Tawny Owl

The Tawny Owl is the owl you hear rather than see: a stocky, round-headed owl about the size of a Woodpigeon, with no ear tufts and big, very dark eyes. It is Britain's commonest owl, but it hunts at night and spends the day hidden in a tree, so most people know it from its hooting.

Look for a pale facial disc with a darker rim, and a dark stripe running from the crown down between the eyes to the small greenish bill, with paler stripes beside it like eyebrows. The upperparts are mottled and barred like tree bark, with a row of white spots along the shoulder, and the paler underparts are streaked dark with fine cross-bars. The legs and most of the toes are feathered.

Tawny Owls come in grey, brown and rufous (reddish) forms, with birds in between, and the share of each varies from region to region. The chestnut-brown form, reddish brown above and paler below, is the commonest in Britain. The colour is largely inherited, and Finnish work suggests brown is dominant over grey. There, brown owls survived less well in snowy winters, and as winters became milder, brown birds became commoner.¹

Males and females look alike, but females are larger, with some overlap. Live birds weighed by ringers average about 502 g for females and 396 g for males.²

Young owls are covered in white down at first and leave the nest looking loose and shaggy, paler and more finely barred than adults, with dark eyes and pink eyelids.

A Tawny Owl is 37-39 cm (14.5-15.5 in) long, with a wingspan of 94-104 cm (37-41 in), and weighs 350-590 g (12-21 oz).

A Barn Owl has a heart-shaped face and pure white underparts, and often hunts in daylight in autumn and winter. A Long-eared Owl is smaller and slimmer, with ear tufts it raises when alarmed and deep orange eyes. A Short-eared Owl has yellow eyes set in dark patches and hunts over open ground by day. A Little Owl is a small owl that often sits out by day on a post or branch, and bobs its head when alarmed. Of these, only the Tawny Owl has a round, tuftless head, dark eyes and a streaked brown front.

The hoot is the male's territorial song: a long "hooo", a short pause, a soft "hu", then a long, wavering "huhuhuhooo". The female's usual call is a sharp "ke-wick", which works as a contact call. There are also soft calls, probably for contact, and long trills in courtship.

Each male's hoot is his own: sonagrams of 50 males in three English areas told individuals apart 98.6% of the time.³

The familiar "twit-twoo" is usually two owls: a pair calling to each other, the female giving her ke-wick and the male his hoot.² It is not a hard rule: males sometimes give the ke-wick, though rarely in the breeding season, and females very occasionally hoot, less tidily than males.⁴

Tawny Owls are most vocal in autumn, when settled pairs see off young owls looking for territories of their own. Calling carries on through late winter and picks up again in early spring. In the Tawny Owl Calling Survey, owls called less on cloudy or wet nights and more when the moon was fuller.⁵

For the best chance of hearing one, go out on a dry autumn evening with a good moon, soon after sunset, near broadleaved woodland or a park with old trees.

Tawny Owls live all year in woods across Britain, and in parks, churchyards and large gardens with mature trees. They are commonest in broadleaved woodland, and in a national calling survey the strongest pull on whether owls were present was broadleaved woodland nearby, while the amount of urban land and artificial light at night pushed the other way.⁶

They are absent from Ireland and the Channel Islands, and within Britain from the Northern Isles, the Outer Hebrides, the Isles of Scilly and treeless uplands. A single bird, presumed wild, was recorded at Castle Ward on Strangford Lough, Co. Down, in May and June 2013.⁷ Young owls rarely move far and seem reluctant to cross open water, which may explain their absence from Ireland and many islands.

In the day you are only likely to see one by chance, roosting against a tree trunk or in ivy, or by following the alarm calls of small birds mobbing it. Pellets under a roost are a clue.

No. Pairs stay on their territory all year, and young owls usually settle within a few kilometres of where they hatched. Not one of 4,768 ringed Tawny Owls reported in Britain and Ireland was ringed or found abroad; the five oldest were found 0-6 km from where they were ringed, and the longest moves on record, 204-688 km, are rare exceptions.⁸

Tawny Owls eat mostly small mammals, especially wood mice, bank voles and field voles, and shrews; they will take rats and, now and then, a young rabbit or squirrel. They also catch small birds, some as big as a pigeon, as well as frogs, beetles and other large insects, and earthworms, which they pick off lawns and short grass on damp nights. They have taken goldfish from garden ponds and caught bats as they leave their roosts.

Diet follows what is easiest to catch. In Kielder Forest, a spruce plantation in Northumberland, field voles were the main food over 19 years, and when voles were scarce the owls took more shrews and frogs and fed more birds to their chicks.⁹ Town owls take more birds. One pair raising young in London, in a study published in 1960, took birds for 96% of their prey, and the only mammal was the Brown Rat, where woodland studies had found about 95% mammals.¹⁰

A Tawny Owl hunts from a perch between dusk and dawn, listening for prey, then glides or drops onto it with wings spread. It makes short flights out and back to the same perch and will snatch bats and large insects in the air. For earthworms it drops to the ground and waits, turns its head to listen, then hops forward and pounces.

Tawny Owls nest in holes in old trees, and also in nest boxes, old Magpie nests or squirrel dreys, buildings, and now and then on the ground among roots. They build no nest. Pairs keep the same territory, and often the same hole, year after year.

