
At Q Lawns we’re proud to play host to a wide range of wildlife from spiders to snakes, beetles to badgers, dragonflies to deer but we’re proudest of all about our resident population of barn owls.
These majestic birds can often be seen at dusk or after dark hunting for small mammals in the field margins, alongside the river and around untrimmed banks of our many drainage ditches.
Totally silent when in flight, these ghost like creatures are not responsible for the “tatwhit ta whoo ” sound so often associated with owls, the barn owl has an equally eery call that is more of a screech than a hoot. Hence their common name of screech owl.
A couple of weeks ago I was lucky enough to visit our local RSPB reserve for a barn owl walk. The warden, David White told us a lot about barn owls and showed us photos of babies in the nest. Funny little things! They have the distinctive heart shaped face from the moment they hatch and are blessed with foracious appetites. On a good year when the weather is kind and food is plentiful, barn owl parents will rear 4 or 5 young which means that the parents will have a whole lot of hunting to do. The RSPB reserve has vast hunting grounds for their owls to patrol but agricultural land can sometimes have smaller populations of mice, shrews, voles and other such small mammals because there are fewer places to shelter and fewer mini beasts for them to eat.
WILDLIFE HABITAT ON OUR FARM
At Q Lawns we do what we can to provide habitat for creatures at the bottom of the food chain without compromising the quality of our crops and we’re rewarded with the occasional glimpse of fascinating and enigmatic creatures like the barn owl. The presence of these birds and the fact that they are nesting on our farm is a sign that our soil is healthy and productive, we’re not sloshing pesticides about willy nilly…..and we’re proud to preserve our wildlife.
