A while ago I coyly disclosed that there has been a pair of eagle owls nesting at one of our nature reserves this year. We think that they have reared two young successfully.
I remember the first eagle owls I saw, and I haven't seen many since, in the mountains of Les Alpilles, near Les Baux, north of Arles while I was working in the south of France. They are really impressive, powerful and magnificent birds with an attention-demanding hooting call. Size is not everything when it comes to birds, but this is an uber-owl! So, if they are so amazing, you might ask 'Why the coyness?'.
The tricky thing about these birds is that they only have a tenuous claim to be native species in the UK. There is a fossil record of UK eagle owls but they may well have died out about 9000 years ago. That's quite a long time ago - about 4000 years before Stonehenge was built.
All the records since that time probably refer to escaped captive birds - many of them of Indian rather than European origin. The nearest eagle owls to the UK are a few pairs in Belgium and the Netherlands but the species has spread westwards through Europe in recent years so they are heading in our direction. However, eagle owls don't often fly over stretches of water (maybe a bit like tawny owls don't nip over to Ireland - there are no tawny owls there) and I am grateful to a German colleague at the RSPB for giving me the following interesting snippet which backs up how reluctant this species is to cross the sea. The island of Heligoland is 30-40 miles off the German coast and has been the site of a bird observatory for well over a century. It must be one of the best-watched sites for birds in Europe. Despite all the rare, inconspicuous, skulking and difficult-to-identify birds which have been recorded on Heligoland there has never been a record of this stonking great owl. That is pretty strong evidence that eagle owls aren't whizzing around making cross-sea journeys and so it seems to me very unlikely that eagle owls have arrived unaided and unassisted in the UK for thousands of years.
And I am amazed that there are thousands (yes, thousands!) of eagle owls in captivity in the UK, of which probably c65 a year escape and c40 a year remain at liberty! So it's easy to believe that 'our' eagle owls are escapes from captivity and difficult to believe that they or any other eagle owls have got here naturally. So does that make them a native species? I don't think so.
Introduced species often cause conservation problems - and eagle owls are powerful predators. Would we want them eating their way through our fauna? But if they used to be here thousands of years ago, and live in similar places elsewhere in Europe, should we be concerned about their impacts or not? These are tricky questions and we know that government officials and agencies are wrestling with them now in order to set policy so that they can tell or advise land owners like the RSPB what to do. Some landowners may love eagle owls, I'm sure some others will hate them. It's impossible for the RSPB to dislike such a magnificent beast, but we do recognise that allowing a 'new' top predator to become established by accident may (but it's difficult to tell) have consequences for our truly native fauna.
What do you think that government policy should be on cases such as the eagle owl? I have to say, personally, I'm torn between loving the bird and fearing its impacts - what do you think?