Toowit-towoo! At long last, a Collins book on owls

Owls have more associations for us than perhaps any other family of birds, suggested Jeremy Mynott in Birdscapes, so it is puzzling that it has taken Collins 70 years to add this ‘Natural History of the British and Irish Species’ to its famous New Naturalist Series.

It is of course primarily a zoological work, with statistics, charts and sentences such as: ‘A real breakthrough in resolving this problem has been the advent of affordable molecular and biochemical methods.’ But the science, if sometimes beyond the simple owl-lover, reveals plenty of fascinating facts.

The five principal species found in Britain are tawny, barn, little, long-eared and short-eared. The tawny is easily the most abundant, at possibly 20,000 breeding pairs. It is the one we hear, the male calling ‘toowit-towoo’ and the female ‘keewik’. It lives in towns as well as the countryside, but appears to hate crossing the sea because, unlike the barn, it is unknown in Ireland. It has also avoided the Isle of Wight, Arran and the more obvious far-flung isles but, strangely, not the Isle of Man.

Christopher Hassall described owls as ‘cats in feathers’. The barn, the ugliest chick and most beautiful adult, makes a particularly cat-like pet, even purring with contentment when stroked. It is reckoned there are about 4,000 breeding pairs. Like all the owls it is in decline because of human overpopulation; but the Barn Owl Trust has proved that providing nest-boxes and cover to raise the field vole population can work wonders. Today there are as many barn owls in Suffolk as there were 50 years ago.

The little owl is almost entirely confined to England. It was introduced from Europe by an owl enthusiast in the 19th century and there are now perhaps 8,000 breeding pairs.