Chapter 20 of 23

Barn Owls Around the World

A quick tour of a very widely travelled bird

About 3 minute read

Our British Barn Owls are only a tiny part of a very big story. The Barn Owl family has spread across almost the entire planet, and the birds that live in other countries have adapted in interesting ways. Here is a short tour.

Europe

Across mainland Europe, Barn Owls live very much as our birds do. They are sedentary, faithful to their mates and their sites, and they hunt small mammals over open country. The main differences are in the menu and the homes. In Britain the field vole is the star, but on the continent there is a wider mix of voles, shrews, mice and rats, and the common vole, which lives in burrows and copes well with short grass and crops, is a major food in many countries. Common voles do not live in mainland Britain at all.

In parts of southern Europe, Barn Owls live comfortably in towns and cities, and they take roosting sparrows from street trees. Nests are often higher above the ground than in Britain, probably because of stone martens, and are commonly in churches, towers, windmills and castles. The Irish owls are different again. There are no field voles in Ireland, so the owls there rely heavily on mice, rats and shrews, including a couple of newcomers that have arrived in recent years.

Africa, Asia and beyond

In Africa, gerbils and multimammate mice take the place of voles on the Barn Owl's menu. In parts of Asia, rats are a mainstay, and in the great rice growing regions, the owls have become valued allies of farmers, and in some places they are encouraged with nest boxes. In North America, voles and pocket gophers are favourite foods, and in many islands, there are local forms adapted to the food on offer. The bird is remarkably flexible so long as there are small mammals to catch and somewhere dry to sleep.

Barn Owl relatives

The Barn Owl has some interesting cousins. The grass owls live in tall, damp grassland in Africa, Asia and Australasia. They are darker on the back and look rather like Barn Owls that have come home from a muddy walk. The masked owls of Australia and New Guinea are big and powerful, and some can tackle animals as large as a possum. The sooty owls live in rainforest. The bay owls of tropical Asia are small, shy and rather odd looking, with a heart shaped face of their own. They all share the same family features, from the heart shaped facial disc to the comb on the claw, and they are a reminder that the Barn Owl's success story is really a family one.

The far north

The Barn Owl is a bird of warm places, and Britain sits close to the cold limit of its range. Scotland has the most northerly Barn Owls in the world. That makes our birds more vulnerable to bad weather than their cousins in warmer places, and it explains a good deal about why cold, wet winters and springs can be so damaging. It also makes it likely that a warmer climate might help them in the north, though it might change the small mammals they rely on in ways that are hard to predict.

If you would like to meet more of the family, the Owls Around The World page on the website is a good next step.