Obsessed with Barn Owls

0:00 (Kate Jellyman)They're such an arresting and magical creature. You catch them at dawn or you catch them at dusk. And being the colour that they are, that paler colour, especially under the wing, means that it really feels kind of ghostly and mythical when you spot them. And it never gets old. Seeing a barn owl never gets old.

0:21 (Rosie Holdsworth) As we approach Halloween, we're going full barn owl as we discover what makes them such an amazing species. We'll meet the man so taken by them, he's self-confessed obsessed, and get expert insight from the Barn Owl Trust. I'm Ranger Rosie Holdsworth and in this episode, fellow Ranger Ajay Tegala takes you to Derbyshire's Peak District for a wander alongside deserted barns and gnarly old trees.

0:48 Welcome to Wild Tales, Obsessed with Barn Owls. (Kate) People call them ghost owls. People call them screech owls. You know, if we ask someone, "Oh, have you ever seen a barn owl?" they'll say, "No, but I've heard a screech owl." What they mean is they've heard the screeching of a barn owl. So, it's quite common for people to get those things confused simply because of that incredible noise they make. And if you've never heard it before and you hear that screeching noise of the barn owl out in the open countryside, if you're walking around, walking the dog at dusk, you know, and you suddenly hear that screeching, it can be a little bit frightening if you don't know what it is.

1:32 Some people can think it's someone screaming or something really sinister going on. (Ajay Tegala) Kate Jellyman is no stranger to barn owls. Both through her work on the farm where she lives and as a conservation officer at the Barn Owl Trust, she relies on eyes and ears across the country to keep a track of how barn owls are doing and where they are thriving.

1:53 Sometimes that's people carrying out specific survey work, and sometimes it's people who are just captivated by the majesty of barn owls and know their local population well because of a regular walk they do. And sometimes it's people who dedicate several months of the year, year after year, to watching their every move, waiting to see their heart-shaped face, witness its silent flight, and capture their story in an image.

2:21 (Jake Brass) So, we are in the Peak District. So we're sort of halfway in between Sheffield and Manchester, and we're just walking down this beautiful little country path. Really nice old woodlands and sort of rough grassland. But, I think the Peak District still has this sort of wild side to it, and you can go walking for, you know, 20 minutes from any town and you're in the middle of this sort of like quarry area or this really ancient woodland.

2:52 There's lots of little secret spots that I think are still fairly unknown, unexplored. So, I'm Jake Brass. I'm a 29-year-old British nature and wildlife photographer. (Ajay) Jake grew up in Derbyshire, a county he still spends most of his time in. He's also self-confessed obsessed with barn owls. (Jake) I would think most people would call me obsessed.

3:16 I think I'm addicted to the feeling of seeing barn owls, and I'm addicted to telling the story of the owls. Oh, but I call it my barn. It's just the local barn I go to. (Ajay) He's fed his addiction every night during the lighter months over the last few years at a barn not far from where he lives. It belongs to a local farmer, and he watches from behind a stone wall on a public footpath. Yet, he's come to affectionately call it his barn.

3:44 (Jake) And having watched them for four years now and seen success after success after success, the same parents coming back every year, and sort of learning the patterns in behaviour, and knowing what nights I should go up and what not. I think that is something that is special and something that I have sort of learned to really appreciate. And so now it's probably obsessive.

4:07 Hopefully it's healthy, but most people from the outside in would call me obsessed. So, this area looks really good just because there's a lot of edged woodland. So we've got a lot of good perches that a barn owl could sit on to sort of scan the thicker grassland. There's a lot of shrub and scrubby little fields that obviously haven't been overgrazed, and really good habitat for voles and shrews. And as we go down these steps you can sort of see the sort of variation in the height of the grass, which is perfect vole conditions really.

4:42 So around 7 or 8 o'clock at night we'd be seeing and hearing lots of voles running through this. And if you were lucky, you potentially would see a barn owl sort of flying over the the fields. I mean, these old stone walls are perfect as well, though. Often land on them and sort of use them as a little perch to gaze from and scan and see if they can get lucky with a vole.

5:04 (Ajay) Jake's walking today near Hathersage in Derbyshire on a woodland footpath open to the public. His barn, as he's come to call it, is further north. And on the day of recording, there are wildfires close by. But this footpath on the National Trust's Longshaw Estate gives views across countryside reminiscent of Jake's local patch.

