Silently swooping barn owls become addictive viewing
WATCHING A barn owl as it quarters rough grassland, you have to pity the unsuspecting voles, shrews and field mice on the ground.
Its flight is not unlike one of those sinister Stealth jets that are designed to evade radar.
In the case of the owl its wings are silent, utterly imperceptible to the tiny ears below because of feathers which have evolved to provide the best chance of taking quarry by surprise.
In the past week I have been spending a lot of time watching barn owls deplete the small mammal population of four or five uncultivated fields and patches of heather on the eastern slopes of Rombalds Moor, and I’m finding it addictive.
A text message from a friend alerted me to the presence of one bird, but when I arrived at the location he had described I counted three individuals.
Each of them was engaged in a mid-afternoon search for food, and after an hour or so it occurred to me that I might be watching two males competing for a mate.
The female – she has noticeably more grey on her upper parts – finally settled on the apex of a pyramid-shaped rock at the end of a dilapidated dry stone wall, and the two other barn owls continued to hunt within sight of her.
Every so often they would stop to hover kestrel-like for a couple of seconds before plummeting like a stone and disappearing among the tussocks of dead grass.
Sometimes they would be quickly airborne again, but on other occasions they remained on the ground for a few minutes.
Dusk was still an hour away, but it seems barn owls are often seen feeding in daylight at this time of year because the small entrance holes to the burrows of their prey are easier to spot before the new growth of spring. There will be no shortage of barn owl food in these fields, which have clearly not been grazed or cultivated for decades.
The bird must surely be nature’s way of dealing with the extraordinary reproduction rate of small mammals.
Yet because they sometimes killed a farmyard chicken or young game bird in Victorian times they were wiped out from some districts by farmers and keepers.
The pioneering naturalist, Charles Waterton, once threatened to strangle his own gamekeeper if he harmed any of the barn owls on his estate at Walton Hall on the outskirts of Wakefield.
These days barn owls are considered an asset, keeping rats and mice under control wherever they take up residence.
I have every reason to believe the owls on my local moor are about to breed. One of the males has disappeared and the female is spending more time perched on the end of a ruined farm building, probably waiting for presents of food from the other male.
It is common for barn owls to engage in courtship feeding, the female accepting these gifts as a prelude to copulation before the male goes back out to hunt.
Barn owls eat their prey whole but cannot digest fur or bone. This is regurgitated in the form of a pellet.