Irish Barn Owl Nest, Cork Live Cam

A barn owl chick sits in a nest box in Duhallow, County Cork, in front of a camera that BirdWatch Ireland runs. The birds use boxes because old buildings and hollow trees have largely gone.

Barn owls hunt by ear. The facial disc works as a dish that funnels sound to ears set at different heights on the skull, and the difference between the two gives a fix in the vertical as well as the horizontal, which is enough to take a mouse in complete darkness.

The Irish population fell sharply through the twentieth century, hit by rodenticides passed up the food chain and by traffic on new dual carriageways. Nest box schemes and monitoring have turned some of that around in the south-west.