Dominic Couzens On Long-Eared Owl

You don’t expect to see an owl from a North Sea ferry – at least, not when the ferry is miles from land. But Dominic Couzens did…

I PEERED A LITTLE harder through the mist. There was no doubt about it. Low over the leaden grey water, with Gannets and Fulmars for company, an owl was flapping incongruously over the waves with those unmistakable deep, wavering wingbeats.

The owl was pleasingly brown in a monochrome landscape of sea and seabirds, every shade of black, white and grey on a chilly autumn morning. Here we were, three or four hours out of Harwich, and I had been hoping to see a skua or a shearwater. Instead, the sea-watching had been enlivened by the appearance of a Long-eared Owl.

Admittedly, people do sometimes see strange things on seawatches (bats flying in off the sea, dead human bodies floating, or the time in Sweden when a circus elephant was spotted swimming offshore, for example). But this was certainly unexpected.

There is actually a logic to seeing a Long-eared Owl at sea, though. Both they and their close relatives, Short-eared Owls, are known to migrate, leaving the northern parts of their range in Europe and crossing the sea to winter in Britain, before returning in early spring.

The reason for being so surprised to see one is that they usually do it secretively, under cover of darkness (as do Coots and Water Rails, for example). And, let’s face it, owls just look out of place on the sea. But then, Long-eared Owls are full of surprises, as we will see. Several aspects of their lifestyle are jarringly dissimilar to those of other owls. They do strange things!