Daisy

Daisy

Daisy is a female miniature Shetland pony and was born on 09/05/96

She is 34” high and is white in colour and is quite shy in nature but we are winning her around with polo mints and apples.

Malteser

Malteser

Malteser was born on 07/07/09 and is brown in colour with a multi-coloured mane.

At the moment he is half the size of Daisy and still has his baby coat so is looking a little scruffy at the moment.

These wonderful babies have already developed unique characters and are extremely popular with visitors both young and old. They enjoy being hand fed and bathing in their water bowls after doing their delightful little dance.

At the moment they are approximately 18 inches high, and look like ‘Humbugs’ on legs, and when fully grown will be between 5 and 6 foot tall.

SKIPPY

Mum, Zapper of only two years old herself has done a wonderful job.

Hatched on 12th June 2009 we have have two lovely babies!

Burrowing Owls Major & Zapper have become proud parents of two!

Our car park was full of cyclists, the top field was full of cars, and the sanctuary – which offered free entry for the day – was also bursting at the seams.

It was a special day for local people. The old chaotic A30 was now closed and had made way for a tranquil and peaceful trail for cyclists, walkers and horse riders, permanently traffic-free.

The sanctuary has easy access out onto the once-secluded moors and conservation site. We have been situated on the edge of this hidden reserve for fifteen years.

We were amazed at its beauty, as everyone has been, as we have been unable to access the moors easily in the past.

The funds raised on the day went to the Precious Lives appeal to help build a much-needed children’s hospice in Cornwall. We helped raise approximately £1,500, with a further £1,000 being raised by Natural England from the cyclists.

Many of our visitors this year were unable to appreciate the benefits of Goss Moor due to the poor weather, which is unfortunate. If you have not yet visited Goss Moor and the national nature reserve site we recommend this to you for next year.

When you visit the sanctuary just ask for a map and we’ll be only too happy to help direct you on your way.

The purpose of this request is to enable the club to provide teaching aids for the children in its local high schools.

Unfortunately all our information is in hard copy, as they say today (i.e. books) and we were only able to send one DVD called ‘Identifying our owls’.

If you have any such DVDs or CDs which you no longer want or use that may be useful for teaching Indian children, please send them to:

Dr K C Soni (Lecturer in Zoology)
Behind High School
Ratten Nagar (Chum)
Rajasthan
India
331021.

Their second language is English so they can use these materials without any translation. We all know that education is the key to conservation, and who knows, the next David Attenbourgh may find his interests from the materials we provide.

Thank you.

In a newsletter last year, I wrote a short story of the history of Dougal, our long-living Tawny Owl. I mentioned her first visit to a school many years ago and the impression she made on the children.

Well, now as parents all these years later, those very children she first saw have now asked for her to come back and visit their children. Now, that does make me feel a little older.

I wonder how Dougal feels!

These owls are not common and are not even recognised as much more than a black European dark-breasted Barn Owl (tyto alba gutatta), or a throw back of the European Barn Owl in layman’s terms.

Their colouring is very different, making the owl very striking and beautiful to look at. So, as you can imagine, we were completely surprised and truly delighted when the sanctuary was given one of these usual birds as a gift from an owl conservationist in Belgium as a thank-you.

We had helped him by providing a male Siberian Eagle Owl so he had a compatible breeding pair in Belgium. He was so pleased with the help we had given him that he gifted the sanctuary with the owl we now call Sooty.

If you have not already met Sooty, he will be on close encounters most days and I am sure you’ll agree how beautiful and unusual he really is.

The first two babies hatched were a boy and a girl, then four months another boy was hatched. This was so impressive that it was reported in the International Owl Society magazine for September 2008.

The second hatching was not reported as the magazine had already gone to press but I have given you an excerpt of the article as reported in the magazine as follows:

Ashy-faced Owls prey primarily on small mammals and birds, but also hunt tree frogs and lizards. The population of these owls is declining, largely due to habitat loss, which in turn is a consequence of the rapid growth of the Dominican Republic’s human population from less than 2.5 million in 1950 to over 8 million just half a century later.

The Ashy-faced Owl is more dependent on forests than the somewhat larger Barn Owl; as a result, deforestation has benefited the Barn Owl at the expense of the Ashy-faced Owl.

The Ashy-faced Owl was first bred in captivity in Germany about 17 years ago. In 1997 the Dominican National Zoo (ZOODOM) and the Society for Conservation and Research of Owls (SCRO) signed an agreement to cooperate on a breeding project for the conservation of this species in the Dominican Republic.

In March 2001, two chicks were hatched in captivity for the first time in the Americas, and seven additional chicks have been hatched since.

The Screech Owl Sanctuary in Cornwall, England, is celebrating the first breeding at the centre of the rare Ashy-faced Owl from the Dominican Republic. Two healthy chicks at two weeks old were taken from the nest in mid May and are doing well.

The birds which are yet unsexed are hoped to be girls so the sanctuary can pair up some of their lonely males and continue their breeding program.

The Ashy-faced Owl (Tyto Glaucops) is slightly larger in size to the British Barn Owl, with an overall more golden body and a distinctly ashy-grey facial disc.

For around nine years the owl sanctuary has had three males (Autumn, Woodie and Fernando) and has been desperately looking for a female to pair one of them up with. In 2006, the sanctuary finally managed to get hold of a young unrelated pair (Ash and Spring) and hoped for the best.

The female was laying but the male seemed uninterested. So the decision was made to swap the young male with a mere mature male. So the lucky male, Woodie, was selected to go in with the female Spring in early January.

Now, these males have never had female company before, and are nine years old, so the staff were laughing about a three-way struggle to get into the box and to be the chosen owl to get himself a lady. They seemed to get on well and on April 2 a first egg was laid, followed by a second on April 4.

We then made sure the birds were not disturbed and we all crossed our fingers hoping for fertile eggs. The eggs would take around 36 days to incubate, so a nervous wait would ensue. Then with great delight the first noise of a baby was heard on that precise date and we knew we had at least one baby.

As much as we are good at rearing babies we decided to let Mum look after them as they generally do a lot better job than us humans. We were still worried though, as these two birds are completely new parents, and had never reared babies before. A lot of mice were put in during the day and night to ensure these babies had enough good food to eat.

These two weeks were the longest of my life, but she did a good job and we found we had two very healthy chicks which we hand reared to a point, and then creche-reared until adulthood. This is so they don’t imprint and humanise so we can breed from them in the future. One of these babies, a male called Ceniza, is now on public display for educational purposes at the sanctuary.

As you have just read from the above paragraphs, the sanctuary has made a large contribution to the continued existence of this very rare owl. With the hatching of a female this year, and the excess males held at the sanctuary, we will hopefully have two breeding pairs next year.

This project can now grow with our contribution.