Mammal hope for barn owls
THE sadness of barn owls turns over the heart. They appear absolutely vulnerable with their soft white faces, like paper moons, framed in golden buff, flitting ghostly white across the landscape, or at night, illuminated in the headlights of a car.
I struck one once, going down a hill by an old ruined castle, its probable home.
I stopped and searched with a flashlight but could find nothing. Why did it come to its end with my car, this beautiful creature? For I did not doubt that I had killed it and that it was lying somewhere in long grass or in a ditch.
I already had a barn owl at home, sitting on an upright piano. This one had died of starvation, a taxidermist said. It had been found in a village school yard, white and stiff in the frosty morning.
The youngest of three boys brought it home. One still has it.
Barn owls make strange and other-worldly noises at
rare times of disturbance or stress -- screeches, whistles and gasps -- but no Shakespearean two-whit, two-whoo.
That's the tawny owl, and you won't hear it in this country. It never crossed over from England.
Like huge, pale moths quartering fields at dusk, these silent search-and-pounce hunters are now few and far between.
There was a time when old stone farm byres were their homes, and they slipped in and out through those rifle-slitted walls bearing young rats and mice to feed their frosty-fluffed squabble of youngsters.
All that has changed.
The air does not often now yield a passage to the gentle force of down-fringed wings.
BirdWatch Ireland reports that the downward trend in the barn owl population seems to be continuing. Surveys carried out earlier this year showed that many previously active or once traditional nest sites were no longer so.
The current total of active sites is now just 75, with the total population estimated at between 250 and 350 pairs.
But, almost on the edge of the abyss, there appears a glimmer of light with the amazing discovery of a new species of mammal -- the greater white-toothed shrew, found in South Tipperary and East Limerick -- which has been appearing in the diet of studied owls.
Research shows that where it is the dominant prey, owls have begun nesting one month earlier.
The appearance of this mammal is the first since the bank vole turned up in the 1920s with the arrival of machinery from Germany for the Ardnacrusha hydro- electric scheme.
John Lusby of BirdWatch heads the owl project.
If you find a road-kill bird, please contact him at Crank House, Banagher, Co Offaly (phone 05791 51676).
He needs carcasses for analysis.
