I first became aware around the middle of March 2003 that the local Short-eared Owls had started nesting. They usually start laying in April, but when the vole population hits one of their cyclical peaks, they will nest earlier. Another sign of a plentiful food supply was the concentration of males hunting. From my parking place overlooking a small part of the moor I could watch 6 different males foraging and engaging in territorial disputes, which mostly involved the stiff wing display and wing clapping but, on the odd occasion, escalated into more intense fighting.

During the early stages of the breeding cycle, prior to egg laying, the female called frequently (1), a behaviour pattern which stimulates food provisioning by the male. It was at this stage that I filmed the male and female interacting (2). The male is carrying a vole in its bill and the darker coloured female is trying to retrieve it. At such times mating occurs, but I am not sure whether the attempt was successful on this occasion.

A few days later the female disappeared from sight, indicating that egg laying had commenced, and only reappeared after the young were old enough to be left on their own. During the incubation phase the male could be observed, for the brief period of daylight when he was active, hunting for voles, displaying and repelling invaders.

At the site I concentrated on, I watched the male return to the nest site with food on numerous occasions but at no time did it reveal the location of the nest. It was only after the female resumed hunting that I was able to watch her back to a nest containing 6 young. As they approach 2 weeks old, young Short-eared Owls disperse from the nest into the surrounding moor, so there may have been more than 6 young to start with; the female can lay as many as 14 eggs in vole years.

The adults can be very demonstrative in response to human intruders, making a lot of noise and swooping in close. The young owls, when approached, will also adopt a defensive posture and click their bill noisily.

2004

Despite visting the site on several occasions in March I didn't observe any activity until the end of the month. When I found the 1st nest on 18th April, however, it was apparent from the size of the young that the owls had for the second year running started nesting in early to mid March. At first there were indications that voles were in short supply, if the skirmishes with the local Kestrels and hunting times were any measure of the situation, but by the middle of April the male at site 3 was catching voles with ease (6 in 1.5 hours with breaks in between hunting trips).

Numbers of resident males were again high which was almost certainly due to vole numbers despite the lengthy hunting times. The maps on the right show the location of hunting males in 2003 and 2004. Since I've yet to observe an owl cache voles at any great distance from a known nest I have assumed that nests were almost certainly present when owls were spotted carrying voles into a site on a number of occasions. These figures were mostly arrived at through casual observation from a car parked at the side of the road rather than rigorous census work as my motive was merely to find 1 nest for filming purposes.

The males at site 1 & 2 hunted over much common ground and sometimes at the same time but interactions were infrequent and of low intensity. Both males were observed carrying voles into their respective nest sites. The female at site 1 helped out with hunting trips presumably after the young were old enough to be left on their own.

Site 3 was the location of the nest with 4 young. I never observed this female hunting and she seemed content to spend all her time in the vicinity of the nest even after the young had dispersed.

At site 4 I observed the male caching voles and uttering the advertising call from the top of an electricity power transmission pole.

Sites 5 & 6 involved 2 foraging males viewed simultaneously.

On the 2003 map the nest with 6 young owls was located in Site 5

The map shows that the sites are around 305 meters (1000 ft) above sea level (asl).

On the nearby Campsie Fells at an altitude of between 450-500 meters asl owl numbers were also high in 2004 with 5 hunting males encountered during a visit on 1st May. At one site I watched a male fly in with a vole and land on a look out post. After a few minutes of looking around it flew straight to the nest to drop off the vole before flying off. This unusual lack of caution may have been due to the distance between myself and the nest site, about 1 kilometer, and perhaps the male did not regard me as a threat. The nest contained 5 eggs and 3 young (see below) and illustrated just how productive these owls can be. It also demonstrated to me how vulnerable they are to predators. One week later I arrived on site to find the nest empty.