GILLETTE — June and Bruce are kind of an odd couple. From what we know, their lifestyle has been fairly normative in the sense that they’ve stuck together for years, raised their young, then watched them grow up and leave home.

That’s what’s normal. What’s odd is the home they chose. The exact timeline is unclear, but roughly since Menards was built in Gillette around 2015, two great horned owls, June and Bruce, have made their home inside of it.

For years, unsuspecting shoppers and locals in the know have wandered into the outdoor garden center during the late winter into the spring months and found the owls — and their eggs or owlets — taking residence up above.

“The owls have been here way before me,” said Jeremy Hempel, first assistant general manager, who has kept a watchful eye on the owls during his four years with Menards.

No one knows exactly how old the owls are, where they came from or why they chose a Gillette indoor garden center to make their home and raise their young. But throughout the past eight years or so, the owls and their offspring have gained quite the reputation and following.

Erika Peckham isn’t sure exactly when she became aware of the Menards owls, but she vaguely remembers how she learned of them. As a Gillette-based biologist for Wyoming Game and Fish, her purview mostly contains outdoor spaces. However that scope expanded into the Gillette home improvement store when she got a report of an injured owl some years back.

The owl was rehabbed, re-introduced to the area and ultimately resettled itself into Menards. Now Peckham checks on the couple’s newly-laid eggs early in the year and keeps an eye on the odd spaces they choose for their nests each year.

Unlike many other birds, owls — even in the wild — do not build their own nests. And while June and Bruce set up camp in the outdoor garden center early in the year through the spring, they ultimately leave for their second home — the lumber barn also on the Menards lot — before returning again and finding a new nest in the garden center when it’s time to again lay eggs.

This year, the nest is high in the air atop several rows of pallet racking, in an uncomfortable but sufficient enough stack of what are effectively baskets. The owls were able to drag plastic sheeting into the “nest” and laid the eggs right on top of it. It’s not ideal, but it got the job done.

“There’s no nest material or anything there, other than some wadded up clear plastic material,” Peckham said. “It’s just kind of funny. With their allegiance to a nest site that works for them, I think that’s just why they keep coming back.”

Great horned owls are protected by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, which prohibits the killing, capturing, selling, trading and transporting of the bird, among a number of others, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. To try moving the owls would require permission and assistance from the federal agency, but there’s been no need for that.

“They’re a protected species so they’re staying here as long as they possibly can,” Hempel said.

June has laid eggs in Menards every year, Hempel said, but she and Bruce had better luck this year than most.

“This is the first year we’ve had three hatch all the way through,” he said.

Those babies have names too: Service, Hades and Pluto. Service established himself as the leader of the bunch, fledging before his siblings and using his young wings to fly between  aisles, while Hades and Pluto were limited to hopping from pallet to pallet.

Not much more than a month old, the birds had already grown to a good size, but were still covered in downy feathers and without their full range of motion.

“When they’re fledged, they come out of the nest, but mom and dad still feed them and they’re teaching them how to hunt and fly,” said Meghan Anderson, a Menards employee.

But they mostly coexist with the swallows and other birds that spend time near the ceilings of the large warehouse space.

The wildlife exhibit may be more than some bargain for when looking for plants, mulch or whatever else brought them to the store that day, but it’s by and large a hit with customers.

“They love them,” Hempel said.

Despite the oddity of a couple of them playing house in Menards, there have been others to find unlikely nests at industrial and non-wilderness sites.

What’s different about Menards is the number of people in and out of the store each day.

“It’s generally open to the public and people are going in and out, there’s a fair amount of activity,” Peckham said. “From that standpoint, it’s kind of unique.”

Perhaps it’s that unique quality that’s made the owls such a fixture of the Gillette store’s culture and identity, for what’s otherwise yet another branch of a home improvement business.

“They’re kind of, how do I put it, they’re kind of like our mascot,” Hempel said.

No one is sure how old June and Bruce are. Already pushing a decade inside Menards, it’s also unclear how many more nesting seasons they have left.

“It’s thought that they definitely could mate for life, if not for life, then at least for several years,” Peckham said. “This is likely the same pair that keeps coming back. The young would come back on their own and find their own mates and own nest sites.”

It’s one thing for the owls to watch their young grow from egg to adult in a matter of months, but what about for the employees who share that experience? Isn’t it sad to see the owlets grow up and leave their home behind?

“Oh no, no. It makes you happy,” Anderson said. “Because you know they were raised successfully and they can be out there making more owls. That’s kind of the whole idea, keep down rodent population and all that.

“There’s not enough predators in this community that way. They’re good, for sure.”

By now, Hades and Pluto may have already joined Service in gaining their flight wings. Not long after that, they’ll be left to fend for themselves, and find a mate and a nest of their own.

There’s no telling just where those three owlets will be by this time next year.

If the past is any indication of the future, we know exactly where June and Bruce will be: somewhere in the Menards outdoor garden center, restarting the cycle of life in the unlikeliest of places — a place they’ve undeniably made into a home.