Hi Philip,
These escaped owls are coming from private
owners (mostly falconers or wannabe falconers) and like many raptors are prone
to fly off during the early stages of training and not returning.
I don’t think anyone is suggesting they
are brought to the UK to avoid persecution elsewhere. They are widely kept in Europe and the US and are thus readily
available to purchase. However, there are fewer knowledgeable handlers than
birds in captivity and thus many are prone to escaping during initial training.
Even if you know what you are doing, some birds will still just fly off - one
of the risks of the pursuit. I believe in the US that Eagle Owls and Great
Horned Owls are also the only raptors that you can easily get permits to keep (but
certainly not 100% sure on this fact) thus further increasing their popularity/availability.
Cheers Dan
-----Original
Message-----
From: Philip Veerman
[
Sent: Tuesday,
31 August 2010 2:36
To: Mantle
Daniel
Subject: Eagle Owls in the UK
Where
are these escaped birds coming from then? Is there a problem of hunting of wild
Eagle Owls from somewhere else, to bring them to UK?
-----Original Message-----
From:
[
Sent: Tuesday, 31 August 2010 1:49
PM
To: ;
Subject: RE: [canberrabirds] Eagle
Owls in the UK [SEC=PERSONAL]
Hi
Martin,
You are
correct, Eagle Owls are widely kept in the UK and I believe elsewhere in
Europe, the US, and Asia but are often not properly trained as falconry birds.
They are well known to be able to catch very large prey items in the wild
(incl. claims of ¾ grown wolves (!) and certainly many foxes) but I believe
falconers use them mainly for shows and occasionally for rabbit hunting. They
are apparently not great falconry birds as they are notoriously difficult to
train to hunt.
There
has been a huge amount of debate about their status in the UK – Are all
the free flying birds escapees or could some be genuine vagrants? Some groups
believe they could be partly self-established in the UK and have arrived under their
own steam. These groups point out that Eagle Owls have increased in numbers and
expanded their range in continental Europe and that other species of owls are
known vagrants to the UK. A substantial paper arguing this case was presented
by the one of the Owl/Falconry groups but I think they clearly had their own
agenda. They released this paper as a ‘scientifc publication’ but I
don’t believe it was independently peer-reviewed.
I think
most knowledgeable birders in the UK believe the free flying Eagle Owls are all
escaped birds. The BOU (British Ornithological Union) certainly maintains
European Eagle Owl as a category E species (likely escaped, non vagrant bird).
Owls
such as Scops Owls and Hawk Owls that are known to occur in the UK as genuine
vagrants are migratory and irruptive species, respectively, that can easily
travel long distances. However, the European Eagle Owl is a largely
resident/sedentary species that is not prone to wide ranging dispersal and
would probably have some difficulties crossing a large expanse of open water
such as the English Channel. Similarly Tawny Owls, a common breeding species in
the UK, are a largely sedentary species that have only very, very rarely made
the short crossing to Ireland.
One of
the reasons for such hotly contested debate in the UK is that as an escaped
species the Eagle Owls are unprotected by law. There are now several well known
breeding pairs and the eggs at one of these sites have been repeatly smashed
and at least one of the breeding female birds was shot. Showing just how many
free-flying Eagle Owls there are in the UK, it was soon replaced by another
female and a new pair was formed. Many of these birds still show traces of
their jesses and are of undoubted captive origin. I think it is because of this
persecution that the Owl/Falconry group put out their paper claiming Eagle Owls
were potentially true vagrants and were establishing naturally occurring
breeding populations in the UK. The paper lobbied for the change in status from
category E (escaped birds) to category A (naturally occurring) in the BOU lists
and would thus be able to get some sort of protections for them.
