Owls - are they a favourite?
What's your favourite species of bird?
Are you entranced by the song of the blackbird, have you been captivated by the robin that takes crumbs from your hand or does the return of the first swallow raise your spirits?
Although there are many candidates, it is amazing just how many people seem to like owls, and barn owls in particular.
There are five species of owls to be found in England. Four of them breed in and around Thetford; with tawny owls nesting close to the town centre, long-eared owls in the forest, little owls on arable farmland and now with barn owls newly arrived on the Nunnery Lakes Reserve, which belongs to the British Trust for Ornithology.
Barn owls are the easiest of the owls to identify, with their white faces and sandy-brown backs and it is really pleasing that they have put in an appearance for the first time in 17 years. They can sometimes be seen flying over Barnham Cross Common or the adjoining water meadows, on the hunt for rats, mice and voles.
They can appear almost white in the half-light, like ghosts rising out of the early morning mist.
June days provide plenty of time to find food for growing chicks if you are a swallow, working from 5am to 9pm, but short nights make it more difficult for barn owls. With several mouths to feed, life becomes particularly tricky when the weather is bad. Imagine trying to pick out the rustling noise of a small mammal in the grass on a wet and windy night.
It is not surprising that you will sometimes see a barn owl hunting at dawn or dusk, or even in the middle of the day, as it tries to make ends meet. The consequences of not finding enough food were revealed for viewers of Springwatch on BBC2 last year, when the largest barn owls in the brood ate their younger brothers and sisters.
We are hoping that the four-year national Bird Atlas project, which will provide up-to-date distributions for every one of our bird species, can reveal some good news for barn owls.
Last time the BTO organised one of these national stock-takes, 20 years ago, we discovered that barn owls had been lost from one third of their traditional sites since the 1960s.
In response to this bad news, large numbers of nest boxes have been put up and landowners have been persuaded to leave areas of rough grass over which barn owls can hunt.
It is going to be great news for conservationists if we find that barn owls have been able to take full advantage of this help nationally and even better news locally if the Thetford birds move into one of the new boxes that are being provided by EDF Energy.
Graham Appleton is from the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO), which has its based in Thetford. Learn more about the work of the BTO at www.bto.org
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Weather for Bury St Edmunds
Wednesday 08 February 2012
Today
Cloudy
Temperature: -2 C to 0 C
Wind Speed: 14 mph
Wind direction: North east
Tomorrow
Cloudy
Temperature: -1 C to 1 C
Wind Speed: 6 mph
Wind direction: North east