They nest early. The median first egg is laid on 23 March, with most first clutches between 5 March and 4 May; a typical clutch is 2-3 eggs (the BTO's observed average is 2.56); the female incubates for about 30 days, fed by the male; and the young fledge at about 34.5-38.5 days, with one brood a year.² Some pairs lay in February, and because incubation starts with the first egg, the chicks hatch days apart.⁴

In poor food years some pairs do not breed at all. In a 1947-59 study in woodland near Oxford, the adults rose from 17 pairs after a hard winter to about 30 by 1955 and then held steady; when mice and voles were very scarce no owls bred, and young birds without a territory of their own died or left the area.¹¹

Young Tawny Owls leave the nest well before they can fly, at about 25-30 days old, and clamber about on nearby branches, a stage called branching. Their parents go on feeding them for weeks: in one study the young stayed in their parents' territory from fledging in mid-May to independence in mid-August, apparently without feeding themselves.¹²

Most owlets that people find and pick up are healthy, and handling does not make the parents reject them.¹³ The RSPCA says Tawny owlets are the one exception among young birds of prey: their parents keep feeding them, even on the ground, and they can climb back up a trunk, so leave them where they are. If one is in danger, move it up into the tree or off the ground close by. If you have already picked one up, return it to the exact spot as soon as possible before dusk, watch from a distance, and check again after 24 and 48 hours; if the parents do not come back, call a wildlife rehabilitator.¹⁴ For an injured owl, contact the RSPCA, the Scottish SPCA or a vet.¹⁵

Tawny Owls take readily to large nest boxes. The BTO's plan is a big open-fronted box of 12 mm plywood, fixed to the main trunk ideally 5-8 m up in woodland or a well-wooded garden, with the entrance away from the prevailing wind; chimney-style boxes work too and may be less likely to be taken over by Grey Squirrels, and a box should be left alone while the owls are laying and early in incubation, from March to early April, when they are most sensitive to disturbance.¹⁶ Put a box up by late summer or early autumn and be patient, as occupation can take years; Stock Doves and Jackdaws often use the boxes too.¹⁷

Tawny Owls defend their young fiercely, more so as the chicks grow and at dusk, and some people have been blinded by attacks at the nest.^{16, 18, 17} The bird photographer Eric Hosking lost his left eye to a Tawny Owl at its nest in 1937, and called his autobiography An Eye for a Bird.¹⁹ Keep well back from a nest with young.

Tawny Owls are nocturnal, only occasionally active by day, and strongly territorial. A pair holds the same territory all year, and in Europe territories average 10-12 ha in the best habitat and 60-70 ha in poor habitat.²⁰ Pairs are faithful to each other and to their nest site, and usually stay together for life.

By day an owl sits tight against a trunk or in thick ivy. If small birds find it, they gather round scolding, and that noise can lead you to it.

About 74% of adults survive each year, and about 30% of young birds survive their first year. A bird that reaches breeding age, at one year old, typically lives to about four.² Some live far longer.

The oldest Tawny Owl ringed in Britain or Europe was ringed as a nestling at Loch of Skene, Aberdeenshire, in 1993 and found freshly dead 4 km away at Dunecht in 2016, aged 23 years, 5 months and 27 days, the record on the BTO's longevity list for Britain and Ireland; because it was ringed in the nest, that is its true age.^{21, 2} The same bird tops the European list kept by EURING, at 23 years 5 months, where the next is a Dutch bird of 22 years 11 months, found dead after a traffic accident; the next oldest in Britain was 22 years 3 months, hit by a car in Argyll.^{22, 8}

In Denmark, 36% of radio-tagged young from broods fed only by their parents died before independence, mostly to birds of prey and mammals, mainly foxes, and the risk rose from 14% for April fledglings to over 58% for June ones.²³ Where Goshawks colonised one British study area, they took young owls more than their share and, among adults, mostly females, though the observed pattern had a relatively small simulated effect on owl numbers.²⁴

In Kielder Forest, field-vole cycles flattened out from the mid-1990s, and the low spring vole numbers sharply cut the chance that owls bred; the researchers' model projects that this would drive the local population towards extinction.²⁵

Owls that eat rodents can take in rat poison. Some 20% of British Tawny Owls tested in 1990-93 and 2003-05 carried residues of second-generation rodenticides, the lowest share of any bird of prey analysed in Britain up to then, and the study found no clear evidence that the poisons were a major factor in owl numbers in Britain between 1990 and 2005.²⁶ Keep nest boxes well away from busy roads, where hunting owls risk being hit.¹⁷

Britain has about 50,000 pairs of Tawny Owls, an estimate dated 2005.²⁷ They are not rare, but they are declining. The Breeding Bird Survey, which covers night birds poorly, shows a 44% fall in the UK from 1995 to 2024 (95% interval -60% to -25%); over the last ten years the UK fall of 26% is not statistically significant, while England's 32% is.²⁸ The longer-running index, back to 1967, is down 39% but classed as stable, a shallow downward drift since the early 1970s.²

The BTO's Tawny Owl Calling Survey, in which 9,452 volunteers listened from their homes in 2018/19, heard owls at 84.3% of sites against 86.8% in 2005/06, which suggests little change, though volunteers chose their own sites.^{5, 29} The causes of the decline are uncertain.

The Tawny Owl has been on the UK Amber List since 2015 (the 2021 review kept it there for a moderate decline over both 25 years and the longer term), Great Britain's Red List rates it Near Threatened, and worldwide it is of Least Concern.^{30, 2}

Like all wild birds in Great Britain, the Tawny Owl is protected by the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981: it is 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.³¹ In Scotland reckless acts are offences too, as are otherwise interfering with a nest in use and obstructing a bird from using its nest.³² It is not on Schedule 1, the list of birds with extra protection from disturbance at the nest.³³

The Act gives a defence to anyone who can show they took a bird disabled through no unlawful act of their own, solely to care for it and release it when it is well.³⁴ It is not a target species of any 2026 general licence we checked for England, Wales, Scotland (GL01) and Northern Ireland; in England it is named on GL40's lists of birds of conservation concern that the licence is meant to protect.³⁵