He's not one of your serious bird-watchers, but he likes to know all the species he can. Three things he wants to experience this year: to see again at close quarters a corncrake as well as hear it; the same with a cuckoo, and to come across a barn owl in flight. As to the first two, he has memories of both birds at short range from boyhood, but in looking through Cabot's Ireland: A Natural History, he realised that it must be 15 years or more since he has seen a barn owl, that lovely white presence, silent and sure. It seems to be still in decline. Cabot puts the numbers in Ireland at between 600 and 900 pairs. The new farming seems to have cut their numbers but there may be other factors. The barn owl's favourite prey is, he tells us, the brown rat and the wood mouse. "For such an agricultural country as Ireland, where there is no apparent shortage of roosting or breeding sites, and a plentiful supply of rats and mice, they are surprisingly scarce. Indeed, many people living on farms or in the country have rarely if ever encountered one of these graceful owls." Even the 600 to 900 pairs may be overestimating their numbers today.
In Gilbert White's day in his village of Selborne in southern England, (he called them white or church or screech owls) they sallied forth from their lair an hour before sunset "when the mice begin to run", to `'beat" the fields like a dog. He timed them. They returned to the nest with prey, the one or other of them, every five minutes. They nested under the church eaves and landed with the prey still in their claws; so to climb up the roof they had to change it over to the beak. Their wings, White noted, made little noise "perhaps necessary for their type of hunting." And "They often screech horribly. I have known a whole village up in arms imagining the churchyard to be full of goblins and spectres."
Back in Ireland, one man says that in his whole life, and he is often out and about in the country, angling or visiting or just touring, he has only four or five times seen the bird. Once near Tullamore coming from Pallas Lake where the bird flew along over the car late at night for a mile or two; once over Kilcarne Bridge, Navan, also near Millisle in County Down near a woodland. And, most memorably, one rising to stare into his face as he stood on the very edge of the sheer basalt drop on Mac Arts Fort, on the Cave Hill, Belfast. Oddly, he has in his house a stuffed long-eared owl. His young folk found it, no wounds, stone dead a few yards away. The only owl seen in the whole townland.