Tipperary Branch

The Barn Owl is a very beautiful and a very secretive bird. It is notoriously difficult to survey, but one thing is certain, it has disappeared from many parts of Ireland. It is on the red list of BirdWatch Ireland’s Birds of Conservation Concern in Ireland because of a decline of greater than 50% in the breeding population over the previous 25 years. In 1991, the Tipperary Branch of BirdWatch Ireland started a Barn Owl nest-box project. Large wooden boxes were placed in ruined castles because most of the breeding pairs of which we were aware were nesting in castles. The project had some success but Jackdaws and not owls tended to take over the boxes.

One such box was erected by Chris Wilson and myself on 15th February, 1991. Over the years Barn Owls roosted in the box from time to time but never nested until 2002. On 23^rd April, 2002 one owl emerged from the box and on 9^th May two Barn Owls emerged at 10pm. This was very encouraging. During June snoring sounds were coming from the box. This is a food-begging call made by the chicks. Finally, on 26^th July 2002 I saw four healthy chicks emerge from the nest-box and walk out onto the ledge. I was thrilled to see such a large brood. They stood on the ledge and exercised their wings. The parents were arriving every twenty minutes with food.

On 28^th July I climbed up a ladder to the box to take out the chicks so that they could be ringed. Alex

Copeland and I did the ringing and we were assisted by my four year old daughter, Cliona. I had the four chicks safely in a sack when I noticed a fifth chick at the very back of the box. All five chicks were ringed and returned to their nest. At that stage the parents roosted in another part of the castle, so they weren’t disturbed. Each chick was fitted with a metal ring which is stamped with a unique number and a return address. If one of these bird is found anywhere in the world, we will know how long it lived, how far it travelled and so on.

This was the largest brood of Barn Owls I have ever found in Tipperary. Usually there are two to three chicks and occasionally four in a nest. The brood of five was all the more remarkable when you consider the bad weather in June and July of 2002. Barn Owls cannot hunt in wet weather. How the parents managed to catch enough food for five hungry chicks is a mystery but I understand that there was also a brood of five chicks in a nest-box in Co. Cork that year .

You can get a very good idea of the diet of owls by analysing the pellets which they cough up. These pellets contain bones and fur from which any rodents eaten can be identified by their jaw bones. On 9^th August I collected 37 pellets from the floor of the castle. The pellets contained prey remains as follows; 46 Field Mice, 22 Bank Voles, 8 Brown Rats, 8 Pygmy Shrews and 2 House Mice. The parents were clearly adept at catching rodents. The spread of the recently introduced Bank Vole is helping this particular pair of Barn Owls and a series of mild winters means more rodents survive to breed the following spring.

It is marvellous to see the beautiful but threatened Barn Owl produce a large brood but what awaits these young owls when they leave their parents’ territory? With agricultural intensification, there are fewer and fewer rough grassland areas to support their prey. With better machinery, there is less wastage of grain at harvest time and therefore fewer rodents and those that do survive are faced with a battery of new rodenticides. The time has probably come to create new habitat specially suitable for Barn Owls hunting in Ireland.