You might have been wondering about how the barn owls were getting on in their barrel. Well they have been ringed and as you can see from the photos and very close to leaving the nest. They have their full set of feathers though these still need to grow out a bit more as there is still some fluffy down poking through in places.
What is more surprising is that there are still 4 young in the barrel (in the picture 1 is being stood on). The hard winter with a lot of snow cover meant that the owls were cut off from their food source, the voles. The voles however do OK in the snow as they just go about life as normal in tunnels under the snow insulated from the cold above. Perhaps this many chicks means that the voles survived the winter in good numbers and any owls that made it to this spring have plenty of food available. The barrel stinks even more than it did before so I expect these chicks will be glad to be out into the fresh air soon.
You might also remember that I found a meadow pipits nest with a cuckoos egg in it about a month ago. Well I returned to the nest to see what progress it had made but unfortunately the nest had been found by a predator. It looked like the contents had been pulled out and there were a scattered few feathers still in pin (not full developed). It looks like probably a fox found the cuckoo when it was nearly ready to leave the nest. These ground nesting birds are very vulnerable especially when they get to close to leaving the nest.
It is interesting that the photos of the fluffy young barn owls got the greatest response in terms of comments on this blog. It is so much easier to get people interested in big, fluffy, beautiful wildlife than the less glamorous types. One of the reasons for writing this blog is because bogs don't always interest people, after all the name doesn't help but hopefully through this blog people will that bogs like Flanders are filled with all sorts of amazing plants and creatures and not many of them are fluffy and cute !
