Barn Owl

The Barn Owl is the pale owl of open farmland: a medium-sized owl with a big, rounded head, no ear tufts and a white, heart-shaped face set with dark eyes. Its underparts are white or nearly so, and its back and wings are golden buff, softly mottled with grey and finely spotted. Flying low over a field at dusk, or caught in car headlights, it looks like a big white bird.

Look for long, rounded wings, a short square tail and long legs feathered in white, whose feet reach past the tail in flight. The bill is small and ivory, and the eyes are very dark brown, looking black. The flight is slow and buoyant, often back and forth over rough grass.

This page is about the Western Barn Owl (Tyto alba), the barn owl of Britain, Europe, Africa and the Middle East. The barn owls of the Americas, and of southern Asia and Australasia, were long counted as the same species, once thought the most widespread land bird on Earth.¹ The 2025 AviList checklist splits them off as the American Barn Owl (Tyto furcata) and the Eastern Barn Owl (Tyto javanica), on evidence from their genes and voices.² American birds are about half as heavy again as ours (males average 474 g against 312 g in Europe), with proportionally shorter wings and longer legs, so North American sizes and weights do not apply to British owls.³

Males and females differ on average, but they overlap. Most males are white below, with no dark spots or only a few tiny ones, and have a white face. Females tend to be darker: the breast is washed golden buff, with on average more and larger black spots, the underwing is usually spotted too, and the rim of the face is often darker. Some males are spotted and some females almost white, and about 90% of British Barn Owls can be sexed from their feathers.⁴ Females are a little heavier: live adults weighed by ringers average about 354 g for females and 312 g for males.⁵

Chicks hatch with only a thin covering of white down, and from about two weeks grow a thicker coat of greyish-white and buff down. By about five weeks the heart-shaped face shows and flight feathers are growing beneath the down. A young owl that has just started to fly can keep wisps of white down for a month or more, but once fully feathered it looks like an adult or is more heavily spotted.

In central and eastern Europe, Barn Owls are buff to rufous below, usually heavily spotted, and greyer above. This is the subspecies guttata; British and western European birds belong to the white-breasted form, alba, and the two interbreed where they meet, in a band from the Netherlands, Belgium and eastern France to the Rhine and central Switzerland. Dark-breasted birds turn up in Britain too and breed with white-breasted ones, so a heavily spotted, dark-breasted male can be a British-hatched bird.^{1, 4}

A Barn Owl is 33-39 cm (13-15.5 in) long, with a wingspan of 80-95 cm (31.5-37.5 in), a little smaller than a Tawny Owl. Most adults weigh 280-420 g (10-15 oz), and a female may weigh as much as 425 g before she lays.

A Tawny Owl is bigger and brown or grey, with a rounder face, and lives mainly in woodland. It can look pale in car headlights, but an owl you hear hooting again and again is likely to be a Tawny, because Barn Owls do not hoot. A Short-eared Owl also hunts over open ground by day and can look almost white below in flight, but it has yellow eyes and a dark-streaked upper breast. Young owls differ too: a young Tawny Owl has vivid pink edges to its eyelids, which a young Barn Owl does not.

Barn Owls screech, hiss and snore, but they do not hoot. The best-known call is a long, harsh, gargling screech, the male's advertising call, given mostly in flight near the nest; in European recordings it lasts about 2 seconds (1.4-2.6 seconds across 95 calls).⁶ Females give a more broken, huskier version. Outside the breeding season Barn Owls call little, so you are more likely to see one than to hear it.

Close to the nest there is more to hear: purring calls, fast twitters when food is delivered, bill-snapping when an owl is alarmed and, now and then, a clap of the wings in a male's display flight.

Nestlings beg with a rasping snore, repeated endlessly when they are hungry and frantic when a parent arrives with food, and both they and adult females give a loud defensive hiss lasting 3-4 seconds.^{6, 7}

Nestlings call even when no parent is there, and in experiments a chick fell quiet when a nestmate was hungrier and called harder once that nestmate had been fed, as if the brood were negotiating over the next mouse.⁸

In Britain, Barn Owls live in open country: rough grassland, field margins, ditches and riverbanks, hedged farmland and young plantations, usually in the lowlands. They are widespread but absent from high ground, city centres, the far north and west of Scotland and remote islands such as the Outer Hebrides and Northern Isles. Numbers seem highest in eastern England; in Ireland they are sparser, densest in the south-west. Bird Atlas 2007-11 recorded them in the breeding season in 1,920 of the UK's 10-km squares, 64% of the total.⁵

A pair needs plenty of rough grass, where voles live: studies of how much rough grass owls need put it at about 14-47 ha within 2 km of the nest.⁹

The best times to look are dusk and dawn, for an owl on a fence post or flying low along a field edge. Barn Owls also hunt in daylight, most often in autumn and winter, and are seen more often in summer, when they have young to feed.

