OK, so this gets more bizarre.  Having just returned from collecting a car from the garage and wistfully looking at the pile of feathers outside the owl box, I checked the camera again ... only to find two Barn Owls present!  Absolutely no idea what is going on!  Did a Sparrowhawk take the third (dead) owl or was it an interloper that was killed by the resident (male?)?  Or is the resident bird dead and teh interloper now installed.  Or “D” none of the above?  Bamboozled.  But at least we can still hope for owlets again this year.

I am sad to say that one of our pair of breeding Barn Owls was killed this morning by what I take to be a Sparrowhawk.  The camera showed the pair in the box at about 08.00 but at 08.30 only one was present - we assume that it had gone to sit on the lip of the landing pad at the entrance to the hole, something they do infrequently.  At 10.30 my wife returned from Bridgwater to find white feathers and two wings only, spread in the field below the box; no sign of the body or head.  In the absence of a body, it is impossible to tell whether the victim was the male or the female.

It would seem unlikely that the remaining owl will pair again in time to produce young this year.  We had seen the pair mate at least twice in the last couple of weeks and had been looking forward to watching owlets growing up again, but not this year now it seems.