page_title: Tawny owl
section_title: Interspecies predatory relationships
hierarchical_section_title: Tawny owl / Dietary biology / Interspecies predatory relationships
caption_attribution_description: Français&#160;: Deux chouettes; à gauche une chouette hulotte Strix aluco, à droite une chouette effraie Tyto alba
context_page_description: The tawny owl or brown owl is a stocky, medium-sized owl commonly found in woodlands across much of the Palearctic. The tawny owl is a member of the genus Strix, that is also the origin of the family's name under Linnaean taxonomy. Its underparts are pale with dark streaks, and the upperparts are either rufous, brown or grey. Several of the eight recognised subspecies have each of the main colour variations. This nocturnal bird of prey hunts a wide variety of prey species, but usually primarily takes small mammals such as rodents. Tawny owls usually hunt by dropping from a perch to seize their prey, which they typically swallow whole. In more urban areas, its diet includes a higher proportion of birds, while in arid subtropics many invertebrates such as insects are taken. Other important prey can include frogs with other vertebrate prey taken fairly rarely. Vision and well-developed hearing adaptations combined with silent flight aid its night hunting. The tawny owl is capable of catching smaller owls, but is itself vulnerable to larger raptors, like eagle-owls or goshawks.
context_section_description: In every part of its range, tawny owls co-exist with other birds of prey, with other owls presenting the strongest possibility for competition given their overlapping food selection and shared nocturnality. As perhaps the most numerous and one of the most widely distributed in the continent of the 13 owl species regularly occurring in Europe, ecological interactions of some kind have been recorded with most other species. Given their medium-sized frame and general adaptability, of special interest is how they co-exist with other medium-sized owls such as long-eared owls and barn owls. Many studies have contrasted particularly the food habits of long-eared owls living in proximity to tawny owls. Generally speaking, the long-eared owls in Europe are much more strongly disposed to being a specialist species than the tawny owl, relying almost entirely on voles. Although in the broad picture, the long-eared also feeds on other prey such as birds and insects, their food niche breadth is consistently lower than that of the tawny owls. For example, in a very large study of central Europe, the common vole species alone constituted about 76% of 57,500 prey items for long-eared owls. Long-eared owls also differ strongly from tawny owls in selecting much more open hunting grounds, such as old fields, usually hunting on the wing rather than from a perch and in utilizing abandoned (and often rather open) bird nests rather than natural cavities as nesting sites. In terms of peri-urbanisation, the long-eared and tawny owls are more or less equally adaptive to such areas. The food niche breadth is usually greater in Europe for the tawny owl than for the barn owl as well, although the barn owl appears to have a stronger liking of shrews as prey than does the tawny owl (shrews more than twice as often selected). The barn owl, although also by nature a cavity nester, does not generally acclimate to well-wooded areas where the tawny owl is at home. Both the long-eared and barn owls prefer voles where they are available, especially as both often hunt in open areas where they are common, whereas Apodemus mice tend to be slightly preferred by tawny owls. When conflicts ensue, the tawny owl tends to dominate these other medium-sized owls. This is in part due to their size advantage, with the tawny being larger by an average of 32% (of 3 standards of measurements, two from the wing, one by body mass) than the long-eared owl and 24% larger than the barn owl. Tawny owls are known to readily evict barn owls from their own nest sites, normally when taking up residency in towns or cities. It was additionally found that barn owls, being a species better adapted to warmer, more tropical areas, is at higher risk of starvation in cool weather than long-eared and tawny owls, with proportionately many more found dead in winter in France due presumably to inferior lipid fat reserves.
  In the British Isles, the tawny owl is the largest and most powerful year-around native owl, ahead slightly of the long-eared and barn owls. Therefore, the tawny owl may be considered an apex predator here (despite still being vulnerable occasionally to diurnal raptors and ground predators). However, since the tawny owl never colonized Ireland, here the long-eared owl is the largest year-around owl (in these island much larger owls are very rare winter visitors, in the case of the snowy owl (Bubo scandiacus) or are probably accidentally introduced by humans, as is likely the Eurasian eagle-owl). However, in much of mainland Europe and elsewhere, tawny owls potentially overlap with larger owls and, depending on habitat composition and prey accessibilities, may be considered more correctly a mesopredator. Mainly in parts of northern and eastern Europe, tawny owls sometimes co-exist with their larger cousins, Ural owls. The Ural owl has generally similar nesting and feeding habits but tends to occur in slightly different habitats. Generally, the Ural is more broadly adaptive to taiga and similarly conifer based forests than are tawny owls and is also somewhat more likely to be acti
caption: A captive tawny owl with a large barn owl, usually the tawny owl is behaviourly dominant and slightly larger than the barn owl.
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