Beyond Britain and Ireland, the Western Barn Owl lives across Europe, from southern Sweden down to southern Spain and eastwards to western Russia, through Africa apart from the Sahara, and in Arabia and the Middle East.

No. Once settled, adult Barn Owls almost certainly stay in the same home range for the rest of their lives, and most young birds settle close to where they hatched: they disperse mostly from August to November, on average only 7.8 km, and most move less than 10 km.¹⁰ A few go much further. Of all the Barn Owls ringed in Britain and Ireland, 9 have been reported outside the two islands, three of them on or over the North Sea, and the longest move within the two islands was 624 km, by a young bird ringed in the Highlands and found in Pembrokeshire.¹¹

A Barn Owl does not defend a territory beyond its nest, and the home ranges of neighbouring owls overlap. In winter a range can cover up to 5,000 ha, shrinking in the breeding season to a core of about 350 ha around the nest.¹² By day it roosts out of sight in a barn, a hollow tree or another cavity, and keeps to the same few roosts year after year.

Barn Owls eat small mammals, above all voles, shrews and mice. In Britain, the Barn Owl Trust puts Field Voles at about 45% of their prey, Common Shrews at 20% and Wood Mice at 15%, with Bank Voles, House Mice, Pygmy Shrews and Brown Rats also taken, while birds, frogs and insects are rare in the diet; an adult eats about three or four small mammals a night, so a pair raising young needs almost 4,000 a year.¹³ A study of nearly 48,000 prey items over 12 years found much the same: mostly rodents and shrews, with the Field Vole chief among them.¹⁴

The mix changes over time. A 1993-97 pellet survey found fewer Common Shrews and more Pygmy Shrews, wood and yellow-necked mice and Bank Voles than one from 1956-74, with the mice rising most in eastern England.¹⁵ Ireland has no Field Voles or Common Shrews, so Irish Barn Owls take more mice and often hunt along hedgerows.¹³

A hunting Barn Owl quarters slowly back and forth over long grass, a few metres up, listening. When it hears prey it often hovers, then drops feet first into the grass. In winter it hunts more from posts, which saves energy. It avoids hunting in heavy rain, and in strong wind or deep snow it struggles to catch anything.

Hearing does most of the work. The ear openings sit at different heights behind the facial disc, which gathers sound towards them, and in laboratory tests barn owls found prey in total darkness by hearing alone, to within 1 degree; much of this hearing research used what is now the American Barn Owl.^{16, 6}

Barn Owls swallow small prey whole and cough up the fur and bones as a pellet: one or two after a night's hunting, about the size of a thumb, black when fresh and greying with age, and often holding the remains of four or five small mammals. Pellets in a barn or under a roost are a good sign that owls are about, and pulling one apart shows what they have been eating.

Barn Owls build no nest. They lay on a mat of old pellets in a dark, dry cavity: an old barn or farm building, a hollow tree, a bale stack or a church tower. Nest boxes now hold most British nests.¹⁷ Most first breed when a year old.

Most pairs lay in spring. The two main British sources differ on timing: BTO nest records give a median first-egg date of 6 May (30 March to 4 July) and show laying about 21 days later in 2020 than in 1967, from a small sample, while the Barn Owl Trust gives an average first-egg date that moved from 9 May before 1990 to 17 April since.^{5, 18, 19}

A typical clutch is 4-6 eggs, with an observed average of 4.85, and the female incubates alone for about 32 days, starting with the first egg, so the chicks hatch two or three days apart and the oldest can be weeks older than the youngest.^{5, 19} The male brings all the food until the young are about three weeks old, while the female broods them and tears up the prey; after that both parents hunt.

On average about 4 eggs hatch and 2.5 young fledge. Well-fed young can be 100 g heavier than their parents at about six weeks, make their first short flights at 8-9 weeks (the observed average fledging age is 56 days), keep coming back to roost in the nest, are fed until about 12 weeks and leave their parents' range at about 13 weeks; the earliest first kill on record was at 72 days.^{7, 5} Their parents give them little or no training: young owls learn to hunt mostly by instinct, practising on objects first. Elder nestlings sometimes pass food to nestmates, preferring those that call most intensely or that have preened them.²⁰

Breeding rises and falls with the voles. Field Vole numbers build over two to four years and then crash; in south-west Scotland a three-year vole cycle was closely linked to both clutch size and survival.²¹ About 10% of pairs may raise a second brood, more in some years than others; second clutches are usually laid in July.¹⁹

