SNN (ScrollingNetworkNews) ✿ ✿ Our Mel and Sydney returned to their nesting box with plenty of bonding occurring..but after 2.5 months of Sydney in the box from Dec 2013 to mid Feb 2014, the lack of prey gifts from Mel ( perhaps due to the severe and historic drought underway in California)and they have forgone the nesting process this year as many other raptors ✿ Compared to other owls of similar size, the Barn Owl has a much higher metabolic rate, requiring relatively more food. Pound for pound, Barn Owls consume more rodents – often regarded as pests by humans – than possibly any other creature. ✿ We remind viewers that sometimes owlets may not survive - the parents will dispose of things in "The Owl Way" -viewer discretion is advised, this is nature and the "Owl way". ✿ ~ ✿ “Animals, like us, are living souls. They are not things. They are not objects. Neither are they human. Yet they mourn. They love. They dance. They suffer. They know the peaks and chasms of being.” ― Gary Kowalski, The Souls of Animals ✿ Each species is a masterpiece, a creation assembled with extreme care and genius." ~ E.O. Wilson

Friday, July 20, 2012

In a flap: The astonishing moment THREE birds of prey were pictured in garden box

Not surprisingly these unusual neighbors get a little flighty with each every so often.

Being three different species of birds they are very territorial, but incredibly they have set up home within a metre of each other.

A trio of boxes, fitted to a pole in Ashurst, West Sussex have been occupied by barn owls, kestrels, tawny owls and now Stock doves. At one point the boxes housed the three predatory birds - the barn owls, the kestrels and the tawny owls - but a pair of stock doves have now replaced the tawny owls which fledged from the basement nest of the pole. Normally these birds would avoid each other like the plague, so I think it’s pretty much unprecedented to have them in one nesting box.

'They all hate each other and I’m worried what will happen if they all come back again next year.
'But it just points to the lack of natural nesting sites there is for birds at the moment, like trees and hollows.'
The pole, with attached bird nests, was one of a number that were installed in the 1990s thanks to funding support from the Environment Agency.