Peak District Retreat Blog: Wildlife and general news about the Retreat and its environment

A female kestrel visits the barn owl nest box and peeks in.

While a barn owl is roosting in the box, a female kestrel explores, including peeking into the box.

Barn owls and kestrels can be serious adversaries. Kestrels may attack barn owls on the wing in an attempt to steal their prey, and sometimes that is successful. Sometimes they fight, including to the death of one of them, over rights to a nesting space.

We can see the local red deer any time of year, but most frequently in the spring.

Sometimes we see them naked-eye in in the daytime, sometimes close and sometimes far away. We also catch them on wildlife/security cameras at night.

Here are a few such photos from different dates. Also a daytime video from a solar-powered camera mounted on a tree adjacent to a gully, and a night-time video of a herd of deer within 20 yards of our house.

2023 has been a successful year for our barn owls.

The pair settled into the box earlier in the year. Four eggs were laid, four eggs all hatched, and four owlets all grew and fledged. They are pictured here just after the youngest of them finally grew strong enough to fly up from the bottom of the deep nest box to get out of the entrance hole.

This success is despite the male seemingly not being a very diligent provider and rarely bringing prey for the young, with the burden of the feeding falling on the female.

We often see the brown hares exploring a 12 inch land drain which passes under our track.

Sometimes they exit the other end, circle around overground, and go through the pipe again, seemingly just playing! Sometimes, as on the attached video, they exit the far end, turn around, and come back to where they entered. And sometimes they back out, seemingly unable to turn around inside the pipe.

Their interest in the pipe is not too surprising as it is sometimes used as a den by other wildlife such as stoat, weasel, and mice.

An unexpected sighting.

An unusual bird to see in the UK, and particularly unusual to see it on moorland in December/January when they are usually found (if at all) on the coast.

In 2022 our barn owl nest box was taken over by a pair of stock doves when the owls didn't visit the box for a few days. One smallish barn owl had been roosting there during daytimes pretty regularly, and wanted to continue doing so. By now the stock doves had two eggs.

One dove was sitting on the eggs when suddenly a large barn owl crashed into the box, seemingly summoned by the smaller owl, and smothered the dove briefly. Yet the barn owl did not seem to aim to harm the dove, and then flew away.

The doves did not succeed in raising their young - see video 'kestrel swoops on stock dove'. Neither did the owls breed here that year though they did in 2023.