In the beak midwinter

I’M going to miss Heartbeat.

Not for the nostalgic Sixties sound-track, much as the ageing hippy in me rises to it, nor for its more memorable characters, loveable though they were.

No, what I am really going to miss is the plaintive call of an owl that marked the commercial breaks.

Owls seem to reach the parts that other birds don’t. There’s something in their calls that roots you to the spot and leaves you mesmerised.

They are the sort of bird that engenders fear or fascination. Creatures of the night, they project a quasi-spiritual nature and few cultures have been indifferent to them.

To the Romans, their calls signified death and the demise of an assortment of Emperors was thus prophesied; to the Navajo, an owl was the form that the human soul assumed after death. Even in our modern stories, where would a wizard be without one?

My own initiation into owls started as a young child. I can remember vividly that an owl once sat on the telegraph wire outside our house and my mother pointed it out for me to look at it. I wanted so much to see that owl, but I was too frightened to look through the curtains; fear one – fascination nil. Much later, as a moody teenager, I would mooch over to the “posh”, tree-lined end of town seeking a vision of tawny owls but never received a revelation.

If the more widespread tawny owl was hard to come by, meeting its rarer cousins was more like receiving a visitation from the Archangel Michael and for years the bird that I most wanted to see was the ghostly barn owl. It wasn’t until we holidayed in Suffolk that I got a really good look at one as it drifted along a fence line, bobbing on its broad wings as if worked by some unseen puppeteer. Totally focused on the long grass below it, it seemed oblivious to us until only a few yards away and I swear I can still see the look of surprise on its face as it caught sight of us and swerved away.

It is easy to understand why the owl almost bumped in to us. Their senses are finely tuned to hunting prey that is largely invisible to us.

Barn owls are fussier eaters than other owls. They specialise in small mammals, with a preference for voles but they will take shrews and mice and make decent ratters as well.

It is often thought that it is the owl’s eyesight that allows them to hunt in the twilight, or even in the middle of the night but even the very nocturnal tawny owl has eyes that are only twice as effective as ours in the dark. It’s actually their ears that do most of the prey location and because of that an owl can find its prey in complete darkness.

The reason for this is that an owl’s ears, hidden under its feathers, are set at different heights on its head.

This means that the sound reaches the ears at different times and this difference allows the owl to pinpoint the source of the noise with amazing accuracy. In order to do this, the owl itself needs to be totally silent when flying and it achieves this through the construction of its feathers which have a comb-like leading edge that allow the air to flow more smoothly and downy surfaces which reduce noise as the feathers move against each other.

Barn owls shouldn’t have been that difficult to spot: they are white after all. What’s more, barn owls in northern Europe differ from most other owls – and from barn owls in the rest of the world – by hunting while it is still daylight. The problem for would-be owl spotters is that, until recently, they were, to quote Ace Ventura, “rare in these parts”, with only two or three pairs breeding in the whole of the Tees Valley, their location kept a closely-guarded secret.

Reports of barn owls seemed to be confined to those unfortunate individuals that had been blown off course and killed by passing traffic as they hunted along the road verges. Nor is their survival helped by the fact that they are in reality soft southerners; having evolved in more tropical climes they haven’t yet developed the legendary Geordie indifference to the cold.

More recently, however, numbers have been increasing in the North- East. Geoff Myers is one of the few people in the region licensed to ring barn owls and is responsible for ringing most of the known nests from Darlington to Saltburn and along the northern edge of the North York Moors. Geoff’s been ringing birds since 1993, but only started ringing barn owls six years ago when he found two youngsters in a hole in a tree. He has seen the number of pairs rise steadily until this year he has followed the fortunes of seven nests and knows the location of four others. In fact, in one location near Darlington, he knows of two pairs nesting in close proximity – barn owls being less territorial than other species of owl, providing there are plenty of voles to go around.

No one is sure why the numbers have increased. It may well be the result of the numbers of nest boxes that Geoff and others have erected, or it may just be a response to an increase in the number of voles; in several nests Geoff has found piles of uneaten voles next to the chicks. If so, it may mean barn owls will become less common again as vole populations follow a cycle with peaks and troughs in numbers.

Having now started to encounter barn owls on a reasonably regular basis, it would be so disappointing if they were to disappear again. In more than 20 years of living in the north end of Darlington, I’d never heard an owl call. Then one new year, as I lay awake in the early hours the morning, I heard the distant, quivering hoot of a tawny owl; probably a young bird prospecting for a territory. That’s what I wish for every new year.

OWL FACTS

● There are five native species of owl in Britain. The barn owl, the tawny owl, the little owl, the long-eared owl and the short-eared owl.

● The largest owl in the world is the European eagle owl. The smallest owl is the elf owl.

● Owls swallow their food whole and then regurgitate the parts they cannot digest as a pellet.

● Owls have no sense of smell or taste.

● A barn owl can see 50 times better than a human at night, but an owl cannot move its eyes in its sockets. It has to move its whole head and can turn its head around 280 degrees.

● Female owls are bigger than the males.

● Owls have unusual feet for the bird world as they have two toes that point forward and two toes that point backwards. Most birds have three toes pointed forward and one pointed backwards. This helps give an owl the best chance of catching its prey.

● An owl kills its prey with its talons, not because they are sharp but by crushing.

● The ear tufts on top of some owls’ heads are not ears at all. An owl’s ears are at the side of its head.

● An owl’s feathers do not have stiff edges like other birds, but are soft and downy. This allows an owl to fly in virtual silence.

● An owl does not oil its feathers as other birds do. If an owl gets wet its feathers absorb water like a sponge, so they can’t hunt in rain and have to shelter until the weather improves.

● Nearly all owls sleep standing upright. The short-eared owl is one exception and sleeps lying down.