Owls have more associations for us than perhaps any other family of birds, suggested Jeremy Mynott in Birdscapes, so it is puzzling that it has taken Collins 70 years to add this ‘Natural History of the British and Irish Species’ to its famous New Naturalist Series.
It is of course primarily a zoological work, with statistics, charts and sentences such as: ‘A real breakthrough in resolving this problem has been the advent of affordable molecular and biochemical methods.’ But the science, if sometimes beyond the simple owl-lover, reveals plenty of fascinating facts.
The five principal species found in Britain are tawny, barn, little, long-eared and short-eared. The tawny is easily the most abundant, at possibly 20,000 breeding pairs. It is the one we hear, the male calling ‘toowit-towoo’ and the female ‘keewik’. It lives in towns as well as the countryside, but appears to hate crossing the sea because, unlike the barn, it is unknown in Ireland.
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