"There were golden plover and curlew and lapwing displaying and it was pretty impressive but if there had been a pile of 400 stoats by the road and however many foxes and weasels and a pile of illegally killed hedgehogs, badgers, peregrines, goshawks and short-eared owls then the lapwing and curlew don't look quite so impressive.
His sentences are full of neologisms: the adjectives he torqued into verbs ("The north wind brittled icily in the pleached lattice of the hedgerows"), and the verbs he incites to misbehaviour ("Four short-eared owls soothed out of the gorse").
Traditionally nesting in open agricultural buildings, barn owls suffered as those sites disappeared.
That puzzled Kenneth Campbell, of the Los Angeles County Natural History Museum, because most owls hunt by night, when the tar has cooled and formed an un-sticky crust.Closer analysis showed, however, that the two most common owls in the pits were the short-eared and the burrowing owls, both of which hunt by day.
But these are outnumbered by owls, which hunt only live prey and of which 1,103 have so far been found.
Night owls could nip next door for a "midnight matinée" of Shakespeare's "A Comedy of Errors" at the Globe theatre.Getting around London late at night used to be expensive or time-consuming.
For birdwatchers, OwlCam follows a family of owls (members.aol.com/owlbox/owlhome.htm).htm
Logging has increased by 60% in the state since the 1980s, when the timber industry moved its operations over from the Pacific north-west in order to avoid continual warfare over old-growth forests and spotted owls.
But this is an assumption that has rarely been tested.To rectify this, Stephen Redpath of Britain's Centre for Ecology and Hydrology and his colleagues studied 22 tawny owls in the Kielder Forest in northern England.
No longer: women's happiness advantage has gone the way of decorative macrame owls.
A half-dozen Magnificent Owls (a type of butterfly) graze on a plate of over-ripe fruit a few feet away.
