Weekly update from RSPB Conservation Manger Stuart Benn.
Blogged Up!
The Scottish Open golf championship was held just along the road from us at the weekend and, gladly, there was no repeat of last year when torrential rain caused landslides, floods and massive disruption. This year, the weather was OK but still not the best and, since I had started a heavy cold, I didn’t venture any further than the moors near Inverness. It was good to find a pair of Stonechats feeding their young – they took a real hit in the two hard winters of 09/10 and 10/11 and disappeared from this hill but they can produce several broods each year and the numbers soon bounce back. But the main excitement was seeing a Short-eared owl.
In our popular imagination, owls are birds of the night, the familiars of witches, heard but rarely seen but not so the Shortie which doesn’t conform to type and is out and about during the day. It’s always a real treat to see one (when else do we get the chance to get a really good look at an owl?) and admire their languid flight - the authors of The Nature of the Cairngorms put it brilliantly “its shallow wing beats silently patting the air, as if testing a hot stove.”
Short-eared owls have an amazing world distribution – much of the Northern Hemisphere but South America too as well as remarkable outposts in island groups like the Falklands, Hawaii and the Galapagos. Unfortunately, they are becoming a rare sight in the UK with numbers declining for reasons that aren’t yet clear. But let’s hope their decline is reversed so they don’t just become a bird of our imagination.
I think the weekend bird was just passing through because I hadn’t seen them on the moor earlier in the year and don’t believe they nested although they can be surprisingly inconspicuous. So, no repeat of 2011 when I did find a nest and saw that, if anything, the chicks are even more endearing than their parents!
Photo: Andy Stronach
As regular watchers of Springwatch may remember, owl chicks don’t all hatch on the same day so show quite a size difference and, if hunting is poor, the younger ones don’t survive. But this nest did well with the adults keeping them well-fed with a regular supply of voles and at least five of the young flew – brilliant!