters.
This old barn is so great that I think it would have an owl nest even without the box. It's made of solid beams and planks, strongly joined.
Before there were barns, these owls nested in natural places like holes in trees. Humans have reduced the number of trees (and many humans object to trees with holes in them, with the notion that such trees are diseased, unsound, and liable to drop heavy limbs onto humans including small beloved children running through the park to raise awareness for kidney disease).
However, we have put up barns which can be nested in. Barns attract rodents, useful to barn owls, since an owl family may eat more than a thousand in a year.
Barn owls evolved hunting in meadows and along forest edges and nesting in trees. Some still do so, but others hunt on agricultural land and nest in agricultural buildings. We're not completely useless to owls.
Even if we give them the creeps.
