Startling sortie to Africa for Scots owl
YELLOWING grasses and hoar-frosted teasels backlit by milky winter sunlight create the perfect stage for nature’s most enchanting marionette show.
Short-eared owls entertain with grace and guile and yet there are no strings attached to their displays on wings seemingly far too long and deft for dumpy bodies.
There is no puppet master alive who could choreograph such exhilarating routines as the owls glide, soar and pirouette with supreme control, only dropping from the sky when acute ears and sharp eyes detect a hapless vole.
Hen harriers may have been immortalised by the military for their slow-motion sorties by the naming of the jump jet but, in truth, short-eared owls are far more effective hunters on the wing. Nothing escapes their senses, be it in brilliant sunshine or when nightfall grips the countryside.
Having departed northern nesting areas on heather moors and upland bogs across Scotland and northern England in autumn, these cat-like owls with piercing golden eyes look to English lowlands for their cold weather quarters. Coastal marshes and sweeping grasslands are perfect platforms for birdwatchers to enjoy their shows, while farmland set aside to turn weedy fields into housing development has also become excellent habitat to spot owls on the wing at dawn and dusk.what determines these nomadic predators’ movements is the abundance of food, a complex matter subject to the breeding vagaries of voles.
Researchers from the British Trust for Ornithology in Scotland have made a remarkable discovery as to how far short-eared owls will wander to feed in winter and nest each summer in efforts to find why the species has declined by as much as 50 per cent since the early 1970s.
By using tracking devices, the team has followed a female owl from her nesting site on the Isle of Arran from June 11 this year to spend the winter in Morocco. After sorties to Bute and Kintyre and to mainland Ayrshire during the summer, she began her odyssey south at the start of November, passing through
Devon and France.with a strong tail wind, she crossed the Pyrenees and headed over the Strait of Gibraltar into Africa. In one burst, she clocked up 300 miles in just six hours.
The latest satellite fix shows she is now hunting near Oualidia, a small town on Morocco’s Atlantic coast.
Senior BTO research ecologist John Calladine, who is leading the project, explained the importance of the satellite tracking: “This is only the second UK short-eared owl to be reported from Morocco and what makes this record all the more amazing is that it involves a breeding female.
“The previous record was of a young bird, which may have been dispersing from its natal area to settle somewhere else.
“Our tracking work has revealed the huge distances these birds can cover.we have also had birds move to Norway, with some individuals seemingly making two breeding attempts in one season, one in Scotland and one in Norway.”
To date, the BTO has tracked nine short-eared owls, each providing important data on their habitat use.
There are plans to track at least 10 more birds over the next two years. The project has been supported by private donations but needs to raise more funds to continue.you can find more details at bto.org/seo-tracking.
‘Nothing eludes their senses’