TAWNY OWLS
Winter is a time of passion and conflict for Britain’s tawny owls. Marianne Taylor takes us into their dark and mysterious world...
Silent hunters with excellent eyesight stalk our dark skies. Explore the night world of the elusive tawny owl with Marianne Taylor.
London’s parks are great for close-up wildlife encounters. Grey squirrels confidently climb up your jeans and would rummage through your pockets if you let them. Offer an outstretched handful of seed and a blue tit, robin or even a jay might fly down for a free meal. At the lake shore stands a grey heron, barely casting a cold-eyed glance at the camera-wielding tourists nearby. This is nature in your face – all mystique stripped away.
Yet here in Kensington Gardens is a bird that is the very embodiment of mystery and magic. High in the lip of a fractured chestnut-tree trunk sits a tawny owl. Motionless, camouflaged, it dozes in the sunshine as trails of oblivious people go by below. It is hidden in plain sight, waiting out the day. Hours will elapse before it stirs.
We know this bird by sound more than sight – that drawn-out quavering flute-note that jolts us out of sleep and sets our minds racing. The tawny’s hoot has long been considered a portent of death or disaster. When we do see the bird, it is a wide-winged ghost caught fleetingly in a headlight beam, or a silhouette against a moonlit sky. We share the same space but are separated in time. The owl’s life, its world, barely brushes shoulders with ours.
NO PLACE LIKE HOME
In town and country alike, you’ll hear tawnies almost anywhere with mature deciduous trees. Our most abundant owl is found throughout Great Britain. However, it is missing from Ireland – the sea crossing is a flight too far for this unadventurous bird. Studies of ringed tawnies show that, on average, they travel just 4km from their birthplace.
Once a tawny finds a good territory, it’s set for life, unless kicked out by a fiercer rival. The owl you hear hooting outside tonight may well be the same individual that was keeping you awake a decade ago. Its chances of survival improve year on year, as it becomes increasingly familiar with its surroundings and exactly when and where to hunt. Both sexes need a territory, but an unpaired female will leave hers and join a bachelor male on his, provided it is replete with prey and has a place to nest.
Your local tawny will hoot most enthusiastically in winter. He (it probably is a he) hoots not to alarm you but to warn other males, and to attract a mate if he doesn’t have one – hooting is the tawny’s version of birdsong and its tone and power reveal the hooter’s physical fitness. Females also hoot sometimes, at a higher pitch than their mates, and both sexes give the sharp ‘to-whit’ contact call. So when you hear a ‘to-whit’ and a ‘to-whooo’, it is often a pair in conversation, but not always.
TERRITORIAL DISPUTES
A good territory keeps a pair of tawnies bonded together for years, though they live quite separate lives outside the breeding season, rediscovering each other in late-winter courtship. But there will always be youngsters lurking nearby, holding poor territories or none at all. They are poised to upgrade, by replacing older birds that die, or challenging those that show any sign of weakness. For tawnies, winter is a time of passion and conflict. Old flames are rekindled, new flames ignited. Old rivalries flare up anew, and fresh battle-lines are drawn. If your area has more tawnies than territories, winter nights may be riotously noisy.
Being out in the woods by night is scary and disorientating. When the torch battery dies, it’s horror-film time. But tawny owls wake just as nightfall chases us home. They can navigate and hunt in darkness with ease, thanks to
“The owl you hear hooting tonight may well be the same one that kept you awake a decade ago”
their near-supernatural senses, lending abilities of which we can only dream. They see with clarity in almost total darkness, as their eyes are acutely sensitive to contrast rather than colour. The retina is huge, thanks to a tubular rather than spherical eyeball. This limits the eye’s movement in its socket, but a very flexible neck compensates – owls famously twist and tilt their heads to extreme degrees when watching something of interest. However, the old belief that a tawny will wring its own neck rather that take its gaze off someone walking round and round its tree is, happily, not true.
SOUND AND VISION
We have long envied owl eyesight. Our forebears concocted potions from burnt owl eggs, hoping to enhance their own vision. Yet for the owl itself, hearing is more important than sight. This makes sense for a night-hunting bird. Night is quiet already, with most of the loud woodland birds asleep, so it’s easier to home in on important sounds – those made by potential prey.
A tawny’s hearing is about 10 times more acute than ours, and its face shape and position of its ear openings are optimised to channel and amplify sound. This means it can locate and catch a mouse moving under leaf-litter without needing to see its victim at all. It creates its own quiet space in which to hunt – when an owl flies past you at close range, it’s the silence that takes your breath away. Specialised flightfeather structure muffles the wingbeats, so the owl is not distracted by the sound of its own efforts – and for the prey, there is no warning.
Because tawny owls stay in the same small territory, even when hunting conditions are difficult, they need to be versatile. When rainfall makes it difficult to hear rodent prey, they pull earthworms from the wet soil. They’ll fly along hedgerows at dusk to flush out roosting songbirds, and wade into streams to catch fish and frogs. That tawny caught in your headlights may have been searching the roadside for carrion. I’ve even seen the occasional youngster trying to hunt hours before dusk – but only desperation drives this owl out into the daytime world of brightness and noise. It belongs to the night, and for all our 21st-century knowledge of its ways, it still dwells in a dark place in our consciousness.