Great Uncle Fred? Where did barn owls live before there were any barns and if there were no barns, what were barn owls called? (Anonymous Questioner, Summer 2009)

Aren`t barn owls just wonderful? A barn owl returning to its nest with a caught animal in its beak, at twilight, is to me one of the greatest sights in nature. And one of the most wonderful things about barn owls is that they have been around for a very, very long time. The oldest fossil known to be that of a barn owl is more than 30 million years old. The bird that scares you half to death with its screech or its hiss, or when you suddenly see it in your headlights, is essentially the same bird that existed all that time ago, and has existed since, watching as we evolved and caused havoc, watching and sometimes suffering at our hands but persisting. The barn owl remains one of the most widespread of all birds and is found in every continent except Antarctica. And - and this might explain its success over such a long time - its ability to locate prey by sound is the most accurate of any animal ever tested. This ability comes in handy: a nesting pair of barn owls will consume more than 1,000 small animals in the course of a year. Farmers, then, like barn owls, or should like them and this, perhaps, is why they have been encouraged to live in old barns and acquired their name. Actually, they are happy to live in several different kind of cavity, with a roughly flat area to nest in and a narrow opening: holes in trees will do, or small caves or big nesting boxes. There have only been barns for about one ten thousandth of the time that there have been barn owls so you can see that the name does not actually have much to say about the species. It is a bit like the name that a tiny child comes up with for her great-great-grand-father: "G-g-rnpa", or something like that. But, because barns sound cosy and barn owls are to be welcomed, it is an improvement on almost all the other names which these magnificent birds have lived under, many of which demonstrate the suspicion and fear that our race has felt for theirs: these include White Owl, Stone Owl, Silver Owl, Cave Owl, Church Owl, Demon Owl, Monkey-Faced Owl, Ghost Owl, Rat Owl, Night Owl and, indeed, Death Owl. The thing is, the bird is bigger than any name. Does that answer your question?

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