The Owl You Can Watch in Broad Daylight

Quick summary

• A large share of Britain's breeding short-eared owls nest on open upland moorland.

• These day-flying owls live and die by field voles, their main prey.

• Densities are highest where rough grassland meets heather in a varied, open mosaic.

• Keeping moorland open, undegraded and vole-rich matters for this amber-listed bird.

Most owls hunt after dark. The short-eared owl doesn't. It works the open hillside in daylight, flying low and slow over the grass on long wings, so for once you can actually stand and watch an owl hunt.

And if you want to find one in Britain, the place to look is the uplands.

A moorland bird, first and foremost

Short-eared owls are strongly tied to open country, and in Britain that means the hills. Research on breeding birds in Scotland found that most British breeding short-eared owls are associated with moorland — semi-natural, open vegetation on acidic, peaty upland soils.

The British Trust for Ornithology puts it plainly: a substantial proportion of Britain's short-eared owl population breeds on managed moorland, where these owls specialise on small-mammal prey.

It's all about voles

More than anything else, the short-eared owl is a vole specialist. Its fortunes rise and fall with the abundance of field voles, and because vole numbers cycle sharply from year to year, so do the owls.

Breeding numbers can swing dramatically between a good vole year and a poor one, a boom-and-bust pattern that has long been recognised in upland Britain.

That dependence drives how the bird uses the land. Where voles are abundant, owls concentrate; where prey collapses, they move on, sometimes ranging over large distances between seasons.

So protecting short-eared owls means protecting the conditions that produce voles: open ground with a good depth of rough, grassy cover.

Video courtesy of Northern Pennines Moorland Group.

Why the moorland mosaic matters

Some moorland suits this owl far better than the rest. The highest breeding densities are reported not from uniform ground but from the interface, rough grassland lying adjacent to, or mixed in with, heather moor, the kind of marginal hill ground sometimes called "white moor."

A single home range of around 200 hectares that contains a diversity of sward heights and structures appears to be what these owls need to see them through the breeding.

Short-eared owls do best on a varied open landscape, a patchwork of grass and heather, of taller cover and shorter sward, held in an open state and not lost to dense conifer plantation or agricultural "improvement."

Keeping large tracts of the uplands open, undegraded and structurally diverse is what keeps voles, and therefore owls, in good supply.

A bird we still know too little about

For all its charisma, the short-eared owl is one of the hardest of British birds to count. It is patchily distributed, wanders widely, and its numbers lurch up and down with the voles, so much so that its national population estimate is acknowledged as among the least reliable of any British raptor or owl.

Surveys tend to detect the pairs that have successfully hatched chicks and miss those that failed or never bred, which makes reliable trends genuinely difficult to pin down.

What we can say is that the species is amber-listed as a bird of conservation concern in the UK, and that its stronghold sits squarely in the open uplands. Because it is both hard to count and concentrated on moorland, the condition and future of those moors matters enormously for its prospects.

Why this matters

The short-eared owl is a good reminder that Britain's working uplands are far from empty. Keep the hills open, varied and rich in voles, and this striking bird of prey keeps hunting over them.