Lovely article in this morning's Times about the barn owl. Owlperson is an uppik, a snowy owl (that to our right is Cousin Ted, a tawny) but the magnificent, mysterious barn owl is beloved of all, nowadays anyway. We live right in the middle of the Berkshire/Hampshire countryside between Reading and Basingstoke and the trees around us are full of barn owls and tawnies, but I have only seen one once when it flew across the road while I was on my way back from a midsummer dusk walk in July 2006.
It must have been busy for several months after that, as the next spring we had about eighty new chicks born in the small area surrounding the local playing fields in Swallowfield and along the "old A33" (now the B3343) between Junction 11 of the M4 and the Hampshire border between Riseley and Hook.
Owlperson, meanwhile, said that once when he was bored he manifested on this side and found a breeding colony of uppik in the Hebrides. He can be very randy for a spirit guide, but he explained that the poor females in that colony hadn't seen a male in ages and were gagging for it. It is a bit difficult getting a cigarette into a snowy owl's beak, but he says the expression on his face afterwards could have given the ORLY owl a run for his money. He also mentions that that poor bird has been fisted, by the way, to get its beak to open that wide...but perhaps that's enough for now.
