Listen out for hooting owls and help to monitor Scottish tawny numbers

Published on Friday 15 February 2008 18:08

ITS “tu-whit, tu woo” call is instantly recognisable, having even made its way into Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost.

Now, birdwatchers in Scotland are being asked to listen out for the sound of the tawny owl and to make a note of where they hear the owl’s call.

The results will be fed into the Bird Atlas, a four-year project to map the distribution and abundance of all the birds in the British Isles.

Fieldwork for the first winter part of the atlas comes to a close at the end of February.

Birdwatchers have been visiting specific areas twice during the winter and recording the number of birds they see.

Others have been sending in roving records when they have been out and about.

The fieldwork for the atlas is being organised by the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO), the Scottish Ornithologists Club (SCO) and BirdWatch Ireland.

More than 50,000 birds are expected to take part in the project – which runs during each winter and each breeding season until 2011 – and already more than 23.6 million individual birds from 375 species have been recorded.

Organisers are encouraging birdwatchers to carry out part of their survey at dusk, so they can listen out for nocturnal species, including owls.

Woodcock, nightjar and grasshopper warblers can all be heard on spring evenings.

“Our surveyors are mostly out during the day so they’re missing out to a certain extent on these nocturnal species,” explained Bob Swann, the Scottish co-ordinator for the Bird Atlas.

“They’re difficult to see during the day, when they’re hidden in forests. At night they become very obvious, so people out in the country will hear them.

“At this time of year they’ll be setting up their territories, and if it stays mild, the first ones will be nesting soon, certainly around mid-March. The males will be attracting females and then calling to each other, saying ‘This is my territory, keep out’.”

The last estimates put the number of breeding tawny owls in the UK at around 19,000: the survey work for the Bird Atlas will provide further figures.

Adult tawny owls (Strix aluco) are around the same size as a pigeon and feed on a range of foods, from small mammals and small birds, through to frogs, insects and even worms.

“It’s our commonest owl by far but isn’t distributed evenly throughout Scotland,” said Mr Swann.

“It’s quite scarce in the north and west of the country because it likes quite mature woodland, of which there’s more in the south.

“It’s definitely the more common one that people will hear.”

As well as providing more data about tawny owls, the Bird Atlas will also increase our knowledge about some of Scotland’s other owls.

“I think barn owls will be one of the big stories from the atlas,” said Mr Swann.

“They have really increased phenomenally throughout Scotland since the last atlas. We’re now finding owls right up in remote straths in Sutherland, occupying old ruined crofts. They’re probably doing so well because of milder winters.”

The latest maps for the distribution of tawny owls are available at www.birdatlast.net and can be compared with those from the previous winter atlas.

&#149 To hear the call of a tawny owl, visit www.scotsman.com and click on the owl picture.