The short-eared owl is a breed apart

We invariably think of owls as creatures linked to woods and darkness, but the short-eared owl bucks both trends in preferring open landscapes and by being active in daylight. In summer, when they are breeding, the birds favour high moors or rough farmland, often in northern England or Scotland, as well as the offshore islands and especially the Outer Hebrides.

Then, in winter, when they descend in altitude or migrate south to English coastal areas, short-eared owls add salt-flats, dunes and grazing marsh to their range of treeless habitats.

Hunting birds will perch momentarily on isolated bushes, but I have never once seen the species in a wood or even merely flying through mature trees. Their preference for day-time is almost equally diagnostic, although best of all its features is when the bird stares straight at you. Its eyes are piercing yellow and, occasionally, you can spot the vestigial ear tufts, which stand proud of the enormously rounded head.

It may not be the largest by weight of our five British species — tawnies are heavier — but the short-eared owl has the greatest span and the chequered ash-brown wings are noticeably broad. In consequence, the flight is airy, light and immensely fluid. Watching a short-eared owl hunt is never less than a joy. It patrols just over the ground and deploys a deep, steady action, in which the two parts of each full beat are of unequal length. The upstroke is whippy and near instantaneous, but the downstroke seems slower, as if the wings must work harder through all that disturbed air.

This rhythmic progress is ultimately at the service of the owl’s spotlight search for rodents, and there are always floating pauses or moments when the wings tilt down to either side. It is the blend of precision and grace throughout that makes the bird so beautiful to watch. Best of all is the moment that the owl strikes, collapsing to earth, the enormous wings folding down upon it like old clothing.

Prey taken during these patrols includes insects and birds as large as redshanks, but newts, frogs and bats are among an occasional miscellany. Yet the vast majority of the short-eared owl’s diet comprises small mammals, and particularly voles. This dependence on the latter has been well illustrated at moments in British history when vole populations have reached ‘plague’ levels. They were recorded as long ago as the 17th century, but a striking event occurred in southern Scotland in 1891–93. Farms were said to have been infested with millions of scuttling, squealing rodents, as the short-eared owl numbers built up in Dumfriesshire alone to 500 pairs. The exceptional nature of these owl numbers come into focus, when you realise that the present British total is only 620–2,200 pairs. This has coincided with a near halving of the short-eared owl’s British range in the past 40 years.

A predator whose own numbers fluctuate with the fortunes of a single dominant prey might be assumed to be vulnerable, but short-eared owls have a massive hemispheric range that wraps right across Eurasia and North America and even through the lower half of South America.

It has, improbably, managed to cross the 300 miles of roiling ocean between Argentina and the Falklands. I recall vividly seeing the species on a South Atlantic coastal cliff — half a world away from any of the British places that I so associated with short-eared owls. Yet it wasn’t the strangeness of the bird’s presence that struck me. It was how at home it appeared in the heath-like vegetation of the Falklands’ diddle-dee; no less a true resident than it is on the moors of the English Pennines.

The ability to cross large areas of open sea allows the short-eared owl to make annual journeys from mainland Europe to Britain. These appearances on our east coast are triggered by the same conditions that bring other autumnal arrivals, such as woodcock and winter thrushes. The coincidence led to an old country name for the shorty — the ‘woodcock owl’.

Quainter still was a belief, which some serious ornithologists once entertained, that those midgets of the bird world, goldcrests, somehow managed to snuggle into the owls’ thick plumage and hitch a ride to Britain.