Tawny Owl

Since my childhood, sounds of Tawny Owl Strix aluco have been so familiar that it would be easy to take them for granted, were they not so wild and inviting. Untangling their intricacies is a challenge, but many before me have helped to clear the way. It was only when starting work on this chapter that I realised how little I knew.

In the Sound Approach team, Arnoud lives closest to Tawny Owls. Just round the corner he often sees one peeping out of the tall chimney of an old house. When he cycles past at dusk, his neighbours are switching on their lights. The curtains are open, and the folks inside are watching the news or having dinner. As he cycles on between the sports fields, he hears other Tawny Owls in the wooded North Sea dunes beyond. Arnoud finds a suitable spot and leaves his gear recording all night. CD4-16 is a male hooting close to the microphones at 04:13 in the morning.

Familiar as these sounds seem to us, we can hardly begin to appreciate what Tawny Owls hear in them. In a few seconds they can learn a great deal about who is calling, just as we do when we answer the telephone. Based on harshness and length and the pitch and relative proportions of particular syllables, they can tell which individual it is, the sex, likely dimensions and weight, its health, level of aggression and the probable quality of its territory (Appleby & Redpath 1997, Galeotti 1998, Galeotti & Pavan 2008, Redpath et al 2000). With so many variables at play, no two neighbours sound quite the same. Even for humans, telling individuals apart by ear is often surprisingly easy.

If Tawny Owls made long distance phone calls like us, their local accents would be very noticeable to their listeners. Each habitat has its own acoustics, requiring slightly different hoots. In dense woodlands for example, lower-pitched hoots are better able to penetrate the many obstacles present. Open habitats permit higher-pitched hoots, but if conditions are windy then a lower pitch may be better. Galeotti et al (1996) found the lowest-pitched Tawny in a karst region in Italy with very dense brushwood, subject to strong east winds. The male in CD4-17, from a similar habitat in Portugal, is also near the lower end of Tawny’s pitch range. Even the female, heard from time to time just after the male, seems unusually low-pitched. 

During the last ice age, Tawny Owls in Europe retreated to three different refuges where there was still suitable habitat. From their Balkan refuge they later spread to Britain, northern Europe and eastern Europe, from Italy they went north as far as southern France, while those that had survived in Iberia made it no further than the Pyrenees (Brito 2005). There is evidence that at least two of these lineages developed slightly different hoots. Compound hoots from England have a more arched first note and a longer second note than hoots from northern Italy (Galeotti et al 1996). A fourth lineage, S a wilkonskii breeding in the Caucasus and south of the Caspian Sea, is more distantly related (Brito 2005). The Armenian male in CD4-18 is one of only a handful that have ever been sound recorded. 

Female Tawny Owls also hoot (CD4-19), although in spring they often give just one or two strophes when the male delivers prey. They hoot much more intensively in autumn. Often females have two short, well-separated notes in the middle of a strophe instead of the male’s one, but there can be anything from zero to three (Galeotti 1998, Hambling 2008). One reason why female compound hoots are so variable is because of the highly charged situations in which they occur. In fact, female compound hooting is only really equivalent to more excited variants of male compound hooting. Males also give more variable hoots when excited, but rarely have more than one middle note. In close contact with females they often shorten the gaps, both within and between strophes, and in territorial disputes their timbre may become harsh and whining. Sometimes, either sex may hoot just the first note of a compound hoot (cf, CD4-24). 

The female’s best known sound is her soliciting call. It varies from an intimate kuWI, barely audible at a few tens of metres, to a strident and far-carrying kuWICK. The timbre is slightly harsh, although this may only be evident at close range. During the breeding season, the female will often solicit for up to a minute or longer when she knows that the male is near the nest. The calls are given singly, not clustered, and this distinguishes them from the very similar ‘distance call’ (cf, CD4-29). Males can go for long periods without using the soliciting call, especially during the breeding season. CD4-20 is a male-female conversation with soliciting calls in autumn. The male’s soliciting calls are marginally lower-pitched and lack the slight harshness of the female’s.

Thanks to film and TV soundtracks, even people who have never heard a real Tawny Owl would be able to recognise one, at least as an owl of some kind. Their compound hooting and soliciting calls are well known, but what other sounds do they make? One of the most striking is pulsed hooting, a call type that all Western Palearctic Strix owls have in one form or another. In Tawny it consists of a ‘bubbling’ series of very short hoots, and birders often compare it to Tengmalm’s Owl Aegolius funereus or the drumming of a Common Snipe Gallinago gallinago. Despite being a common sound, it can easily trip up the unwary.

Autumn is the time when Tawny Owls use pulsed hooting most often and in its purest form, like the male in CD4-21. Arnoud recorded the female in CD4-22 when, together with Peter Nuyten, he was following up a report of a rare autumn ‘Tengmalm’s Owl’. Perhaps Tawny Owl’s pulsed hooting would be more familiar if autumn owling were more popular. 

There is always a fine line between affection and aggression, and passions can flare easily. When a male and female Tawny Owl come close together, you never know quite what you will hear, but pulsed hooting often makes a fleeting appearance. The first note or the final note of a compound hoot can easily be extended into a pulsed hoot (CD4-23).

