Finding a dead creature when out walking is often a moment to pause, wonder what happened to cause its demise and reflect on the fragility of life. We’ve seen quite a few dead animals at Cowbar recently, mostly because of myxomatosis which has run through the rabbit population. A couple of young hares didn’t get the timing quite right for their dash across Cowbar Lane, neither did the stoat lying in the middle of the lane today.
So, although we are used to finding animal remains, to find a young barn owl, complete except for the breath of life, was a little sad. It had no speckling on its chest feathers and the barring on its tail feathers wasn’t very dark. Both these features suggested to us that it was a male. It had obviously not been caught by a fox for food but, we thought, must have had an accidental death. There had been gusting winds the previous night so possibly it had been blown into a car or fence.
We were surprised to see that it had been ringed so was, presumably, from a monitored nest site. Not wanting to leave it on the cliff top, we took it home while we did some serious Googling to find out how and to whom we should report it. We discovered that the British Trust for Ornithology has information on their website for reporting ringed birds and we filled in this form.
A few days later we received the information that it was indeed a young male barn owl. It had been ringed at Easington, a village 4km away, as a nestling in early June, just 118 days before we found it.
Googling also led us to the website of the Predatory Bird Monitoring Scheme, an organisation which carries out research on the presence of contaminants in birds of prey. To help their research we have bagged the young barn owl and popped him in the freezer while we wait for PBMS packaging and posting instructions so that we can post him off to them. We’ll be given some basic feedback about him and will let you know more when we hear from them.
