The flattened green line of our path wiggles through a tussocky field of strawy tumps and wind‑bent grasses. At every few paces there’s a panicked brown scuttle as a small mammal dashes for cover; we’ve not seen so many voles in all the years we’ve lived here. Everywhere we look there are entrances to burrows, neat round holes half hidden by grass.
The populations of both bank and field voles fluctuate over a cycle. A peak year is followed by a crash after which numbers build up again, impacting on the health and abundance of predators. The cycle can happen within a fairly limited area and in this valley it’s a super‑peak year.
A heron stands poised, one back leg crooked and foot dangling as if frozen in a game of musical chairs. From its stretched out neck, a yellow dagger of a bill stabs downwards, missing a vole by a whisker. There will be plenty more. I’ve watched a heron snatch and gulp down voles from my kitchen window.
Others stake out this busy field. Kestrels hover above or perch atop the single hawthorn. Buzzards launch off the wooded escarpment to glide across the gap of the valley, heads angled down, scanning with intent eyes. Tawny owls, noisy at dusk, call with urgent kee-wicks from the garden trees before heading off on a silent hunt.
Each day I see the regulars of this avian jigsaw, but there’s been no barn owl now for two years. In 2021, I wrote in a Country diary how that beautiful, haunting and familiar shape had survived Storm Arwen. Only weeks later though I was mourning its loss; it probably starved to death after three named storms in a single February week. Barn owl feathers are not properly waterproof so the birds cannot hunt in wind and rain.
So it is with joy that I spot a barn owl, standing watchful on a fence post. Even more uplifting a few days later to see two. Pale wings swoop past the headlights in the dusk. We hear a drawn out shriek outside the evenings’ closed shutters. The missing piece of the jigsaw is back. Barn owls have returned to the valley.
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