Owl with pussy cat habit

Press, 20 February 1988, Page 24

Owl with pussy cat habit

ANGELA WIGGLESWORTH,

of the London “Guardian,” talks with Tony Warburton who has

increased the British barn owl population by 5 per cent.

Tony Warburton saw his first barn owl on a Boys Brigade camping holiday in Suffolk when he was 11.

“I thought it was the most fabulous thing I’d ever seen in my life,” he remembers 40 years later. “It was very ghost-like flying around and I thought, that’s my favourite bird from now on. But living in Manchester, I never saw another one for many moons.” It still is his favourite bird and now he’s trying to save it from extinction in Britain. “There used to be 12,500 breeding pairs in the British Isles, now there are probably less than 2000. It’s the old story of the changing countryside. Barns are being pulled down or converted into houses, hollow trees cleared from the fields, and the owls have nowhere to nest and breed. Even worse, the rough grassland and hedgerows where its main prey, the short-tailed vole lives, have virtually disappeared because of prairie farming, drainage schemes and silaging.”

It was in 1973 he realised that without active help it would probably disappear altogether from the British countryside and founded the British Owl Breeding and Release Scheme (BOBARS) to create a nationwide chain of people dedicated to the welfare of the British owl and the barn owl in particular. At first nothing happened. “I felt like a lone voice in the wilderness. People didn’t believe the situation was as desperate as it was. Then suddenly, after a television documentary I made, there was this marvellous upsurge of interest.” Today BOBARS members all over the country are putting up -nesting boxes either individually or together in groups; in Southport, one ringing group has put . up 150. Owls can be obtained on loan (most are permanently injured ones unable to be released), and the resultant young are all released into the wild, members reporting back on breeding results. Tony had left school to work - for an estate agent, became (“the world’s worst”) furniture salesman, then “the Man from the Pru,” had a spell at Belle Vue Zoo in charge of tropical birds, did his national service in the R.A.F., and spent 24 years as

a radar operator on an MoD gun range in the Lake District where a sympathetic management let him rear owls on MoD property. It was while he was here that he began to edge his way into working as a field naturalist. He became honorary warden of the Ravenglass galleries and honorary manager of the Eskmeals Dunes nature reserve.

In 1965, two years after he went to live in the Lake District, a local gamekeeper shot two barn owls in a field opposite his house. Tony reared the orphan babies until they were strong enough to be released into the wild. He wrote about the experience for a magazine and was subsequently commissioned to write a book on the barn owl.

TV programmes and round-the-country talks followed and people, hearing about the work he was doing, brought him an endless stream of injured birds. With his partner, Vicky Borrino, he’s now put 204 baby barn owls, reared from injured parents, back into the wild.

But it was being made redundant at the age of 51 that pushed him into doing what he really liked on a full-time basis. “I wrote a very cheeky letter to Patrick Gordon-Duff-Pennington at Muncaster Castle where my parents had been former custodians, saying the castle bird garden was nowhere near what it could be and why didn’t we get together to resurrect it and make it BOBARS headquarters. To my

amazement, he said ‘yes’.” He hopes it will become the premier owl establishment in the country. “I don’t think there’s any other place that has all the British species,” he said. He plans to build a hide so that “real owl aficionados can come and sit here and see what I’ve been seeing all these years.”

Above all, he hopes, it will do much to make people aware of the plight of the barn owl, because it does still have a role to play in the scheme of things; it feeds on voles that would otherwise reach plague proportions in young forestry plantations, killing the trees by nibbing the bark. For Tony Warburton, the barn owl has not lost its early magic.

“When you start going out in the night and watching it, you learn that what you’ve read in books just doesn’t tie up with what you see. The reason, I think, is because some writers have found it easier to repeat what someone else has written and get a good night’s sleep. “But the real magic is being out at dawn and dusk and watching the owlets through the long fledgling period because, so far as I know, barn owls are the only birds in the world where the babies play like fox cubs, puppies and kittens. They play the same games, jumping on each other, pouncing, learning timing and the art of hunting. I think they’re Britain’s most beautiful birds.”