The Company of Owls

Owls of Lakeland

There are five species of owl that live wild in these Lakeland uplands: tawny owls, barn owls, long-eared and short-eared owls, and little owls. Until recently I would have told you only two of these five are known to be resident in Grasmere - tawny owls and barn owls. But in 2023 little owls were seen and heard around the village, up Easedale Road and even around Broadgate in the village centre. I have looked for them, but I have not seen them - the owl of the goddess Athena - tiny, furious and iconic. But I have heard them. I hope one day to see their glare directed at me.

There are barn owls too, though I do not see them often at our end of the village. There are not many barns left open to owls in the valley any more, though we know of one farm with a healthy barn owl population in full-time employment managing the equally healthy rat population. We have heard stories of people shooting the rats and hanging them out for the barn owls to take, finding them all gone in the morning. The most recent Cumbria Bird Atlas describes barn owls as 'a fairly common resident' that 'breeds in small numbers'.1 One warm spring twilight in 2018 we saw a barn owl hunting from the sixteenth-century bank barn at How Top Farm. We stood on the road, transfixed, as it surveyed the dell by the duck pond. The following year the barn was sold along with the farmhouse and the adjoining land, and its conversion from owl-friendly accommodation began.

Both long- and short-eared owls are nomadic, often travelling huge distances over sea and land to settle in the British Isles, for a season or longer. Short-eared owls roost and hunt on grassland and bogs, but long-eared owls need a mixture of habitats - woodland for nesting and moorland or farmland for hunting. This combination is getting harder to find, and through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, the numbers of long-eared owls settling in Cumbria have fallen. Cumbrian conservationist Chris Hind describes the long-eared owl as 'being pushed to the very furthest reaches of our landscape in its attempts to find suitably undisturbed locations for hunting and nest sites'.2 So it is that long-eared owls are now so elusive you won't find any in this book, aside from here, so please don't be disappointed if you don't catch a glimpse of one. I haven't either, though I would love to stumble upon a wood full of them, as was possible in the late nineteenth century. I have not seen a short-eared owl in Grasmere. The ones that appear in these pages dwell further afield in the outlying fells, though it wouldn't surprise me at all to learn there are some living just a mile or two from me, and I wouldn't know.

I have used the word 'Lakeland' to describe the place or places of these owls. I use it not just to call up the Romantic past of this upland country, but to locate us - you, me, the owls - in the unbounded place of the imagination that pre-exists the Lake District National Park and wavers in and out of county jurisdictions. The other names of this place have become overly complicated in recent years. Can I still talk of the owls of Cumbria, the county I moved to in 2007, which was created by combining Westmorland and Cumberland and the Sedbergh Rural District and Lancashire North of the Sands in 1974, and was abolished and split in 2023 into two new counties: Cumberland, and Westmorland and Furness? Or do I need to resurrect those older borders and loyalties to understand our owl genealogies? To slip through realities to the timeline in which you can stand on Wrynose Pass and cross three counties with one body at once? Many of the older records are split into birds of Cumberland and birds of Westmorland, or, to cross counties, birds of Lakeland. To the owls, none of these namings and renamings and drawing and redrawing of maps means much at all, unless it impacts on their safety, their right to live and hunt and roam through these non-apparent fences.

The owls of Lakeland are also owls of Solway Firth and the Yorkshire Dales and the Pennines and shifting sands. They are upland owls and lowland owls and coastal owls of many kinds. They are owls whose ancestors have been living in these isles since before they were isles, when we were linked to Continental Europe by Doggerland. They are owls who floated in by accident and stayed, or who escaped domesticity to rewild themselves. They reflect histories of small-scale farming and of grand estates, of rural industry and abandonment, of residents and passage visitors, of migration and displacement.

