Barn Owls
A hunting Barn Owl is a beautiful, unforgettable sight, but they all too frequently fall victim to poisoning, accidental and deliberate
Why this beautiful bird often falls victim to poisoning
Ihave been working with Barn Owls since 1981, when I first found a natural nest site in an old oak along the River Gelt in Cumbria. The following year I erected two nestboxes in a barn by my house. At first, they were not used, but by 1984, I had my first pair using the boxes. Over the years, I have had great success with these boxes. In fact, it was not until 2018 that I had to change one of the boxes, due to rot owing to a hole in the roof of the barn!
Over those years, a number of key facts have come out of my observations of the boxes. One is that food can differ from year to year, with breeding success of course dependent on it. The local school did ‘pellet’ work, showing that in poor vole years, shrews were increasingly taken as food.
Ringing showed that the birds could live a long time, with a male at eight years old and a female at nine, and that they can move around a great deal, with a bird found dead in a barn in North Berwick, while the extreme was one found dead in Brighton!
A double brood in 2002 (a sideeffect of foot and mouth disease, with no stock in the fields by my house), saw 15 young, with 14 fledging!
The site is not affected by heavy road use, so I haven’t lost birds that way. It was also not affected by poison.
But this is not always the case, as I was to find out at one highly productive site, where the farmer actually asked for boxes. Poison had never been an issue there, but in 2014, working for a local Barn Owl group, we found the female sitting on five eggs, but sadly dead. The farmer found the male, also dead, out in the field.
I suspected that because a local house was for sale, rather than have viewers think there was a problem with mice and rats, the owners had overdosed the area with poison.
And don’t think this is an isolated case. Here is what the Barn Owl Trust say on their website: “The vast majority of rat poisons used these days (such as Neosorexa and Slaymor) are highly toxic SGARs –‘Second Generation Anticoagulant Rodenticides’. Most birds of prey are contaminated. The extent to which SGARs have contaminated small-mammal predators is shocking.”
The number of Barn Owls contaminated reached its highest level in 2015, with an alarming 94%. A more recent figure, from 2017, was 90%.
Results from the Predatory Bird Monitoring Scheme showed that 100% of the Kestrels they examined in 2011 were contaminated, along with 94% of Red Kites! And the problem is not restricted to a particular area. The analysed corpses were sent in by the public from across
Britain. In other words, virtually the entire populations of these three species have been feeding on rodents that contain rat poison. Sparrowhawks (93%), Buzzards (48%), Peregrines (35%) and even Hedgehogs (57%) contain SGAR poisons.
What you have to remember is that these species can help the farmer, the industrialist, even the gamekeeper and the garden bird feeder, by removing the mice and rats from their properties. Often the numbers of these rodents have exploded in numbers due to food being freely available.
Poisoned prey
An approved training course for the responsible use of poison is available, but of course, that still does not stop the problem, entirely.
So, can we do more to prevent this problem? We only have to look across at Israel for what can be done. A staggering 80% of rat poison has been removed from the whole country.
This does not happen overnight, and a lot of work went into educating farmers and industrialists to make them change. This was even hampered by a fear of owls, probably dating right back to the Roman occupation, when owls were nailed to doors to keep evil spirits away.
Another problem with this poison was that passage migrant birds of prey were being affected by the fields full of poisoned prey. Being the scene of one of the largest migrations of birds of prey in the world, moving from Europe and Asia to Africa and back again, Israel felt it had to do something about it.
The main action was to expand the population of Barn Owls and Kestrels to do the work of removing the rodents. This was done by adding large numbers of nestboxes around the fields and villages to keep the rodent population at a reasonable level, and prevent them from damaging crops. From 20 nesting boxes in 1983 in Israel, they have succeeded in increasing the number to 4,500. There are also 120 nesting boxes in the Palestinian Authority and 380 in Jordan. The scheme does not stop there.
With so much success, the idea of
natural control has been sold to other countries. In Syria, Lebanon and across the Sinai in Egypt, farmers and landowners have been to seminars on using this form of control. Countries like Morocco and Tunisia have joined in, not forgetting, on the north side of the Mediterranean, Spain and Greece.
Cyprus took to the scheme quickly, as rat poison was being subsidised for farmers to use. Given that a Barn Owl family can consume between 2,000 and 6,000 rodents a year, it should be easy to sell to farmers, as long as that subsidy on poison is removed. More than 50 boxes have been added so far, although there has been a slow uptake by the Barn Owls, maybe because of the amount of secondary poison already in them and Kestrels.
France has also shown an interest. Europe is home to the Common Vole, which like the Short-tailed Vole in the UK, can explode in dramatic numbers, causing damage to crops. France, in the past, has covered fields with poison to clear them of this vole, causing secondary poisoning in many species. So, it would be a great change to see France use the owl project as a way forward.
Inadequate training
So why are we in the UK not using predators to remove pest species? I asked the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs for the amount of rat poison used in Britain, each year, but they claim no one knows. Rat poison is freely available to buy.
Lantra is the main body involved with training for the use of this poison, and claim it is one of the leading awarding bodies for land-based industries in both the UK and the Republic of Ireland.
It develops quality training courses and nationally recognised qualifications that are delivered through a national network of training ‘Provider Partners’.
So why not train the individuals to use natural predators?
As far as Lantra know, there is no encouragement from Government to make use of predators for rodent control on farms.
So, who will provide that encouragement? The RSPB says it should come from the top level in Government, but at present, they are not pushing for it. Natural England actually offers licenses to kill other ‘pest’ species, which sadly includes those which could also remove rats and mice, such as Foxes and Buzzards!
So, we are left with no one espousing the cause, especially as so many wildlife charities actually use the same rat poison to remove rats from their bird feeders! Unless we start to take action, it looks like secondary poisoning of our birds of prey and especially the Barn Owl is here to stay in Britain!
THE MAIN ACTION WAS TO EXPAND THE POPULATION OF BARN OWLS AND KESTRELS TO DO THE WORK OF REMOVING THE RODENTS