If you're worried about ticks, put up an owl box.

The animal driving most Lyme disease in the eastern US is the white-footed mouse. Ticks that feed on them are far more likely to come away infected than ticks that feed on other animals. The bigger the local mouse population, the worse the next year's tick year.

A single barred owl pair raising chicks can take hundreds of rodents in a breeding season. Owls also don't carry Lyme. The bacterium can't survive their digestive tract, so an owl that eats an infected mouse is a dead end for the disease.

Researchers at the Cary Institute, the leading lab on Lyme ecology, have been explicit about this: "Landscapes that support predators have reduced Lyme disease risk."

One owl box on its own isn't going to fix a tick year. But a yard with owls, foxes, bobcats, and weasels in it has fewer mice, and a yard with fewer mice has fewer infected ticks.

If you have woods or fields nearby, a properly sized barn owl or screech owl box (different species, different boxes) is one of the most useful single things you can do for tick exposure at the landscape scale. Match the box to the owl that lives near you.

The mouse is the problem, owls are the solution.

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My main rooster checks for owls every morning before he lets anyone out of the enclosure. I’ve seen him stop them for 30 minutes until the owl in the tree across from the coop gave up and flew away. Owls are no joke if you have chickens and ducks.