5:25 (Jake) We're walking past this tiny little sort of stone structure right now, which is almost a one-for-one replica of where I'd normally stand. And it's little buildings like this that are so so good for barn owls nesting. When you see the little holes in the roofs and that sort of thing where there is access for barn owls, but not really used for people anymore, this is prime habitat for them to be nesting in.

5:49 And you know, it's somewhere like this at sort of 7, 8 o'clock at night, you might walk past and hear what sounds like static on a radio, and that's the sound of the fledglings telling their parents that they're really hungry and they're ready for food. And then, yeah, you maybe if you're lucky, you'll see a barn owl flying out the top and off on its way to hunting for the evening.

6:05 (Ajay) And it's when they hunt that barn owls display their most incredible adaptations. (Jake) They are just complete silent fliers, They'll leave the barn without a noise. And if you're not watching, you won't see it. They could fly right over your head and you won't see them. (Ajay) And as Kate from the Barn Owl Trust explains, it's all down to their feathers.

6:24 (Kate) A lot of the primary flight feathers have a comb-like structure along the edge that just dissipates the air as it moves through it. And then every flight feather has a microstructure on the surface, which is like a fluffy surface, and it just again dissipates that air as it moves over it. And it just means that both the prey can't hear them coming, but it also means that the barn owl can't hear itself flying like other species.

6:49 You can often hear birds such as wood pigeons flapping away as they fly past you. Barn owls wouldn't be able to hunt as effectively as they do if they could hear their own wings flapping, so it's a really amazing adaptation that really makes them an amazing predator. (Ajay) But they're not completely foolproof.

7:11 (Kate) One downfall to these amazing feathers that they have is that they don't work once they're wet. Those microstructures are so delicate that they completely get drowned out, and it actually starts to make the flight audible, which then obviously means the barn owl can no longer hear the prey. It can only hear itself flying. So, it really has an effect on the hunting successes.

7:34 We see much warmer, wetter winters with climate change, and we are seeing long periods of rain. Sometimes when they're starving, they just have to go out there and give it a go. It just means they're not going to be as effective. They're not going to catch as much food, and therefore they're not going to be eating as much food. And we do have problems with starvation in long periods of rainy weather.

7:54 (Ajay) And although hunting in wet weather can make it difficult for owls to catch their prey, they do have other incredible adaptations they use to be effective hunters. (Kate) So a barn owl is a bird of prey that specialises in low-level lighting. It's got amazing eyes: they're conical, they take up most of the size of their skull.

8:12 And they have amazing photosensitive rods that are adapted perfectly for low-level lighting. Not as good in pitch black actually, but the other amazing thing about them is that they have amazing memories for their home range, and they can actually create mental maps to be able to fly in pitch dark. It has a really specifically heart-shaped face which acts as a little bit of a satellite dish. The feathers of that facial disc are quite stiff and they capture the sound and divert them to really really sensitive ears within the edge of those facial disc feathers.

8:48 Just means that they are able to triangulate exactly where their prey is below them and that's often why you also see them when they're hunting and flying very slowly, they might be moving their head and that is them trying to use their facial disc like a GPS and funnelling that sound into their ears to try and pinpoint exactly where the prey is below them.

9:08 (Ajay) Catching a glimpse of these incredible birds requires a huge amount of patience as Jake knows only too well. (Jake) When I'm waiting and waiting and waiting, my mind can wander and it's quite tiring to make sure that I'm constantly switched on and waiting. But then when something's happening, when the fledgling barn owl is sticking his head out of the top of the barn for the first time, and I sort of raise the camera to my eye, the whole world just disappears.

9:35 And all I'm thinking about, and all I am sort of noticing, is the barn owl. It's like nothing else in the world matters. It doesn't matter what has gone on in the day or the week, for the 30 seconds that I have something in the viewfinder, that is me. That's everything. Every now and then, something particularly crazy happens, or something you've never seen before happens. And even now, you know, thousands of hours in, once I've left the barn and I start to sort of decompress and allow myself to actually sort of wake up from this fever dream of an encounter, your heart is racing, and you feel giddy. It's like: and I'm not a runner, but it feels like you just want to sprint for 10K, you know?

10:19 You want to set a new PB for a marathon or something, because it's... it's just this feeling of elation that I get from nothing else. Now, there's the train that's just gone past. That'll be on its way towards Manchester, I think, that one. (Ajay) Where Jake's walking is close by the Manchester to Sheffield train line, with stops within walking distance at Hathersage and Grindleford.

