“Excuse me, are you looking at birds?“
This is a familiar and well-used introduction, usually from a non-birder to a birder. It is slightly preferable to “What are you looking at?” Often folk are just curious as to why someone might be standing in a meadow, binoculars around their neck, looking up at the sky with a microphone next to them. It’s a fair question. However, explaining the intricacies of recording visible migration is often beyond the limits of my patience, so I usually just say “yes“.
On this occasion, the person making inquiries wanted some help identifying a bird that they had seen. My heart sank a little. This might not be a quick interaction and more importantly, our conversation might drown out the flight calls of Hawfinches passing overhead. Then suddenly I became much more interested:
“It was a large white bird, bigger than a Kestrel, floating low over the meadow in the very last of the light, occasionally dropping down, then rising up again“
It was a perfect description of a Barn Owl hunting. Barn Owls are very rare up here. Isaac West and I sounded recorded one calling when we were out listening for Common Scoters in the spring of 2021. We never saw that bird and it has remained the sole Lye Valley area record over the last six years. I was intrigued by the dog-walker’s report, even though the bird was only seen once, and that was several days ago.
On Thursday evening, I visited Warneford Meadow as the light was fading. By 5pm it was dark and I was just about to return, when a ghostly pale shape floated across the meadow in front of me: Barn Owl! I took some video of the owl hunting, the lights of the Churchill Hospital bright in the background [if you receive this blog post as an email you will have to visit the website to see this video]:
I watched the Barn Owl hunting for about 20 very special minutes, amazed that it had found this small area of meadow in urban Oxford, completely surrounded by housing and hospitals.
This was my 700th visit to the Lye Valley area, and Barn Owl is the 81st species that I have recorded here this year. The illustrated list of all 112 species recorded in the Lye Valley area is here.