As Salinas Oldtown becomes livelier, a pair of barn owls moves into an old building.

When Trish Sullivan first saw the wide wingspan flapping down Main Street in Oldtown Salinas, she thought it was nothing special. “I saw this huge white bird,” she says. “At first I thought it was a seagull.”

After the bird landed, Sullivan looked closer and realized it was something more unusual: a barn owl. A pair has taken up residence in a hole in the facade of an Oldtown building, directly across the street from Destination Salinas, the visitor center and gallery where Sullivan is director.

She keeps it open until 8pm, after many fellow business owners have shut down, around the time the owls emerge to hunt each night. About three weeks ago she first spotted the birds, whose wingspans are close to 4 feet.

This nesting duo lives in a small hole in the facade of 215 S. Main St., just above the old Odd Fellows Temple sign. That’s the fraternal organization affiliated with the Garden of Memories cemetery on Abbott Street. Odd Fellows owned the building until 2010, when it sold it to Taylor Fresh Foods, which is currently building a new headquarters a block away.

This building has been vacant since the last tenant, the Monterey County Republican Central Committee, moved to a Monterey location in 2011.

There’s been some interior work in recent weeks on the building, with the old Republican sign coming down and a dumpster out back filling up. Barring major construction, barn owls are willing to tolerate a lot of human activity.

“They adapt to manmade, cavelike sites to use for nesting,” says Don Roberson, senior author of the Atlas of the Breeding Birds of Monterey County, published in 1993 by the local chapter of the Audubon Society.

Volunteers surveyed the entire county for use in the atlas. They counted 600 pairs of barn owls, sighting them in 68 of 385 3-by-3-mile blocks. Barn owls are not rare, but they’re especially noticeable in an urban setting.

“It’s remarkable because it’s right inside a town,” Roberson says.

The atlas chapter on barn owls opens with this portrait: “Gliding on silent wings, the barn owl looks like a ghost as it systematically searches open fields for rodents.”

Indeed, on a recent evening, the male owl perches, unmoving, on the wire connecting the Odd Fellows sign to the wall. He doesn’t react to drunken laughter below or sirens in the distance, or when a passerby stops to take a cell phone photo of him.

When he finally glides across the street with a few powerful pumps of his wings, photographer Miguel Santiago is perched on the edge of a planter with a long Minolta lens, ready for the shot.

Santiago heard about the owls from Sullivan at First Friday Artwalk. Since then, he has spent dozens of evening hours hanging out for photos.

Barn owls in this area generally build nests in February, and owlets hatch by April. Officials from Taylor Farms didn’t return calls by deadline to comment on how that timeline meshes with their construction plans.

Meanwhile, Taylor Farms continues to buy up Oldtown real estate. On March 17, City Council approved a $400,000 sale of the old Salinas Street fire house to the company, which plans to have it ready for commercial use by July.