Some sounds of Tawny Owl are both infrequent and brief. While preparing this chapter I wanted to improve our examples of female hooting, and I also realised that I’d never experienced the climax of their courtship. As it was early March I thought I might still be in with a chance, so I paid a visit to a pair that shared a barn with a pair of Common Barn Owls Tyto alba. I included one recording of the Tawny pair already (cf, CD4-19), but not the time when they copulated in the tree right beside my microphones (CD4-24).

After the young hatch, several new sounds make their appearance. Whenever the male brings prey, the female gives faint, nasal, often slightly disyllabic feeding calls at a rate of about 3-4/sec while offering out tiny morsels to her brood (CD4-25, from 0:11). This is one of the first signs that they have hatched.

By the time the young become audible from below the nesting tree, their begging call is a faint, uninflected and drawn-out seep. From an early age, juveniles also use their chitter call. The juveniles in CD2-26, using both call-types, had already clambered out of the nest. As they grow older their begging calls become louder and more disyllabic (CD4-27), and by the time they are able to fly we can hear them from up to several hundred metres away. 

As I moved closer to the juveniles in CD4-27, their mother started to become nervous. Her yelping quek-quek-quek is so typical of such a situation that I call it her guarding call (CD4-28). Håkan has heard a markedly deeper version from a male. As the situation becomes more threatening, the calls become louder and sharper. The guarding call serves as a warning not only for the benefit of the brood, but also for the intruder.

Tawny Owls can be surprisingly nasty in defence of their young. Bird photography pioneer Eric Hosking lost his left eye to a Tawny, and another female attacked W A Cadman, a ringer who was inspecting a nestbox he had erected in his back garden. Determined to reprimand her, he constructed a “glorified butterfly net” and ascended the tree once again: “the Owl came almost at once, and before I could even raise the net she had struck me a glancing blow which turned my jacket right back over my shoulder. She struck me in all five times, and each time she managed to choose the exact moment when I was unable to use the net. Her most effective coup was one to the seat of my trousers!” (Cadman 1934). 

While the guarding call belongs to the latter part of the breeding season, there is a slightly different call that we can hear all year round, especially in autumn. This ‘distance call’ (CD4-29) also consists of yelping sounds, but its delivery is slightly slower and the individual yelps are disyllabic, like a series of very fast soliciting calls. The distance call is used in long distance communication with rivals or other owl species, and never directed at the partner (Scherzinger 1980). The name refers to its role in keeping enemies at a safe distance. I have heard Tawny Owls replying to Ural Owls with this call (cf, CD4- 15), which is a homologue to Ural’s territorial barking. Often it forms the opening salvo of an aggressive interaction, to be followed up with compound hooting or other sounds. Mark once received a livid blast of distance calls after making one kuWICK with his trusty owl whistle. The reply was so sudden that Mo came out of the cottage to check that everything was OK.

The only time I have ever really been spooked by a Tawny Owl was during an autumn trip to Białowieża forest in Poland. I had been walking towards an area where I hoped to record Tengmalm’s Owls when I heard a pair of Tawny Owls calling nearby. They stopped before I could record them but provoked a Tengmalm’s into giving a tsyuck, so I waited. After a few minutes of silence I imitated Tengmalm’s hooting. A Tawny cursed me harshly in response (CD4-30). According to Wendland (1963), only females use such foul language. The calls that I recorded may be a highly excited, aggressive subversion of the soliciting call, and are surely equivalent to the koRAH scream of Ural Owl (cf, CD4-14). 

For me, the sound of Tawny Owls settling scores in autumn is a nocturnal highlight on a par with rutting deer and the mass migration of thrushes. In CD4-31, there are no thrushes, but Fallow Deer Dama dama are grunting in the far distance. A pair of Tawnies on the right are replying to a more distant male on the left. The males exchange compound hoots in an orderly fashion, and then the pair join forces in a duet. In their combined aggression, their voices caterwaul like fighting tomcats or foxes, and one could easily assume that these are two inexperienced young owls practicing their calls while squabbling over territory. 

However, the majority of excited close-range interactions between Tawny Owls in autumn are in fact male-female duets, very excited but nevertheless innate adult sounds. Very few seem to be male-male fights. It all comes down to levels of excitement, and in the autumn, Tawny Owls can get very excited.

It was autumn owl sounds like these that I first heard as a child, as belligerent Tawny Owls patrolled our neighbourhood in Edinburgh, Scotland. We lived not far from the Water of Leith, a small river with woodland along its banks. I recognised the owls from the traditional tu-whit, tu-who that my mum used to imitate them. From the security of a warm bed, I would imagine a family of owls perched on chimneypots across the road, but I rarely if ever saw them.

I still hear Tawny Owls far more often than I see them. Knowing their calls allows me to understand what they are up to in the dark. Hearing parallels in species I know less well, I can make educated guesses about them too. Compared to Tawny Owl, Maghreb Wood Owl S mauritanica, Hume’s Owl S butleri and Omani Owl S omanensis are almost virgin species, untouched by science. Discovering them is both a pleasure and a privilege.

Support The Sound Approach

You can support The Sound Approach by clicking here.