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

We have live streaming camera feeds from our barn owl nest box.

The owl activity varies by season.

Currently we have one barn owl roosting most daytimes from approximately 5-8 a.m. until 4-8 p.m. During her residence you will see her on the camera feed inside the nest box. You may catch her perching on the ledge outside the box when she arrives in the early morning and/or when she exists the box late afternoon/dusk.

If they use the box for breeding then it will be permanently occupied by the female for about three months during which time the male is in charge of hunting and providing.

The camera feeds are on our live owl cam page.

We're waiting to see whether or not we will have a breeding barn owl pair this year.

A barn owl (female we think) has roosted here most daytimes over the winter (though not as regularly as last winter).

We haven't seen her mate. We're waiting to see whether a mate appears, whether they do nest, and if so whether they nest here.

And alongside that, we wonder whether the box be taken over by tawny owls, or by stock doves. Check back later to see how it turns out…

There's a lot of interest in this barn owl nest box. This evening, for the first time, we have seen a tawny owl inside the barn owl nest box, and its mate looked in too.

The video is best viewed with sound turned on.

Stock doves nested in our barn owl nest box (thereby excluding the owls) in 2022. Last year and again this year they are persistent in visiting the box hoping to find it empty.

We have a barn owl which roosts here most days (though occasionally misses a day). Today the doves came again, and entered the box to attack her.

The roosting barn owl promptly settled into defensive posture, back towards the corner of the box (for support?), standing on one leg leaving the other leg free to strike out with its long sharp claws.

In the full speed video it happens too quickly for you to see the leg strike, but keep watching and it is repeated in slow motion.

When the barn owls leave the box at dusk after a day of roosting, they often do some limbering up and stretching exercises on the nest box ledge.

The curlews are returning to their breeding grounds around us.

We've heard and seen the first curlews of the year. Each year the curlews return to the moorlands around us to nest on the wet moorland ground which is ideal feeding grounds for them and their chicks.

Staffordshire Wildlife Trust (SWT) manage most of the land surrounding us as a wildlife corridor between the Roaches nature reserve and Black Brook nature reserve. Curlews are a species in decline so SWT pays special attention to managing their land so as to best accommodate the curlews. Curlews like to nest in tall grass for protection, but adjacent to open land so that they can see what is coming. SWT ‘tops’ (threshes) patches of the tall rushes to make patches of open land adjacent to patches of undisturbed rushes. For the last few years, at our invitation, they have managed our land in the same way.

So far I don't have any photos of this year's curlews, so I've attached some photos of a curlew courting display that I observed in 2019, and some other past photos too.

Our resident barn owl returns to the nest box early one morning, bringing some prey with her.

A snap of our barn owl ("ours" in that she is using our box frequently as a day time roost) with the sun behind her as she lands, and with a vole held in her right foot.

Our first recording of a tawny owl.

We often hear tawny owls hooting, particularly over the last 18 months, but this is the first time we have caught one on camera at our barn owl nest box.

Our barn owl box is designed to suit barn owls, but other birds also show interest in it.

It snowed last night and the barn owl nest box was covered deep snow.

Fortunately no owls were trapped inside as the box was not inhabited last night.

A wren visited and perched on the mound of snow.

During 2024 there was no owl breeding in our barn owl nest box.

During the winter 2023/24 one owl (female we think) roosted in the box every single daytime for over 6 months, leaving at dusk to go hunting and returning around dawn. During that time we didn't see a second owl.

We might have expected to see them together as a pair from around Jan/Feb but still we saw a second owl on only a couple of occasions, and the female was roosting here less regularly, not being seen at all from May onwards for two to three months.

Perhaps the pair nested somewhere else this year. We saw more of them July/August, with some courting behaviour (see photos) but no nesting or breeding.

A female sparrowhawk visits the barn owl nest box.

We consider it a barn owl nest box, but other species are interested in it too.

This photo has a ghostly appearance but with an innocent explanation.

The see-through appearance is due to the camera's handling of motion not coping well-enough with this large fast-moving object. The camera ‘remembers’ the scenery behind the owl and repeats that instead of showing all of the owl that is actually there. 

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.