Eagle owl attacks in Kuchl
Newsletter 15/06/2017
Since the start of the breeding season, the birds in the breeding colony of Kuchl, country of Salzburg, had been unusually nervous. The non-breeding birds even stayed elsewhere overnight. On July 13 in the morning, the nervousness within the colony increased enormously, and a chick was missing. A feather found on the ground gave reason to assume that an eagle owl was the cause.
In the night of June 14, this assumption was confirmed in a dramatic way. Our field manager D Trobe was on site and had to observe two attacks of an eagle owl after 10:00 pm. The bird flew directly into the breeding cliff and took another chick.
Due to that we immediately decided to remove all remaining chicks and their parents from that breeding site. Already during the night the majority of the adult and juvenile birds were caught. The next morning showed that this was the right decision: At approximately 10:00 am, the eagle owl unexpectedly showed up again, flying out of the trees near the breeding cliff, obviously his resting place, and trying, again, to grab one of the remaining chicks - luckily the attempt was unsuccessful.
All breeding pairs and the remaining nine chicks were brought to our facility in Burghausen, Bavaria, not far from the breed colony at the castle of Burghausen. A critical moment in the late afternoon was the reunion of the parent birds with their chicks in the wooden breeding cliff. To our relief, the parent birds responded quickly to the chicks' calls and began to feed them.
This was the first incident with an eagle owl in the past 15 project years. Thanks to immediate action, we were able to prevent that the parent birds gave up their offspring completely and to limit the loss to two chicks. We assume that next year we will continue the establishment of a breeding colony at Georgenberg. A coexistence of Northern Bald Ibises and Eagle owls, as their natural predators, has to be possible. Based on the current experiences, we now want to analyse by what measures we can support this.
One of the important experiences was that it was probably not by chance that only chicks became the prey of the eagle owl. Apparently, it did not attack the adult birds, although they were sitting in the niches next to the chicks. During the attack in the later morning, we could even observe that the parents defended their chicks and chased the departing eagle owl.
A volunteer also reported that he found a feather in the breeding ground a few weeks ago, which he now recognized as a feather of an eagle owl. We therefore assume that the bird has been in and near the breeding site since weeks, but has never attacked an adult bird of the colony.
These observations make us confident that a balanced coexistence between the Northern Bald Ibises and their natural predators at the breeding site Georgenberg and elsewhere is possible. We can support this by targeted measures, e.g. by providing nesting niches which make the approach of the eagle owl much more difficult.
Picture (J Fritz): Rescued birds after the transfer to an aviary in Burghausen, Bavaria. Immediately after release, the parent birds responded to the chicks' calls.
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