part of our issue of course is scale.That's a very relevant point in "pest" control. Creating owl, etc, habitat may help a little, but your garden is superb rodent habitat complete with a very dense, attractive rodent-food source unlike the habitat that owls and other predators usually hunt in. All those great veggies means your garden is capable of supporting far more rodents than the surrounding wild land, thus it's unlikely that you can attract sufficient native predators to control them: owls need a much larger area to live than your garden or that which a nesting box will provide. That's why cats and other methods of a full IPM strategy are surely going to be needed. A built environment like a garden has cycles, densities, and flows that are unlike those in wild land, no matter how much we try to make it behave like wild land. I'd love to believe that an owl box and native plantings would be enough, but it won't be.
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