Things you need to know about BARN OWLS!

Hello and how's it going? In today's video I'm going to tell you almost everything you need to know about the barn owl. If you've been out in the countryside in the early morning or late evening you may have been lucky enough to spot a barn owl. These are the most recognisable owls in the UK and are in fact the most widespread species of owl in the world. They have speckled grey and buff wings, cream undersides, a yellowy golden neck and head and a white heart-shaped face. Their eyes are large and dark and they have a wingspan of around 85 centimetres and weigh from 330 to 360 grams. Males are usually slightly smaller than females. As their name suggests, barn owls are often associated with roosting in outbuildings and barns but they would also roost in hollow trees among dense vegetation and on cliff ledges. They're mainly nocturnal and emerge from their roosts in the evening to go hunting. Their diet is almost entirely made up of small mammals such as mice, voles and shrews but it would also take birds, amphibians and insects. Each adult owl needs to eat four small mammals per night just to survive. They can either hunt from a perch or by flying silently and listening to movement below. They have an extraordinary sense of hearing, up to 10 times as good as a human's and use this to lock in the location of their prey before swooping down to snatch it with their sharp and powerful talons. The shape of a barn owl's face is no coincidence. Its disc shape helps to direct sound towards its ears and on top of this, they can even move the feathers on their face to listen to sounds from a specific direction. They mostly hunt over grasslands meadows and farmland but do sometimes venture into green spaces in urban areas. Barn owls can start breeding from one year of age when a pair will form and claim a territory. The size of this territory completely depends on how much food is available and so too does the window for when a pair will lay their eggs. If there is lots of food available, their territories are usually smaller and they can lay eggs at any time of the year but if food is scarcer, their territories will be bigger and their egg laying restricted to the spring and summer. Each pair chooses a nesting site, often a hollow tree, a shelf in a barn or ever increasingly a specially made owl nesting box. Like many birds, owls regurgitate pellets which contain all the hard to digest bits of their food, mainly bones and fur, and it's these pellets that the female uses to make a rudimentary cup-shaped nest. She will lay between 3 and 11 rounded white eggs that measure about 3.8 centimetres long. These are laid at 2 to 3 day intervals and take 30 to 31 days to hatch. The female does all of the incubation and starts as soon as the first egg is laid, which means there is a big size difference between the youngest and the oldest owlets. During incubation and for the first 2 to 3 weeks of the owlet's lives, the male provides all of the food for his mate and young. Sometimes he brings more food than can be eaten straight away, with any extra prey cached around the nest to be eaten later. At 8 to 9 weeks of age, the owlets look like slightly fluffier versions of their parents and will begin to venture away from the main nest in a process known as branching. During this time, they take their first short flights but usually return to the nest to roost during the day time. By 14 weeks of age, the young are indistinguishable from their parents, fully independent and will move away from their parents' territory in search of their own. Barn owls typically nest once per year, but if lots of food is available, they can sometimes rear a second brood. They will often use the same nest site year after year and remain monogamous most of the time. As I mentioned at the beginning of this video, barn owls are widely distributed around the world. There are 10 subspecies which are found across Europe, Africa, Arabia, India and in some parts of Asia. But there are also other very similar species such as the American barn owl which until recently was considered a barn owl subspecies, but has recently been determined to be a separate species in its own right. In the UK, there are around 9000 pairs of barn owls, and although their numbers did plummet throughout the 20th century, they seem to be slowly recovering from their lowest numbers during the 1980s. Around 70% of wild barn owls die within their first year, but if they do survive this, they have an average life expectancy of 4 years, with the oldest known wild bird surviving for 15 years, 3 months and 21 days. Barn owls do not make the stereotypical twit-twoo noise, that is in fact made by a male and female tawny owl. The barn owl's call is often referred to as a screech, and sounds like this. And there we go, if you enjoyed this video and you would like to learn some more about British wildlife, then click this one on the screen now. Thanks for watching and I'll see you next time.