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Man shares apartment with family of huge owls

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A window box in Belgium became the last place anyone expected to find Europe’s largest owl raising a family.

In May 2020, the Dutch nature program Vroege Vogels aired footage from Geel, Belgium, showing a resident named Jos Baart living side by side with a wild Eurasian eagle-owl and her three chicks — all nesting in the planter box mounted right outside his third-floor living room window. Baart hadn’t invited them. He simply woke up one day to strange noises he assumed were pigeons, only to discover Europe’s biggest owl species had claimed his flower box as a delivery room.

• Jos Baart, a third-floor apartment resident in Geel, Belgium, found a wild Eurasian eagle-owl nesting in his window planter and initially mistook her calls for pigeons.
• The mother owl hatched three chicks that grew comfortable enough to press against the glass and watch television alongside Baart from their perch.
• Vroege Vogels published Baart’s footage in May 2020, and it drew international attention as a rare close-up of eagle-owls nesting in an urban setting rather than their usual cliffs and forest ledges.

A Nest Nobody Planned For

Eurasian eagle-owls are creatures of rock faces and remote woodland ledges — not window boxes on residential apartment blocks. That’s what made Baart’s discovery so strange to begin with. A female had somehow decided his third-floor planter, pressed flush against his living room glass, was safe enough to lay eggs in, and by the time Baart realized what was happening, the eggs had already hatched into three chicks.

Three Chicks and a Front-Row Seat to Television

What turned the story into an international clip wasn’t just the nest — it was how quickly the young owls adjusted to having a human a few feet away on the other side of the pane. Baart described the chicks regularly peering through the window and watching television with him, treating the glass less like a barrier and more like the edge of their own living room.

Three huge, fluffy chicks spent hours staring into the apartment — and Baart says they watched TV right along with him.

The Mother Kept Her Distance

While the chicks grew bold, the adult female stayed cautious, spending most of the day hunting or watching from a nearby vantage point rather than lingering at the nest. That split — trusting chicks, wary mother — is typical of how eagle-owls behave even in their natural rocky habitats, where the adults hunt everything from rodents to other birds of prey to feed a brood. It’s the same predator-and-prey dynamic that shows up across raptor coverage, whether it’s an eagle-owl working a Belgian apartment block or the hunting footage chronicled in Filming The World’s Deadliest Bird.

Geographic Significance of the Location

Eagle-owls rarely choose anything resembling a third-floor window box, which is exactly why Vroege Vogels ran with Baart’s footage. Their diet leans heavily on small mammals — not unlike the rodent surges that have made headlines elsewhere, such as the explosion covered in Millions of Mice Are Terrorizing Australia — so a planter box tucked against an apartment wall, with easy access to hunting ground nearby, apparently checked enough boxes for this particular female to take the risk.

Every night, Baart still had three owlets pressed against his window glass and a mother eagle-owl keeping watch from somewhere just out of sight, waiting for the next chance to bring a meal back to the nest she’d built four feet from his television set.

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