Scottish Short-eared Owl tracked to Morocco's 'Oyster Capital'
A Short-eared Owl, fitted with a satellite tag while breeding in Scotland, has been tracked to Morocco, revealing significant new information for British Trust for Ornithology researchers.
The female, tagged at her nest site on Arran in June 2019, visited Bute, Kintyre and Ayrshire before flying south to Devon. On 9 November 2019 she flew south once more, and with the help of a strong tail wind she travelled 495 km into France in just six hours – that's an average of 82.5 km/h! She then continued south, crossing the Pyrenees on 13 November and the Strait of Gibraltar on 24 November to reach Morocco.
The latest fix places her near Oualidia, Morocco's ‘oyster capital’ (a reference to the significant role shellfish harvesting plays in the local economy), which she reached on 29 November.
She is one of nine birds satellite-tagged in Scotland since 2017 as part of the BTO’s Short-eared Owl Tracking project.
Short-eared Owls appear to be nomadic, breeding almost prolifically in suitable habitat in some years, yet in others appearing to be absent. Adults owls can be seen flying during daylight hours when they have dependent young, but at other times they can be largely nocturnal, making the population hard to monitor. The best evidence currently suggests that the population has declined, perhaps by as much as 50%. The reasons underlying these changes are poorly understood, but recent advances in technology have presented new opportunities for research.
The BTO’s Short-eared Owl tracking project aims to find out more about their fine-scale habitat requirements in order to provide advice on how best to create and maintain suitable conditions. It also aims to better-understand how factors such as prey, predators and competitors influence how they use otherwise apparently-suitable habitats. Given their nomadism, they need to know more about their migration strategies, connectivity between apparent populations, and to better-understand how they find often variable and patchy resources.
Another female tagged in Stirlingshire in 2017 overwintered locally, then undertook a wide-ranging exploratory flight within Scotland before settling down to breed again in Perthshire in March 2018. Not long after her chicks had hatched she left her mate to continue feeding them and flew to Norway, where the tracking data strongly-suggest that she bred for a second time within the same year. The tag then tracked her movements to Ireland, Cornwall and Norfolk, before recording her final hours as she attempted to migrate back to Norway in spring 2019, sadly perishing in storm close to the Norwegian coast.
The project aims to track up to 25 individuals from sites across their breeding range in Britain. By tracking birds from a range of locations the BTO can better-understand how variation in local conditions affects their breeding success. Factors such as habitat composition, prey and predator density are all likely have a bearing on the owls’ reproductive output.
The fieldwork necessary to find Short-eared Owl nests is time-consuming, and the tags can only be fitted by highly-trained specialists. This limits the number of tags that can be fitted in a single breeding season (typically May-June), so instead we aim to tag three to five Short-eared Owls each year for the next few years.
How you can help
To fulfil the potential of this work, and ensure valid information is available to those who can apply the findings to help Short-eared Owls, the BTO need financial support. The cost of our tagging programme is £97,000, including equipment, fieldwork at different sites, analyses of results and dissemination of findings. Each satellite tag costs £2,000 to buy and the annual data costs are £1,000. Please support the Short-eared Owl Appeal if you can.
17 December
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