In the UK more widely, some people would stretch to include other owls in this list of species, blown-ins like the snowy owls who nested in Shetland in the 1960s and 1970s and still occasionally appear here, or the eagle owls whose very existence here remains controversial, with conservationists and ornithologists arguing amongst themselves about whether any of the growing wild population could have travelled to these isles themselves, or whether they are all descendants of escaped captive birds. In 2020 my dad picked up the hoot of an eagle owl on the outskirts of Nottingham. Whether feral or a new arrival, we never discovered. I imagined it sitting in the top of one of the huge old trees around the edge of the golf course at the end of my parents' road, calling out to see if anyone called back. A lonely life, when there are only forty breeding pairs at most living free in the UK.

Eagle owls have been spotted on the loose not far from Grasmere too. My friend Loren was alarmed to find an 'owl the size of a toddler' sitting casually in a tree at Ruskin's View in Kirkby Lonsdale several years ago. It turned out to be an escaped eagle owl from a nearby bird-of-prey centre. It was captured and not left to join the growing wild population. Many of the confirmed breeding pairs of eagle owls in the UK outside Scotland have been based in the north of England though. From the mid-nineties to the mid-noughties, one pair in the North York Moors raised twenty-three chicks, counted and ringed in the nest. This success garnered unwanted attention, and the female was found, shot dead, in 2006. In 2015 a breeding pair in the Forest of Bowland, just south of Lakeland, abandoned their nest because of human disturbance. In 2016 a pair made headlines when they settled in Nidderdale, to the east of us. A pair was spotted preparing to nest in the north Pennines, at the eastern fringes of Cumbria. I like to think there may be some living in the wilder parts of wider Lakeland, under the radar, confusing hikers with their call like a throaty laugh.

Though their presence has caused rows about their status between bird protection charities, one way of looking at it is that they are merely re-establishing populations lost through habitat disturbance and persecution. As Andrew Gilruth of the Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust argues:

The Scots Gaelic, Manx, Welsh, Cornish and Irish Gaelic languages all have words for [eagle owls] and it is generally agreed that fossil records indicate eagle owls were present in Britain from some 700,000 years to at least 10,000 years ago [. . .] - ten times longer than anatomically modern humans.3

Under these terms, it is perhaps they who should be complaining about our presence.

The little owl has been well established in the UK for over a century, but it is not a native bird to these isles. People still argue about exactly when it first settled here, and how. Little owls were popular pets in the nineteenth century. Florence Nightingale kept one, which she named Athena. Athena's taxidermied corpse is on display in the museum dedicated to Florence. Florence loved her owl very much, and their story is often depicted as a heart-warming tale of interspecies bonding, but if that is the kind of story you like, I should warn you not to look it up and find out more details, as I did. Becoming domesticated did not end well for Athena.

Little owls are not generally believed to be nomadic like short- and long-eared owls, so the wild population in the UK is often attributed to the deliberate release of imported owls or the escape of pets. It is known, for example, that little owls were deliberately released from estates in Yorkshire in 1843, 1890 and 1905, as reported in the journal British Birds in 1908: 'As long ago as 1843 Charles Waterton liberated five Little Owls, which he had brought from Rome the previous year, in Walton Park, Yorkshire, and of late years (about 1890 and again in 1905) Mr. W. H. St. Quintin has turned out some of these birds at Scampston Hall, Rillington.'4 These releases 'did not do very well' though, and no wild populations grew from them. The first release that seems to have flourished in the British climate was in Northamptonshire in 1890. These little owls spread so rapidly that they were spotted in Rutland in 1891, where they were breeding by 1895. In 1896 they were found in several places in Nottinghamshire. Other releases in the late nineteenth century - in Kent and at Knepp in Sussex - did not lead to the same spread of birds.

Do these releases account for the current wild population, estimated somewhere around four or five thousand pairs? In 1873 John Gould describes the little owl as an 'accidental visitor' with occasional breeding, listing sightings that pre-date any of the known releases.5 In his 1886 study The Birds of Cumberland, Hugh Macpherson calls the little owl 'an accidental visitant from Central Europe', but adds what he considers a dubious account from much earlier...