The View
Naturalist Stephen Moss shares some of the secrets of Britain’s most elusive and enigmatic bird in this extract from his wonderful new book The Owl: A Biography.
ANY ENCOUNTER WITH an owl is unforgettable. Owls are so elusive, so enigmatic – and just so hard to find – that whenever we chance upon one, the moment always stays in our memory.
They are, by a long way, the most mysterious of all the world’s birds. Much of this mystery is down to the fact that many of them only emerge at night – or at dawn and dusk – and so live in an ethereal, unknowable world far removed from our own, day-bound existence.
Encounters with owls have given rise to more superstitions, myths and legends than any other group of birds. Owls are associated with wisdom (‘the wise old owl’), and are considered to hoot to ward off evil.
There are close to 250 different species of owl, in every continent apart from Antarctica. Just seven of these can be seen in Britain, but these ‘magnificent seven’ – tawny, little, barn, shorteared, long-eared, snowy and eagle owls – are among the best-known in the world.
I hope that you, too, will have had your own encounters with owls. Whether a tawny owl calling in a city park, a barn owl drifting at dusk across a grassy field, or a plump little owl perched in an oak tree, looking more like a Russian doll than a bird, these are moments you will remember for ever.
Tawny owl
The tawny is by far the commonest species of owl in Britain, with an estimated 50,000 breeding pairs – yet we hardly ever see it, because of its almost entirely nocturnal lifestyle. Rarely seen, maybe, but often heard: the tawny owl’s famous tu-whit, tu-whoo call is one of the best-known and most distinctive of all our bird sounds. Yet even this is a misperception. The sound is actually a rare example of an avian duet. It is the male that utters the hooting tu-whoo, while the female responds, in the gaps between his hoots, with a high-pitched tu-whit.
Of all our owls, the tawny is by far the most sedentary, with breeding pairs staying put on their territories all year round and, during the whole of their lifetime, rarely travelling more than a few kilometres from where they were born. The tawny owl’s sedentary nature and small, localised territory have led, each autumn, to an annual battle between established breeding pairs and their newly-adult offspring. By then, the young birds have become independent, and are trying to establish their own territory, which often brings them into conflict with their parents. So, from early autumn through to late winter, the adult males become more v
