Eagle Owl in Britain (1 Viewer)

PaulE said:

what difference does it make whether they were here before or not if they colonise naturally they surely have as much right as barn owls to survive

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If they colonise naturally then fine, but there is very little evidence of that happening.

TV programmes are invariably designed to produce heat, not light and they usually try to come up with a controversial angle. Here Roy Dennis was promoting the view that Eagle Owls are occuring naturally, but clearly couldn't come up with any hard evidence to support that view.

When Snowy Owls were breeding/attempting to breed in the Shetlands some people were advocating releasing extra birds to "help" them, but the sensible view which prevailed was that this was a natural event which should be allowed to fail or succeed naturally.

Same with Eagle Owls - if they colonise naturally then good for them, I'll enjoy watching them. But their place as part of our natural avifauna is at the very least doubtful, and I thought we had realised from past mistakes that introducing non-native species is not a good idea.

PaulD said:

Same with Eagle Owls - if they colonise naturally then good for them, I'll enjoy watching them. But their place as part of our natural avifauna is at the very least doubtful, and I thought we had realised from past mistakes that introducing non-native species is not a good idea.

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Now that is on the money...

PaulD said:

Same with Eagle Owls - if they colonise naturally then good for them, I'll enjoy watching them. But their place as part of our natural avifauna is at the very least doubtful, and I thought we had realised from past mistakes that introducing non-native species is not a good idea.

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Spot on.

Colin

The question I asked a while back and someone else has asked since the doco reaired remains unanswered and in my view relevant and that is to ask how many of these free flying "european eagle owls" in the UK are actually Bubo bengelensis. My recollection as a kid going to falconry parks and such was that they were at least as common as europeans if not more. A lot of the arguments would I think go away with regards to owls of this species - "nativeness/place in the ecosystem etc"

I've just returned from a couple of hours at Lagoa dos Salgados (Pera Marsh) this morning. In terms of numbers of individuals and different species per unit of area this must be one of the best birding spots in Europe (I know a lot of forum members know this locality and would agree with me).

This morning there were virtually no birds at all: no waders, ducks or gulls which should be present in their thousands. Two groups of Brits said that there were loads of birds early on but that the Peregrine "over there" had dispersed them all. I set my scope up to look at what one guy assured me was a huge female Peregrine. It was actually a Saker Falcon on the ground tucking into what I think was a Teal. I threw a brick in its direction and made as much noise as I could and, as it took off, I was able to point out the jesses attached to the bird's legs.

The bird could have come from ZooMarine down the road where, as well as dolphins, etc, they also have a raptor section (including Eagle Owls) but is more likely to have escaped from two Spanish falconers who are employed by Faro International Airport to "get rid of the birds" (their words, not mine).

Pied Avocet and Black-winged Stilt, as well as other species, have already started nesting at Lagoa dos Salgados - I wonder if they will come back?

Would I shoot the Saker given the opportunity? - too bloody true I would.

Colin

Keith Reeder said:

Now that is on the money...

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i'm a little confused all the points i made were made on the basis of a natural colonisation when someone agreed with me you sighed and said i was wrong and yet when colin made exactly the same point you agreed with him
throughout this thread i havn't advocated introducing eagle owls or any other large predators i have serious doubts about sea eagles but what i beleive is that if they get here naturally then humanity has no right to remove them whatever their motives, even if it means other species suffer and i still say whether they have been here before or not makes no difference

Let´s see if I can understand all this. Eagle Owl is breeding in the UK. Some people are happy because an extra species is a Good Thing. However others are afraid that Eagle Owls will eat other (rare) species to extinction, and this would be a Bad Thing. The arguments pivot on two central questions, firstly, did Eagle Owls historically breed in the UK (and if so how long ago), and secondly, did any of the EO´s in the UK make it there on their own steam.

There seems to be no foolproof way of answering the major questions above, which are:
1. Will EO´s make any other rare species extinct?
2. Did EO´s breed in the UK in the past?
3. Did any EO´s make it to the UK on their own?

The arguments and opinions expressed in the hundreds of above posts are all very informative and interesting, but none conclusively answer any of these three questions, and it seems we have no way of doing so. I suppose it´s far more worrying for all the other species on the planet (including EO´s) that we expanded beyond our original Rift Valley range (once we´d come up with all this Prehensile Thumbs/Upright Gait/Abstract Language nonsense) to threaten every ecosystem on the planet. And it´s also in the longer term irrelevant, given that long before the Universe dies a Cold Death, we´re all headed for the extinction bin anyway. The prognosis is Not Good, and the exact position or condition of the Deck Chairs on the good ship Titanic/Earth shouldn´t cause any of us to be Unpleasant to each other. I suppose all we can do is wish the EO´s, and each other, well. Happy Birding folks.

Sancho said:

1. Will EO´s make any other rare species extinct?

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I don't think there is a single case worldwide of Eagle Owls causing the extinction of another species, so I think the answer to this is no. Eagle Owls breed on my local patch, so do several other owl species and, within a short distance of the owls, there are nesting Honey Buzzard, Common Buzzard, Goshawk, etc, etc. Also Corncrakes nest just nearby (as this species has been mentioned once as a species that coud be affected in the UK!). Fact is they all coexist, as they do in habitats even more similar to those in the UK. Occasional predation, perhaps, extinction, no.

alcedo.atthis said:

"Not in post-glacial deposits we haven't. Remains were found, but they were hundreds of thousands of years old, not thousands."



Please clarify, where were they found, when were they found, where are they now and who has dated these finds??

Also, who has clarified which species of Owls were found, who did the identification, and by which means??

Thank you.


Regards

Malky

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UK 48 Ossom's Cave (Staffordshire)
Alt: 250 Type: c
Sources: Bramwell 1960b, Jackson 1962, Stewart 1999, Stuart 1982
Layer: C
Date: LP LG Late Devensian, Dryas 3 14C=10590±70,10780±160,10600±140 BP. [apologies, it was 10,000 not hundreds of thousands].
Fauna: Lagopus lagopus, Lagopus mutus, Tetrao tetrix, Buteo cf buteo, Crex crex, Bubo bubo, Turdus
viscivorus, Corvus monedula
Det.: Bramwell Stored: Stoke City Museum
Notes: Bramwell and Jackson also report Pluvialis sp., Calidris alpina, Strix aluco, Anthus sp. and Corvus corax
but these are probably Holocene. A. k. a. Ossum's Cave

Refs on here http://web.telia.com/~u11502098/pleistocene.pdf

Britian 10,000 years ago was like Norway, and with virtually no humans. Massively different from today, in terms of climate and habitat. The forests were mostly coniferous.

haven't got time to more than skim posts on this page, but I'll just say that anyone would be a fool to suggest that EO could cause extinctions of eg barn owl on their own. But they're not working on their own, they'll also be working in tandem with habitat loss, loss of nest sites, increase in roads and cars etc etc etc. It's added pressure, and the disproportionate impact I mentioned in a previous post.

This is going round in circles now. The same dead points coming up again, so I'll duck out.

Thanks for digging out the reference, Poecile. Despite the date being much more recent, I still want to emphasise that showing that EOs "lived in Britain" 10,000 years ago is fraught with difficulty. See the link and consider to what extent "Britain" actually existed 10,000 years ago. http://www.anth.ucsb.edu/projects/Europe10K/10kbp.html