The beautiful barn owl is the product of millions of years of
evolution.

A perfectly reasonable question might be, where did
they live before there were barns?

If you look at some of the other names it's been called
over the years - church owl, cave owl, stone owl - you get a
few clues.

The barn owl sometimes nests in rocky crevices or
hollow trees, but since the advent of farm buildings - or the
Barn Age, as I call it - it has found its preferred roosting
spot.

I once had a barn owl sit on my head. I was making a
TV documentary about barn owls, and I was visiting an
owl sanctuary, so under those circumstances, the fact that I
was near these nocturnal birds was not that surprising. Barn
owls like to perch on wooden posts before hunting, and I
was wearing a wooden-post-coloured shirt, so it was fair
enough.

I was amazed by how little it weighs for such a powerful
hunter. The barn owl's diet consists mainly of voles, but it
will also eat frogs, lizards and sometimes other birds. They
have superb hearing, and can judge exactly where a vole
is in the long grass, and, without even needing to see it,
they can pounce in the dark with deadly accuracy. Their
ears are not symmetrical, and this allows them to judge
distances with great precision. I've also got asymmetrical
ears, but I still manage to stub my toe on the kitchen table.
It's a pale and ethereal creature, the barn owl. To see one

19