In the 1930s, as Europe stood on the brink of war, British landowners were poised to launch their own offensive. Their target was a foreign invader from Europe, the little owl, Athene noctua. Half a century earlier, a few pairs had been released in England. Several decades on, these diminutive birds of prey, source of these bone-packed pellets, had become a common sight in parklands and orchards throughout much of England and Wales. But as they spread across the country, so did stories about their evil ways.
The little owl was accused of the wholesale slaughter of pheasants, partridges and poultry chicks, not to mention songbirds. Estate managers and gamekeepers reviled it as the worst sort of vermin, and clamoured for its extermination. A bird that had been revered by the ancient Greeks and sacred to Athene, goddess of wisdom, looked destined for extinction in Britain. Only one person could save the owls now – Miss Alice Hibbert-Ware of the village of Girton near Cambridge.
IN THE time-honoured manner, the matter was to be decided by committee. The little owl – an alien species from the Continent – was on trial for the killing of Britain’s game birds. So in 1935, the British Trust for Ornithology convened a panel of the great and the good to determine its fate. Everything would depend on what it ate, and that would be cleared up by the Little Owl Food Inquiry.
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The inquiry’s “scientific advisory committee” was packed with distinguished gentleman experts. But they were to act only as judge and jury. To discover what little owls were actually consuming, these men turned to Alice Hibbert-Ware.
Their choice was inspired. Hibbert-Ware was a field naturalist of prodigious talents, with the determination to match. Born in New Zealand, she came to England with her mother, brother and five sisters after the death of their father, a retired army captain. In 1882, the family settled in the genteel spa town of Cheltenham, and the 13-year-old Alice attended Cheltenham Ladies’ College, an enlightened place that encouraged its girls to take an interest in science.
Hibbert-Ware became a teacher and a passionate promoter of nature study for the young. On holidays, she travelled across Europe and to New Zealand, birdwatching with her close friend and fellow naturalist Gulielma Lister, who, like Hibbert-Ware, was among the first women elected to the prestigious Linnean Society. On her return, she would write up their observations for the School Nature Study Union, founded to teach natural history to teachers.
In 1919, Hibbert-Ware moved to “White Cottage”at the edge of Epping Forest on the outskirts of London. She had at last found her ideal home. For it was there, on the edge of the forest, that she began to reveal her genius for field research. According to ecologists Tony Turk and Tim Sparks of the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology at Monks Wood in Cambridgeshire, Hibbert-Ware is one of the unsung heroines of modern ecology. Though hardly a household name today, she had a huge influence on the teaching of natural history in the first half of the 20th century, and contributed enormously to our understanding of the diet of wild birds.
She began in small ways, by feeding crushed peanuts to the tits in her garden so that she could watch them closely. Soon the birds were so tame that they would happily feed from a dish inside her dining room, and from the hands of visitors. During one cold snap, she recorded up to 55 visits to the dish in five minutes, despite the presence of her two pet cats, which she had trained not to hunt birds.
Hibbert-Ware became a museum curator in London’s Stepney during the First World War, creating what came to be regarded as a nature study oasis in the East End”. Over the years, she had built up an impressive array of skins of British birds, without ever killing one.
Early in 1931, Hibbert-Ware’s sister-in-law died, and she felt duty-bound to look after her brother, a vicar. So she left White Cottage and moved to Girton, a village on the outskirts of Cambridge. It was a terrible wrench, but she immediately set about converting the local schoolchildren from egg-robbing to birdwatching, all the while speaking up for grass snakes and dragonflies, which the locals regarded with suspicion. But of all the creatures suffering unwarranted persecution, the little owl was her favourite.
Hibbert-Ware had kept a close eye on the little owls in Epping Forest, and discovered that they were eating a blameless diet of earthworms, insect larvae and rodents. Soon after she arrived in Girton she pinpointed several little owl nests in the neighbourhood, and began to keep them under surveillance. By painstakingly dissecting the contents of the birds’ “larder holes” and scores of regurgitated pellets she found near the nests, she confirmed her earlier findings. “All affirmed that the staple food of the Little Owl consists of rodents, shrews, insects, and earthworms,” with only an occasional sparrow or starling, she told the Cambridge Bird Club in 1934.
Meanwhile, the campaign against the little owl was gaining momentum. Throughout the country, gamekeepers began shooting them at every opportunity. So when Hibbert-Ware heard about the Little Owl Food Inquiry, she volunteered her services at once.
It was to be an arduous undertaking. First, she needed to be certain that what turned up in the regurgitated owl pellets reflected what they had actually eaten. To find out, she fed the owls at London Zoo – first with house sparrows, then mice, and then earthworms, and waited for the owls to spew up pellets. Day after day, the birds performed, ejecting bundles of tiny beaks and wing bones, or delicate rodent jaws and leg bones. Dissecting the pellets, Hibbert-Ware even spotted wheat grains and beetle wing cases, the remains of their prey’s own last suppers. Indeed, what came out matched pretty well what went in, except in the final experiment.
That day, two owls had dined exclusively on a pint and a half of easily digestible earthworms. The keeper reported that the birds had “cleared up the whole lot but no pellets of any description were formed, although the excreta was excessive”. But in the wild, no bird would overdose on worms, and Hibbert-Ware detected telltale earthworm bristles in the pellets of birds eating a more natural mixed diet.
With the feasibility study completed, Hibbert-Ware launched herself into the official inquiry. She spent the next two years working through thousands of samples sent in by 75 helpers from 81 locations in 34 counties. She fastidiously analysed 2460 pellets, the debris from 76 nest holes and the ground-up contents of 28 little-owl gizzards. She worked non-stop, nine hours a day. Such was her attention to detail that she counted 2000 individual crane-fly eggs in one owl pellet. That particular bird had evidently swallowed several female crane flies just as they were about to lay their eggs. In another pellet she found the remains of 343 earwigs.
“No one can read Miss Hibbert-Ware’s report,” the committee concluded, “without appreciating the enormous amount of careful, arduous and often unpleasant work which has fallen upon her in the course of this investigation.” She had listened to the complaints of landowners and gamekeepers in most English counties and painstakingly investigated even the most fabulous accounts of the owls’ evil-doings.
“The Little Owl is considered by many game preservers and keepers to be a veritable fiend as a chick destroyer,” she observed. But the pellets told a different story. “An extremely close search was made with the help of the microscope and reagents for possible hidden traces of game or poultry chicks,” Hibbert-Ware reported. She even searched for chick brains, reputed to be the vermin’s favourite food. But in all the thousands of samples she found the remains of only seven poultry chicks, and all came from just one little owl’s nest, sampled over two seasons. It seemed that only the odd “rogue” bird had ever developed a taste for chicks, and then only when it was feeding its own young.
Hibbert-Ware’s exhaustive study showed that the vast majority of birds spend their time on the ground, feeding on insects, mice, rats, shrews and voles. In the face of overwhelming evidence, the Home Office acted immediately. It sent a memo to every local authority, proclaiming that the little owl was now officially regarded as a very useful bird.
Today, little owls are regarded with affection. They’re admired for their fierce expression and amusing antics as they bob up and down on fence posts. But it took Hibbert-Ware’s tireless efforts to turn the tide of hatred and confirm what Aristotle had recorded three centuries before Christ: Athene’s bird hunts beetles and mice.