page_title: Tawny owl
section_title: Habitat
hierarchical_section_title: Tawny owl / Distribution and habitat / Habitat
caption_attribution_description: Epping Forest
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: The preferred habitat of the tawny owl is temperate deciduous forest and mixed forest with some access to clearings. They too may habituate to riverine forests, parks, large gardens with old trees, open landscapes with wooded patches and avenues of trees in open agriculture. The species prefers "richly structured habitat" with old, mature trees available. Since they naturally tend to utilize tree hollows as nesting sites, sections of forest or woods with available snags may be ideal. They tend to occupy pure coniferous forest only near edges or when clearings and glades exist. Often areas in the conifer forest, especially the taiga in the north, where the tawnys will occur show a mixture of some deciduous tree growth such as birches and poplars. In the taiga-dominant environments of vast Russia, tawny owls are usually restricted to broadleaf stands often in river drainages, parks, orchards and cultivated lands, often where woods of Quercus, Tilia and Betula stand with plentiful broken snags and dead trees. Locally, the tawny owl has been known to be adaptive to subalpine forest dominated by conifers, such as the pine forests in the Spanish ranges of Sierra de Gredos and Sierra de Guadarrama. Similarly, in southern Poland, they reported occur in spruce-fir dominated forests. Also the species can habituate to rocky areas as long as they have scattered trees and bushes from which to execute hunting. Locally, tawny owls are quite adaptive to living near or in human settlements, extending to towns or cities, most often within timbered gardens or tree-line pavement areas. They have adapted to living in parks or wooded suburban fringes of almost every major European city, including London and Berlin. They also live in and around even larger cities just outside of Europe, such as Istanbul and Moscow. Although tawny owls occur in urban environments, they are less likely to occur at sites with high noise levels at night. While this owl can settle in very young forest as long as nest boxes are available, woods with trees too young to support typical hunting behaviours from a prominent perch may be suboptimal. In Lithuania, it was found that nest boxes would booster the population in openings of the forest, interiors of mature forest and even grassland but no increase was noted in young forest in a state of recovery. In the well-studied population of Monks Wood, England, those living in more continuous sections of the woods (stands exceeding 4 ha (9.9 acres)) had more territorial skirmishes and overlapping territories while within farmland parts would be clustered around available wooded stands. In the Monks Woods, intermediate woods were probably preferable with less direct competition and more food was likely. In a Romanian study, tawny owls were rare in glades within the forest where substantial gaps occurred and were clustered around very old stands of trees, possibly being restricted from the more prey-rich glades by interspecific competition. In central Italy, 560 territories were studied in various habitats such as urban parks, mesophilic woods, sclerophyllous woods, and mountainous beech woods, with the most attractive and highest density type being in sclerophyllous woods and lowest in urban woods and mountainous beech. Generally, tawny owls occur in lowland areas but also may occur in mountainous areas (i.e. not exceeding 550 m (1,800 ft) in Scotland). They generally do not exceed 1,600 to 1,800 m (5,200 to 5,900 ft) above sea level in the Alps but may live at up to 2,650 m (8,690 ft) on Piz Lagrev in Switzerland. Tawny owls may live at elevations of over 2,000 m (6,600 ft) in parts of Armenia, Turkey and Tien Shen. The species may even occur at elevations of up to 4,200 m (13,800 ft) in the Himalayas.
caption: Ancient deciduous woodland is a favoured habitat.
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