Just heard an owl, inner London

[Bloodybridget]

I'm so excited! It was a tawny owl, I am quite old and have lived in London all my life and never heard this before. We did used to hear them when we had a house in Suffolk. This one sounded very close. I know they have been heard in an old cemetery about half a mile away, but rarely.

I'm enjoying reading everyone's comments and stories. It was great to post in my excitement in the middle of the night and have lots of responses! Night owls, eh?

I get them in my garden too, in East London. Absolutely love them!

We have owls in city of Cambridge location, though we are near fields/woodland. They like open spaces to hunt.

@MissTermeanor there is a large area of marshland and waterways about a mile from us which would be a good hunting area for them, I guess.

How wonderful. I lived in Central London for 30 years. Never heard an owl but we had a family of mangy foxes who lived in the garden, the mother used to show us her babies, they were all very tame.

Now live very rurally and have owls living in the trees in the garden, they are VERY noisy and scare my dogs, its wonderful! Nature makes me so happy. We often sit at the bottom of the garden and watch owls swooping across the fields.

@BossAssBitch we usually see a lot of foxes round here, they are very bold, but funnily enough since the pandemic hit, I don't think I've seen any. Perhaps they have second homes!

Lol lol at the 🦊 having second homes! 😆

We see the odd fox and we have deer very close by, I love seeing them.

This website is great for identifying different Owl calls.

I don't think I've ever heard a Barn Owl...I think if I did I'd think I'd entered some Blair Witch type realm 😆 Fairly disturbing call!!

www.woodlandtrust.org.uk/blog/2017/12/owl-calls/

We had Tawny owls in the garden in inner London in the 80s. They had 4 chicks who would sometimes sit out on the branch of a tree in the daytime.

They were only there one year though, they never came back sadly.

Is a baby owl a chick? An owlet?

Yes @PutYourBackIntoit I used the Woodland Trust website to check it actually was a tawny owl. @eleventy3isthemagicnumber I'm pretty sure baby owls are chicks.

Baby owls are owlets. I've actually done an AMA now about my owls.

There's also a poster on there who has a hand reared Barn Owl.