A young Barn Owl on the ground before it can fly is in trouble, unlike a young Tawny Owl. The Barn Owl Trust advises that a healthy owlet must go back into its exact nest: the parents normally feed their young only in the nest, so one left on the ground will almost certainly die, and handling it will not make them reject it. If the nest cannot be reached, local nest monitors may be able to foster it into a brood of the same age, and an injured or thin owlet needs a vet or a wildlife rehabilitator. Disturbing nesting Barn Owls needs a licence (see legal status), though putting a single owlet back is unlikely to need one.¹⁷

Nest boxes helped Barn Owls recover. About 25,000 were up by the mid-1990s, and they may have let owls breed in places with no natural sites, such as the Fens.⁵

A good box is big and deep: a square entrance about 130 x 130 mm, a floor of 0.2-0.4 square metres, and at least 450 mm from the bottom of the hole down to the floor, so the young cannot tumble out, with a ledge with a raised edge where they can exercise their wings. Put it at least 3 m up, in a barn or on a big tree overlooking open countryside, ideally within 1 km of rough grassland, but not within 1 km of a motorway, dual carriageway or similar unscreened major road, and clean it out in the months from November to January, to avoid disturbing nesting owls. Avoid shallow boxes: from boxes 250 mm deep or less, owlets fall out before they can fly.^{22, 23, 24}

Barn Owls are mostly nocturnal, but daylight hunting is a regular sight in Britain, especially in autumn and winter. An owl hunting in the middle of a winter day is often a hungry one.

Flushed by day, a Barn Owl is often mobbed by crows and other birds. Threatened at close quarters, it spreads its wings, sways its head, hisses and snaps its bill, and may even fall on its back to strike out with its feet.

Pairs usually stay together for as long as both live, and keep to the same nest site. In courtship the male flies round screeching, hovers in front of a perched female with his feet dangling, and brings her food for about a month before she lays. Pairs do not always stay together, though: in a Swiss population, 46% of the females but only 4% of the males in pairs that bred twice in one season left their first brood to the other parent and raised a second with a new mate.⁶

A Barn Owl flies almost silently. Its feathers are unusually soft, with a velvety surface, and the outermost flight feather has a fringe of tiny hooks along its leading edge that softens the noise of the air; with big wings on a light body, that lets it fly slowly, hover and come down on prey unheard.

Its eyes are on average about twice as sensitive to light as ours, but it finds most prey by ear.²⁵ The price of soft feathers is that they are not particularly waterproof, which is why long spells of rain are hard on Barn Owls.

Most live only a year or two. About 37% of young birds survive their first year and 72% of adults each year, so one that reaches breeding age at one year typically lives to about four, and the average life of a British Barn Owl ringed in the nest is only about 18 months.^{5, 26}

The oldest on the BTO's longevity list for Britain and Ireland was ringed as a nestling at Saltfleetby, Lincolnshire, on 26 August 1967 and found dead at Sleaford, hit by a car, in December 1987, aged 20 years 3 months 7 days. A female ringed as a nestling near Collingham, Nottinghamshire, in 2007 was caught alive in a nest box in Lincolnshire in 2025, 18 years later.^{27, 11}

Europe has older birds. The oldest on EURING's list of European records is a Dutch Barn Owl of at least 30 years 9 months, found dead, and the next a German bird of 27 years 3 months, killed by traffic. EURING ages a bird ringed full-grown from 1 July of its likely hatching year, and the list does not say whether these two were ringed as nestlings, so both are minimum ages; the BTO gives the time since ringing.²⁸

Birds recorded killing Barn Owls in Europe include Goshawks, Buzzards, Peregrines, Tawny Owls, Eagle-Owls and Golden Eagles, and stoats occasionally take nestlings, but in winter most deaths come from starvation, and deaths peak from December to March: snow more than about 70 mm deep, or snow frozen hard, makes food very hard to catch, and in south-west Scotland survival followed vole numbers more closely than the weather.^{6, 29} In a 68-year Swiss study, winter harshness explained 17% of the variation in young birds' survival and 49% in adults', and the two harshest winters brought population crashes.³⁰

Roads are the other big killer. Road traffic caused 6% of recorded Barn Owl deaths in 1910-54 but 50% by 1991-96, and in a 15-year study in south-west England, 72% of the 62 owls known to have met a major road were killed there.³¹ Major roads make up less than 2% of Britain's roads, yet over 90% of road-killed Barn Owls are found on them, and an estimated 3,000-5,000 of the roughly 12,000 young raised each year die on roads, most of them while dispersing in autumn.³²

