Searching for owls…

This morning I decided to walk the dog in the fields near the Hansons Nature Reserve – just over  a mile from where I live - which are a good area for seeing owls.  We are fortunate to have a small number of barn owls around this area, and like short eared owls they hunt around ungrazed pasture – rough grassland where voles live.  As explained here  this allows a “litter” layer to develop which then becomes a home for voles, their favoured prey. 

The fields between the canal and the reserve provide just such a habitat and have not been grazed for some years.  Nestboxes are also provided for the barn owls - on poles the other side of the lake from the  nature reserve amongst the fishing lakes.

At times we have also had short eared owls here in the winter, which are wonderful to see– although I have not seen them in recent years.  It seemed worth having a look this morning to see whether they were around as the weather was not good and sometimes rainy weather pushes the owls out to hunt by day. 

There is a similar but smaller area of uncut pasture in the common quite near my house (see photo) and the preference for hunting this part of the common is very clear when the kestrels are around (or more occasionally the barn owl) as they are invariably hovering over this area rather than other parts of the common.

I was shocked to hear that barn owl numbers are estimated to now be around only 1,000 pairs in the UK after a very bad year in 2013.  According to a Guardian report http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/dec/14/barn-owls-threatened-freak-weather there may only be a thousand pairs in the UK, although the estimate on the RSPB page is four times that many.  In any case this is very low, so here’s hoping that the milder winter this year (so far) will help.

In the event, today, there were no owls to be seen and very few birds altogether: a flock of lapwings flew overhead; a few crows, magpies, ducks and herons – which were roosting in the heronry – and given the ferocity of the wind and intensity of the rain, I couldn’t blame them.