Mayo householders thankful to the owl for keeping mice away
COUNTRYFILE
AS I sit in the warm at my desk, I observe that the annual incursion of woodmice into the house hasn't taken place.
What we do have is a pine marten in the attic. There's only one place for him (or her) to get in, and that means scaling a vertical wall with very little to cling onto on the way up.
But the pine marten is resourceful, if nothing else.
While it feels nice to have such an esteemed visitor, I'm not sure I'm keen on establishing a long-term relationship, for in just a few weeks the female, if it is indeed a female, will be giving birth to a litter of kits.
While the adult martens are reasonably clean in their toileting habits, the young ones don't have enough sense to avoid soiling their bed, and I don't care to think what sort of mess the kitchen ceiling would become.
With that thought firmly in mind, resolve is building in me to make sure the entrance hole is used lastly as an exit, long before family matters come to the fore within those little marten minds.
There's nothing quite like one or two of these sharp predators to keep the local rodent population down, and so those wood mice and their foreign cousins, the recently arrived bank vole and greater white toothed shrew, are hardly seen at all.
A dozen miles away, while on a rain-drenched walk that threatened to turn into a swim, we found the roosting place of a long-eared owl.
How do we know that? Well, there was a typically soft owl feather or two on the ground, and the only owl species we have here, that habitually roosts in dark conifer woodland, is that very one.
Alongside the feathers we also found a number of owl pellets, comprised of the undigested remains of many owl dinners and lunches.
On dissecting these we discovered, among the wads of compressed fur, the skulls and jawbones of several small animals.
The pygmy shrew remains are always the easiest to identify. The front teeth of this smallest of native animals have rich orange iron deposits, which tells them apart from anything else.
And then the lower jaws of the greater white-toothed shrew have longer, pure white front teeth - once you get to recognise these you can't mistake them for anything else.
That was most of what our long-eared owl had been eating. We found small feathers in one pellet, so it must have found one of our songbirds in the dead of night.
As these owls tend to sleep through the day it is only at night, when it is too dark for them to be seen, that we hear them calling.
Listen out the next time you are out there in the dark. Should that slightly muffled 'Hoo!' reach your ears, you just might have one of these special birds as a neighbour, especially if the sound is issued repeatedly from the same corner of the wood.
Then, if you happen to be there at twilight, keep a careful look out and you may even get to see a round face set with rounder eyes peering at you from a gap in the ivy or the braches of an oak.
And if you have no mice or voles or shrews, you will know who to thank – the owl and the marten.