I have made a stand this year. Having been turned into a walking pin cushion during previous Barn Owl nesting seasons you would have thought that I’d have learnt earlier, but I still began this year putting my poor bare little hands into dark nesting boxes where owlets sit back on their tails, talons stretched forward, hissing and spitting like angry cobras.

Not only do the needle-like talons hurt, but the scratches that they inflict inevitably become infected due to the muck and dead voles that these messy creatures sit on. So halfway through the season I decided that enough was enough and began to use a marvellous piece of protective clothing: a leather glove. Now my hand goes in and comes out good as new and there is still a smile on my face.

Unfortunately, the Barn Owl situation in Cumbrian this year is giving me very little to smile about. Clutch sizes are smaller than last year – and 2004 was down on 2003 – and I have found dead chicks in the nest boxes of many pairs.

Elsewhere in the country, Barn Owl workers are reported the most successful year in decades, so what has gone wrong in Cumbria? It is probably mainly down to the very long and extremely wet winter we have just experienced.

Barn Owls are well known for their inability to cope with extended periods of rain and last winter was exceptionally wet from September onwards. This would have meant that, come the breeding season, the females were not in good enough condition to breed and so they waited a month longer than usual before even beginning to lay eggs. Some of my most regular and successful sites have not even bothered to raise a family this year. When the females did lay, they produced fewer chicks than usual.

Long periods of bad weather are also bad news for voles and so it is likely that prey is harder to come by in normal years: this would explain chicks dying in the nests now.

We wont really know the full story until I have the results written up at the end of the season, but I’m already very aware that our Cumbrian Barn Owls desperately need a good breeding season next year to follow the last two poor seasons.

Hopefully the baby boom in the south will compensate for our lack of breeding and force more chicks from elsewhere to disperse north!

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