However,
the situation is coloured by the fact that Eagle Owls are well known to kill
other birds of prey up to, at least, the size of a Northern Goshawk. One of the
pairs in the UK is thought to have killed a female Hen Harrier as the remains
were found very close to an Eagle Owl nest. Hen Harriers are a protected
species in the UK and thus many conservationists/birders would agree that
probable escaped birds, even as magnificent as an Eagle Owl, such not be
allowed to spread unnaturally if they are killing a vulnerable breeding
species. Again further complicating matters a grey wing, initially thought to
be a male Hen Harrier wing, was also found at one of the nest sites but DNA
analysis proved this to be a Common Gull wing and the pro-Eagle Owl groups
jumped on this claiming there was no real evidence that the UK Eagle Owls were
killing Hen Harriers.
My
personal opinion is that they are more than likely all escaped birds. There was
a really good summary of the status of Eagle Owls in the UK in the British
Birds journal a few years ago and I am pretty sure there are scanned copies of
this article on the web that I can find for anyone that may be interested.
Cheers
Dan
-----Original
Message-----
From: martin
butterfield [
Sent: Tuesday,
31 August 2010 12:41
To: Philip Veerman
Cc: COG
List
Subject: Re: [canberrabirds]
Escaping birds
Thanks
for those comments Philip.
Here is a link http://www.rspb.org.uk/ourwork/policy/species/nonnative/eagleowls.asp
to the article from which I extracted material in my last message. The
only suggestion I can find as to why people might keep eagle owls is in the
reference to falconry (although when - in my youth in the UK - I hung out with
falconers I never head of anyone having an Eagle Owl). I agree that there
is a leap from the number of certificates to the inference that there are a
large number of birds in captivity.
WRT to the last bit what I was hoping for was someone who is connected with the
captive bird situation in Canberra (or indeed elsewhere in Australia) to
say something like "Our members, who have got n birds of species A, have
reported z escapes per year.". This would be to be a
useful topic for research by someone concerned about the impact of feral birds.
Martin
On Sat, Aug 28, 2010 at
6:31 PM, Philip Veerman <> wrote:
That is
curious. I wonder why would anyone want to keep an Eagle Owl. I wonder if they
would cost more to feed than a dog. Most likely they would be fed on rats. I
agree those figures sound like a high escape rate. Or are people not wanting
them any more and releasing them, and calling that an escape. I don't follow
the logic about counting certificates if a bird is sold enabling a suggesting
that the number kept
in captivity is likely to be considerably higher than this. Surely one bird could be sold many times. They can live a long
time. I can imagine people would get bored with keeping one.
About
your last bit, it is difficult to describe, as we know so little about how long
individual escaped birds survive. Beyond that, as you know, the GBS Report
comments on this issue for Canberra, as our GBS is a probably unique position
to contain relevant (even if patchy) data. I don't know of any study that
offers anything more than the GBS Report does (as minimal as that was),
otherwise I would have cited it in the references................
-----Original Message-----
From: martin butterfield [
Sent: Saturday, 28 August 2010
1:57 PM
To: COG List
Subject: [canberrabirds] Escaping
birds
As a result of reading
about an Eagle Owl (in the UK) atacking a Hen Harrier I checked out the RSPB
site to find about Eagle Owls, which I thought got no closer to the UK than the
Alps. It seems there are quite a few in the UK derived from
escapees. I thought it might be of interest to reproduce the words of the
RSPB about this situation.
"The eagle owl has been known in captivity in this country since at least
the 17th century and many were brought from India during the 19th century.
Eagle owls are very commonly kept in captivity - often by people who are not
falconers. There is no formal requirement to register these birds, but a
certificate is required if a captive bird is sold. In the 10 years to 2007,
3,370 such certificates were issued. The number of eagle owls kept in captivity
is likely to be considerably higher than this.
"Of the 440 captive eagle owls registered with
the Independent Bird Register between 1994 and 2007, 123 (28%) were reported to
have escaped. Of these, 73 were reported as not having been recovered.
This equates to 9-10 escapees per annum, of which 5-6 were not recovered. If
the same escape rate is applied to a conservative estimate of the British
captive population over the same 13-year period, around 65 birds could be
expected to escape each year."
This seemed an astonishing number of escapes. I
wonder if anyone has done any studies of the escape rate of Australian captive
birds?