10:50 (Jake) If you want to get out of the city, a lot of people think that you need to be, you know, you need to have a car, but for this spot in particular, if it's accessible by train, anyone can get out and enjoy it. And I think there's a big movement for younger people to find spaces like this and to get out and enjoy them.

11:07 So, when there's a train station, you know, two minutes from where you can see so much wildlife, your pied flycatchers, your kingfishers, your dippers, you know, it's so important. And it's special. How lucky am I to be able to stand for four hours and see hobbies flying over, and peregrines flying over, and lapwings and curlews in the fields, the occasional stoat.

11:33 Just so much extra wildlife that I would never have found the time to watch if I wasn't spending four hours a night up at the barn. (Ajay) The path heads deeper into countryside now. And then through a gate and into woodland as Jake looks for possible barn owl nesting sites within the trees. (Jake) So, when a barn owl is looking for a nest site, it has to be able to see the hole on the wing essentially. So, if there's a hole a bit low to the ground, or if the tree is sort of in really dense forest in the middle of a forest, then you're very unlikely to find a barn owl.

12:08 Tawny will use it, but not the barn owl. One of the best indicators for a nesting site is looking for little white streaks of poo that signal that the barn owl, or any bird has been roosting there for a long time. But, it's so incredibly hard to actually sort of find them. You just have to get so lucky to hear something or see something. Usually we're looking at crows or magpies making a lot of noise, or little wrens screaming at them, blackbirds, other birds essentially alarming saying, you know, get out of my tree. Get out of here. We don't want you here.

12:45 (Ajay) Here on the Longshaw Estate, rangers and volunteers monitor any nest sites they're aware of. And in 2026, there were 28 owl chicks born on the estate, including barn owls. It's good news for a species whose numbers haven't always fared so well. (Kate) Lots of people sort of 15, 20 years ago were thinking it was quite a bleak picture. And because the decline seemed to be so drastic, all of the sort of reporting and the monitoring was showing fairly continuous decline for a number of years.

13:17 And I think the real positive that we are finding in the last few years is that numbers seem to be sort of plateauing, and maybe there's even a bit of an uplift there. We're not completely certain on that yet, but the decline seems to have ceased for now. (Ajay) But, as Kate explains, it's difficult to know how many barn owls are out there.

13:39 (Kate) There was a really robust survey at the turn of the millennium that's probably the only robust barn owl population survey that's ever been done. And that actually estimated there were around 4,000 pairs. And before that, an estimate back in the 1930s saw that there was probably around 12,000 pairs. So, we often say there's between 4 and 12,000 pairs, which obviously sounds extremely vague. But, the way that we work out how the general population is doing is we use data from monitoring across the country gathered by amazing people, often volunteers.

14:12 And we gather all of that data into one place and produce the national state of the UK barn owl population report here at the trust. We do that every winter based on the previous breeding period, and we try to use that as a really robust sample to be able to monitor those fluctuations. (Ajay) One of the things that affects numbers of barn owls is availability of prey. Barn owls are small mammal specialists and can be quite fussy about what they eat compared to other birds of prey.

14:41 They home in on field voles, wood mice, and common shrews. Very occasionally, a bat or a rat. They don't switch their diets depending on the season or the weather, and so they are really impacted by fluctuations in small mammal numbers. (Kate) We believe that the terrible year for barn owl breeding that we saw in 2025 was probably down to a really early drought. When we started monitoring our sites, we started to just see adult birds roosting with no eggs and no young, which is quite unusual.

15:14 We theorised by the end of the year, once we had a lot of the data from a lot of the other groups that saw really similar things, that it was a very poor year for barn owls, simply because that lack of rain early on at the time where barn owls are looking to get into breeding condition, and looking to be really healthy and eat lots of food was actually affecting the prey itself.

15:35 So those fresh grass shoots that things like field voles eat themselves weren't there, and it just had a knock-on effect, and meant that the field vole numbers weren't there at that time of year that's so crucial for the species. (Ajay) Sadly, drought is not the only factor impacting barn owl numbers.

15:54 We heard earlier about their difficulty hunting in extremely wet weather, but there are other issues, too, that have contributed to the fluctuations in numbers. Barn owls are site faithful, and many have lost nest sites to barn conversions. Others have succumbed to rodenticides, a chemical used to control rodents. Others have drowned while trying to wash in deep water feeding troughs where their feathers become waterlogged. Overhead cables are another hazard, but probably the largest issue for this low-flying bird are major roads and motorways.

