Who gives a hoot

Occurring throughout England, Scotland and Wales the Tawny Owl is well known, especially during the winter when their territorial calls can be heard during the night.

The Tawny Owl is amber listed, i.e. a species of medium conservation concern due to recent population declines. Surveying this species can be difficult, but studying them is easier due to their readiness to use nestboxes. Ringing the adults and their chicks, as well as following the progression of the nesting attempt (nest record), provides very useful information to help interpret population changes.
 


Adult Tawny Owl. Photo by Rachael Barber



Adult Tawny Owl with a more grey plumage. Photo by Lee Barber

The number of Tawny Owls ringed each year varies considerably; in the last five years the number ringed has ranged from 920 to 2,748 birds. The number ringed also varies by county, with ringers in Northumberland topping the list with an average of 183 birds per year. This is followed by Lincolnshire (107), North Yorkshire (100), Nottinghamshire (92), Norfolk (81) and Cumbria (81). Around 80% of the birds ringed each year are chicks. Ringing chicks enables researchers to follow an individual throughout its lifetime, providing vital information on where birds move to and exactly how long they live.


Tawny Owl chicks. Photo by Lee Barber

For most of the recoveries the BTO receive, the cause of death is unknown, but for some the cause of death is clear. Being hit by a vehicle is the most reported cause of death for Tawny Owls, followed by train casualty and drowning in artificial water containers like horse or cattle troughs. This doesn’t mean that 66% of all Tawny Owls die from vehicle strikes, however. Birds killed by vehicles are inevitably more visible than a bird that dies of natural causes in the middle of a wood. Also, as most of the birds that are reported are from areas with high concentrations of people, these are more likely to be reported when found.

By recapturing ringed birds, licenced bird ringers are in the privileged position to be able to gather information on the presence and condition of Tawny Owls that are alive and well. Last year one of our ringers re-caught a Tawny Owl that was originally ringed as long ago as 2003. This bird was ringed as a chick and re-caught in the same place (Kielder Forest, Northumberland), so the exact age of this bird is known (13 years). A bird ringed in 2004 at Rowlands Gill in Tyne and Wear which was also caught during 2016, that was an adult (at least 1 year old) so she could have been much older. It would have been doing very well to break the longevity record of 21 years 10 months.

Unlike some other owl species, Tawny Owls doesn’t generally travel very far or cross large bodies of water, so their distribution is restricted to mainland Britain.  Due to this behaviour we have had no foreign recoveries in the history of the BTO Ringing Scheme.


Tawny Owl chick about to be ringed. Photo by Lee Barber

I have received one recovery while working at the BTO, of a ring found in Iceland (without a bird) which was originally put on a Tawny Owl chick. This was an amazing record so (as with all our recoveries) some investigation followed. Unfortunately, this wasn’t quite as amazing as we’d hoped as we had a previous record that this bird had already died. The ‘used’ ring was put on a binocular strap for safe keeping after reporting. Some years later the finder was on holiday in Iceland when the strap broke and the ring was lost, only to be found later by someone else who reported it to the BTO via www.ring.ac.

The vast majority of data from ringing and the resulting finding of dead birds can provide an amazing amount of information, so if you do find a ringed bird please report it via www.ring.ac.  As a thank you, you will receive the information on where and when the bird was ringed.

Swallows fledge young at a natural site

Ian Kerr writes:

A thriving Swallow population has long been a feature of my regular patch on Holy Island, Northumberland and 2014 has proved to be by far the best year since I started nest recording and ringing the species a decade ago.

This year around 75 nests, most of them around the village, harbour and at St Coombs Farm, fledged at least 260 young. Many pairs produced two broods with a small number of nests producing a third brood, although it was impossible to say if the same pairs were involved. Whatever the circumstance, the 2014 breeding season far surpassed the previous record year of 2009 when 56 pairs fledged around 150 young.

Juvenile Swallow - Jill Pakenham

Excitingly, for the first time a pair used a natural site, the first record of its kind for Northumberland. This nest was in a crevice under an overhanging turf at the top of an eroding low boulder clay bank near Emmanuel Head, the eastern most point of our tidal island. At high tides the waves would have been just eight feet below the nest. The nest was discovered by a friend, George Moody, summer warden for Lindisfarne’s Little Tern colony. When I visited the site a few days later these birds had disappeared but there were large amounts of droppings indicating the chicks had fledged. When I climbed up I found a fully-feathered dead chick in the cup which must have perished at about the time its siblings fledged.

The white droppings making this nest more obvious - Ian Kerr

Swallows using natural nesting sites are very rare in Britain although obviously at one time in the remote past they must have been the norm. Keith Bowey knows of a nest in County Durham in the early 1970s which was situated on the side of a horizontal branch on a Beech tree in Sunderland and Martin Davison reported Swallows nesting near the entrance to a sea cave near Oban on the west coast of Scotland. I will certainly be checking the bank site next spring in case these birds return.

Editor's comment - we also heard that Mark Lawrence found two Swallow nests on cliffs in Devon this year. Luckily, he found them in time to ring them!

Confused Stone Curlew

The rare Stone Curlew breeds in Southern England in the UK and migrates south into Iberia and north Africa for the winter. The best places to see this cryptic bird are on Salisbury Plain, Wiltshire and in the Brecklands, Norfolk and Suffolk.

We have just received a report from Linda Jenkinson concerning Stone Curlew EX45756, which was ringed on the 9th June 2010 in Breckland as a chick by the RSPB Ringing Group. Amazingly this bird was found dead at Lindisfarne, Northumberland on 12th December! This bird was definitely going in the wrong direction and this could have been the same bird that was seen on Brownsman Island, Farne Islands, Northumberland on the 1st December. The last Stone Curlew on the Farne Islands was in 1950 so this is a pretty special record.


View Stone Curlew in a larger map

The previous recoveries from outside the UK are mainly from France and Spain but we also have reports from Algeria, Ghana, Sierra Leone, Switzerland and Morocco. We have had a sighting of a Stone Curlew at Blackdog, Aberdeenshire in May 2002 but this is the first report of a British ringed Stone Curlew in Northumberland!