Hi and welcome to my Blog, my name is Paul Riddle and I live in south Leicestershire, UK. Back in August 2007 my quest began to locate as many local Little Owl territories as possible. The driving force was a reported decline in the uk numbers so I thought I would do my bit and conduct a study in my area. After 7 years and countless hours out in the field I have detected over 200 different sites. With a thirst for a greater understanding of the owls a more comprehensive monitoring and nest box programme then commenced. This also now includes monitoring the local and very sparse population of Barn Owls, please pop back occasionally and catch up with the life and times of my owls and any other wildlife that I come across. I hope you enjoy your visit!!!

Sunday 29 May 2011

Cute!!!

Got out for a few hours this morning with Daz, we went out to check a few more sites for breeding activity and to blow the cobwebs away from a very heavy drinking session yesterday, we went down to Twickenham to watch the Leicester Tigers play in the premiership final which they sadly lost to Saracens! 

Anyway, there was nothing much doing at the sites we checked apart from another great tit nest in a Little Owl box, that's the forth now!!!! There was only really 2 highlights from the morning, a confirmed breeding territory has been set up by a pair of Hobbies over near to Enderby and the 5 Little Owl chicks in one of my boxes near to Whetstone Gorse are doing just fine.

Here is an image of the box that the Little Owls are breeding in, amazingly it is only four feet from the ground!


Before further investigations could take place I took this image of two of the chicks as they sat inside the box.


Your truly fighting through the brambles to take a closer look


Flipping cute or what!!!


As the hen owl was in the box with the five chicks I didn't hang around too long and only took 2 of the chicks out for closer inspection, the parents are doing a smashing job feeding them up as they looked to be really healthy and twice the size they were a week ago!


I need to be contacting the ringing group very soon otherwise at the rate they are growing we could well miss the opportunity of ringing them as they could be gone!!

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