B57I5578-Barn-Owl,-Tyto-alba - a photo on Flickriver

            Barn Owl, Tyto alba.

Length: 33-39cm 
Wingspan: 80-95cm 
Weight: 250-350g 
UK breeding: 4,000 pairs 
Europe: 110-220,000 pairs 


The Barn Owl makes almost no noise when it flies. This enables it to hear the slightest sounds made by its rodent prey hidden deep in vegetation while the owl is flying overhead.
They have broad and rounded wings with a high surface area, which means barn owls can glide for longer and don’t need to flap so much, creating less sound.
Like other owls, Barn Owls also have specially adapted primary flight feathers, which have a serrated leading edge to disrupt turbulence and prevent it from making any noise. 
The Barn Owl’s heart-shaped face collects sound in the same way human ears do and  it's hearing is the most sensitive of any creature tested. It's ears, hidden beneath feathers, are at slightly different heights to help calculate the precise source of  any noises made by it's prey.  All of this makes a Barn Owl in flight the perfect stealth predator.

Because they mostly eat small rodents, barn owls are tied to the areas richest in small mammals – the perfect barn owl habitat is tussocky, unimproved grassland. 

Barn owls are not territorial. Adults live in overlapping home ranges, each one covering approximately 12,500 acres, equivalent to 7,100 football pitches! 

In order to live and breed, a pair of barn owls needs to eat around 5,000 prey items a year. These are mainly Field Voles, Wood Mice and Common Shrews. On a good night outside of the breeding season, a Barn Owl can catch four or five of these rodents and eat more than its own weight in one evening.
It’s not uncommon for barn owl chicks in the nest to eat each other, which is incredibly rare behaviour in birds. This is only possible because the chicks don’t all hatch at the same time, so some will be significantly bigger than others. This is a survival mechanism for when food is in short supply, particularly during prolonged bad weather when the adults are unable to hunt. During such times the adults will often hunt during the day time if the weather breaks. 
The barn owl is not only the world’s most widely distributed species of owl, but is also one of the most widespread of all birds, as it is found on every continent except Antarctica. Barn owls average about 36cm in length and the wingspan is usually between 80-95cm, but there’s a lot of variation across their range. 
The largest barn owls live in Jamaica and Cuba while the smallest are on the Galapagos Islands, where barn owls might weigh as little as a third as much as their larger Caribbean cousins. British barn owls have distinctive white breasts, but in central and eastern Europe they are a shade of dark yellow-orange. British barn owls are largely resident and seldom move far, but dark-breasted Continental birds are recorded regularly in eastern Britain. Scotland has the most northerly breeding barn owls in the Northern Hemisphere.
Barn owls are usually monogamous, staying faithful to their partner until one of them dies. They will use the same nest site every year and have an elaborate courtship ritual to re-establish the pair bond every spring. As their name suggests, they commonly select man-made structures in which to live. Silos, water tanks, church towers and barns are favoured sites, but they will readily adopt nest boxes and this is a proven way of increasing populations in areas where a shortage of suitable nesting sites limits the number of breeding pairs. No actual nest is made, though the female may form a slight hollow. When threatened or disturbed, they lower their heads, spreads their wings, and sway from side to side while making a growling sound. 

Though barn owls are capable of producing three broods of five to seven young each year, most breed only once and produce, on average, only two and a half young and around 30%  of nests produce no young at all. Their populations tend to undergo a boom and bust cycle that follows the vole population, and can also be severely impacted by extremely cold or wet weather. 

Captive barn owls have lived for as long as 25 years but the majority of wild barn owls don’t survive more than 10 years. In fact, only a third of barn owls survive long enough to reach breeding age.
Ninety one per cent of barn owls that underwent a post-mortem were found to contain rat poison. Some owls die as a direct result but most contain sub-lethal doses, the effects of which remain unknown.
In a typical year, around 3,000 juvenile barn owls are killed on Britain’s roads, which is about a third of all the young that fledge, and with modern intensive farming practises not providing much habitat for prey species like mice and voles  it’s no wonder that barn owl populations have declined so dramatically in recent years.

   

Taken on: February 25, 2021

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