16:27 They like the sides of the roads for prey and they just get taken into the traffic stream. Amazingly, in 2025, when drought affected barn owl numbers, the Peak District bucked the national trend. And at Jake's barn, over the four years he's been watching, he's seen his own family of barn owls thriving alongside another owl species that has also taken up residence there.

16:50 (Jake) When I first started that first year, I caught them really late. They had bred, and they had three fledglings that were pretty much adult size. And then the next year, having had that incredible encounter, I got up there from March, and that's when I first discovered that this barn also had little owls.

17:08 (Ajay) Little owls are another species of owl, a little smaller than a barn owl. (Jake) And then from April, the barn owls would start hunting, so I'd know that they'd nested and the eggs were laid. And then that year again, more success. I think we had three fledglings that year again. And then the year just passed, we had five fledglings at the barn and it was magical.

17:29 And now going into my fourth year, the story changes again because now those little owls that were always present for the first two months have now started to breed. So what we think, or what I think, was happening, was that the little owls they hadn't reached the breeding age. So they were there, they knew it was a good spot, but they'd never sort of learned how to breed properly.

17:45 Or they just weren't mature enough to breed. So now we have this crazy interaction between little owls and barn owls. The little owl fledglings have started to come out of the barn now, which is incredible to see these little fluff balls, three of them just floating around. And at the same time we've now got the barn owl fledglings also starting to put their heads around the barn.

18:04 So these are the steps that we were walking down before. So we're sort of almost full cycle back to where we started now. (Ajay) As Jake makes his way back, he confesses he has another title to describe what he does: begrudged birder. (Jake) My mum and dad are keen birders, and so they'd always drag us out, you know, into places like this. And when I was younger, that was the last thing I wanted to do.

18:26 So I was always begrudging in my enthusiasm. I never really appreciated it until I got older. And then I sort of got a camera in my hand and that sort of sealed the deal. But then, even now, I don't own a pair of binoculars because I spend too long with the lens, and the the sort of camera in hand. So when people call me a birder, I don't know if I can call myself that because yes, I can ID the birds and I know the bird song and all this, but I think I still count myself more as a photographer than a birder. And if someone wants to call me a birder, I'll accept it begrudgingly.

19:05 (Ajay) Before he started going up to his barn to photograph owls, Jake had been all round the world taking photos of incredible wildlife. But, it was coming back to his parents' house that started his new journey with the wildlife that was right on his doorstep. (Jake) And it was one of them what now moments. And as I landed back, I overlapped with my parents, but they briefly mentioned about this barn that, you know, has always been 30 minutes from home that I've never visited and the potential to see barn owls. So, I walked up there the first evening. Had the most incredible sunset. And while I was stood behind this wall not seeing anything, I heard this ridiculous sounding noise, which turned

19:51 out to be a stoat killing a baby rabbit. And as I was trying to find out what this noise was, I sort of looked back up at the barn and there was four barn owls just looking out at me. And I was just absolutely blown away by it. When I was walking home from there, I remember thinking, "Okay, there is something here."

20:10 (Ajay)And even like the walk today, where Jake's not seen any barn owls, it doesn't matter to him. (Jake) I've never had an evening up at the barn where I've thought this has been a waste of time. Because even on the nights you don't see anything, you know, you've not missed anything. It does, It feels like therapy in a way, you know, it's this mindfulness that we're always hearing about. And instead of finding it in, you know, a yoga studio, people are finding it outside in nature. Even if it's a couple of hours with Merlin on your phone, listening to different bird calls and identifying it that way, it's something, and it's like a reset for what has been a stressful day or a stressful week.

20:48 It's like I'm always going to be able to sit in my garden. I'm always going to be able to see something. And for some people it's as simple as seeing a robin on a walk, or a blackbird, or a seagull eating someone's pastry, you know. There's joy to be found in nature, and I think younger people are finding that joy far more readily than generations previous.

21:09 It took me travelling all around the world and coming home to realise that maybe the way to do it is to to stay local, to stay in the Peak District and to just start championing what we have locally that people can actually get behind and find for themselves. (Ajay) Thanks for listening to this episode of Wild Tales. If you fancy going for a walk to spot barn owls, please stick to the footpaths and don't disturb them, their nests, or their young.

21:48 Barn owls are classed as a schedule one species, meaning that any activity in the vicinity of a nest site that isn't consistent with the normal everyday activity around the site could be illegal. That said, there are plenty of paths and walks you can go on. Check out the show notes and I'll leave you some details. We'll be back soon with more inspiring stories from the world of nature. Until next time, goodbye.