Rat poisons reach Barn Owls through the rodents they eat. Of 88 Barn Owls found dead across Britain in 2022, 79.5% had detectable residues of second-generation rat poisons in their livers, against 81% in 2006-12, and the yearly share has ranged from 78% to 94%; the report suggests stewardship has not yet brought a statistically significant fall in the owls' total residues, and in most cases the residues found in dead Barn Owls have been at low levels unlikely to have contributed to death, though a small proportion carried potentially lethal doses.^{33, 5} The Barn Owl Trust reports that since 4 July 2024 it has been illegal in the UK to use these poisons against rodents away from buildings.³⁴

Barn Owls also drown in steep-sided water troughs and butts deeper than about 120 mm, and a float lets them climb out; losing an old barn to conversion can make the owls abandon other sites nearby as well.^{35, 36}

No, though they are far fewer than Tawny Owls: on the same official estimates, the UK has 4,000-14,000 pairs of Barn Owls (2016) against about 50,000 pairs of Tawny Owls (2005).³⁷ The low end is the only reliable survey-based estimate, from Project Barn Owl, a stratified sample of 1,100 random 2-km squares in 1995-97 that estimated 3,951 pairs in 1997 (95% interval 2,769-5,214), about 4,000; the high end is that estimate carried forward with the Breeding Bird Survey trend, and the European Red List's UK entry puts the true figure at probably about 9,000.^{38, 39, 40}

Numbers fell through the 20th century. A 1932 survey put England and Wales at about 12,000 pairs and a survey from 1982 estimated 3,778 pairs there, but the two used such different methods that the 70% fall often quoted from them cannot be relied on; organochlorine pesticides almost certainly played a part in the losses across eastern England during the 1950s and 1960s, and the loss of hunting habitat and the severe winters of 1946/47 and 1962/63 probably played a part too.^{5, 41, 42, 43}

They have increased since the mid-1990s. The Breeding Bird Survey, which covers night birds poorly, shows a 223% rise in the UK from 1995 to 2024 (95% interval +111% to +419%) but no clear change over the last ten years, and its 2010-2020 figure was a 28% fall, while nest records show fewer failed nests and more young per attempt, from 2.08 to 2.85 fledglings between 1967 and 2020.^{44, 18}

Years vary a lot. 2013 was the worst breeding season the monitoring groups had recorded, with nesting occupancy down 70% across 26 groups and only 3,031 chicks ringed, against 13,990 the next year; 2025 was poor too, as groups reported about 25% fewer active nests than average, probably because of drought.^{39, 45} Before 1992, when a licence became necessary, an estimated 2,000-3,000 captive-bred Barn Owls were released each year by about 600 people; many died quickly, and whether releases helped the recovery is unclear.^{5, 6}

The Barn Owl has been on the UK Green List since 2015, after being Amber in 1996, 2002 and 2009, while in Ireland it is Red-listed.^{46, 47} Worldwide it is rated Least Concern, but that assessment was made for the old, broad species before the split; Europe holds an estimated 82,300-178,000 pairs.^{48, 40}

Like all wild birds in Great Britain, the Barn Owl is protected under the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981, which makes it an offence intentionally to kill, injure or take one, to take, damage or destroy its nest while it is in use or being built, or to take or destroy its eggs.⁴⁹ In Scotland reckless acts are offences too.⁵⁰

It is on Schedule 1 in England, Wales and Scotland, so it is also an offence intentionally or recklessly to disturb one "while it is building a nest or is in, on or near a nest containing eggs or young", or to disturb young that still depend on it; the nest itself is protected only while it is in use or being built.^{51, 49} In England you need no licence to watch or photograph Barn Owls if you do not disturb them, but you do need one if you cannot avoid disturbing them while they are nest building or rearing young.⁵²

The Barn Owl was added to Schedule 9 throughout Great Britain on 25 November 1992. It stays on it in England and Wales, where releasing one into the wild is an offence unless licensed, while Scotland repealed that schedule in 2012 and its law now turns on whether a release is within an animal's native range.^{53, 54} In England and Wales, general licences allow wild Barn Owls that were taken in to be cared for to be released at or within 1 km of where they were found, and other releases in England need an individual licence.^{55, 56}

In Northern Ireland the Barn Owl is on Schedule 1 of the Wildlife (Northern Ireland) Order 1985 and, since 2011, on Schedule A1, so its nest is protected all year round; there, it is an offence intentionally or recklessly to disturb any wild bird that is building a nest or is at a nest with eggs or young, and photographing at or near any bird's nest needs a licence.^{57, 58} In the Republic of Ireland it is a protected wild bird under the Wildlife Act 1976, and wilfully disturbing one on or near a nest with eggs or unflown young is an offence.⁵⁹