LITTLE OWL
Falling numbers of this bird in the UK should be worrying enough, but factor in European declines, too, and it’s even more of a concern
When I was younger, I had a wonderful mentor. He taught me many things about birding, along with a healthy dose of good principles and a bemused, detached world-weariness. In common with all the best mentors, he had his eccentricities, and one of these was a slavish disgust of all introduced birds.
He couldn’t bear them; he would not deign to look at them or even talk about them. He was a Ruddy Duck-hater before it was fashionable, and the only Mandarins that were acceptable to him were oranges in tins. The unquestionable beauty of a Pheasant passed him by. If there was a Red-legged Partridge in a field, he would literally turn and walk the other way.
Remarkably, though, for a stubborn man, there was one species that somehow escaped his ire. I often teased Ron for this chink in his armour, this obvious flaw in this thinking, and he never did give a satisfactory explanation. But he delighted in Little Owls, excluding them from all criticism. And, of course, he shouldn’t have.
That’s because the entire breeding population of the Little Owl in Britain stems from deliberate introductions. These began seriously in the 1840s, in Yorkshire, Kent and Northamptonshire. The first breeding was in 1879 and the population didn’t take off until the end of the 1800s, so this diminutive predator has only been established here for a little more than 120 years.
Quite why people made a big effort to introduce these owls can perhaps be best explained by the Victorian desire to ‘improve’ the countryside by adding new animals, but at first the initiative wasn’t popular and met widespread resistance from farmers, who suspected the Little Owl of eating chickens, Pheasants and other livestock. Many of the newcomers were deliberately shot.
The Little Owl already had a history of captivity in Britain long before these major introductions occurred. As early as the 18th Century, they had sometimes been kept as professional cockroach-killers, which proves that householders then knew something that farmers subsequently didn’t – the Little Owl is a predator of small fry.
You only have to look at one to appreciate this. Little Owls live up to their name. They aren’t very much bigger than a Mistle Thrush or a pigeon, albeit they are much more rotund, with a round head and a short tail. They have staring yellow eyes and heavy white eyebrows which, in combination, give them an expression somewhere between disdainful and furious.
Interesting quirk
Their brown plumage (extra brown in the juvenile on this page) mottled with white spots gives them superb camouflage, especially when they are perching on willow trees, one of their favourite haunts. They nest, and often rest, in holes in trees, buildings and drystone walls.
If you have seen Little Owls in the wild as a birdwatcher, you may well have noticed an interesting quirk in their behaviour. In contrast to some other owls,