Barn Owl (Tyto alba): Facts, Hunting, Habitat and Lifespan

One barn owl or three?

For most of the 20th century, all the world’s barn owls were treated as a single species, Tyto alba, with dozens of subspecies. Genetic studies in the 2010s found deep differences between the populations of different continents, and the IOC World Bird List and the Clements (eBird) checklist now recognize three main species:

• Western barn owl (Tyto alba): Europe, Africa and the Middle East.
• American barn owl (Tyto furcata): North, Central and South America; introduced to Hawaii.
• Eastern barn owl (Tyto javanica): the Indian subcontinent, Southeast Asia, Australia and many Pacific islands.

North American field guides now usually call their bird the American barn owl. BirdLife International and the IUCN Red List, however, still assess the barn owl as one worldwide species. This profile covers all of them and says which population a figure comes from where they differ. Barn owls belong to their own family, Tytonidae, separate from the “typical owls” (Strigidae) such as the tawny owl and the great horned owl.

What does a barn owl look like?

The barn owl’s most striking feature is its flat, heart-shaped facial disc, usually white and edged with a thin rim of darker feathers. It has dark, almost black eyes, no ear tufts and a pale hooked bill half hidden in feathers. The upperparts are a soft mix of golden buff and gray with fine black and white dots, and the underparts range from pure white to warm buff.

In flight a barn owl looks strikingly pale, with long rounded wings, a short square tail and long legs that dangle as it drops onto prey. The legs are covered in short, sparse feathers, and the middle claw of each foot has a comb-like edge that the owl uses when preening.

Plumage varies by region and sex. In Europe the white-breasted race T. a. alba lives in Britain and western and southern Europe, while the darker, buff-bellied race T. a. guttata lives in central and eastern Europe. Within any population, females tend to be darker and more heavily spotted below than males.

Barn owls do not hoot. Their call is a long, rasping scream, and they also hiss and snap their bills when threatened. Chicks beg with a loud, hissing “snore” that can be heard from outside the nest site.

How big is a barn owl?

A barn owl is roughly crow-sized but looks bigger in flight because of its long wings. Size differs between populations: American barn owls are clearly larger and heavier than European ones. Females are on average slightly heavier than males.

Much of a barn owl’s bulk is fluffy feathers. Ringers in Britain find that most adult females weigh about 295–435 g (10–15 oz), and males are lighter still, so even a large European barn owl weighs well under half a kilogram (1.1 lb).

Habitat and range

Barn owls live in open and semi-open country: farmland with rough grassland, field margins and hedgerows, marshes, river valleys, savanna and the edges of deserts. They need two things above all, grassland full of small mammals and a dry, dark cavity for roosting and nesting. They avoid dense forest, high mountains and the polar regions.

The western barn owl lives across most of Europe, Africa and the Middle East, the American barn owl from southern Canada through the United States and Mexico to southern South America, and the eastern barn owl from India and Southeast Asia to Australia and the western Pacific. American barn owls were introduced to Hawaii to control rats, where they also prey on native birds.

Barn owls are mostly resident, but young birds disperse after leaving the nest; in the United States they typically travel 80–320 km (50–200 mi). Long periods of deep snow hide voles from hunting owls, which is why barn owls are scarce where winters are long and snowy.

What do barn owls eat and how do they hunt?

Barn owls are specialist hunters of small mammals. In temperate regions more than 90% of their prey is voles, mice, shrews and young rats; in Britain the field vole is the staple, and in North America voles dominate with shrews in second place. In warmer or drier places they also take birds, bats, frogs, lizards and large insects. See What do owls eat? for how owl diets compare.

The usual technique is “quartering”: flying slowly and low over rough grass, turning back and forth, hovering briefly over a promising spot and dropping feet-first into the vegetation. Barn owls also hunt from fence posts and branches.

Hearing does most of the work. The facial disc acts like a satellite dish, channeling sound to ear openings set at slightly different heights on each side of the head. Tiny differences in timing and loudness between the two ears let the owl pinpoint a rustle both left to right and up and down. In classic laboratory experiments, barn owls caught mice in complete darkness using hearing alone.

Silent flight helps too. The leading edges of the outer flight feathers carry a comb-like fringe, the trailing edges are soft and frayed, and the feather surface feels like velvet. Together these muffle the turbulence that makes wing noise. The trade-off is that the soft plumage is not very waterproof, so barn owls struggle to hunt in heavy rain.

Small prey is swallowed whole, head first, and the bones and fur are coughed up hours later as a pellet. An adult eats one or more voles a night, about a quarter of its body weight, and often stores surplus prey at the roost.

Behavior and social life

Barn owls are mostly nocturnal and become active around dusk. In Britain they regularly hunt in daylight, especially in winter and when feeding chicks, while in southern Europe and the tropics they rarely do. By day they roost in barns, hollow trees, cliff crevices, church towers and nest boxes.

They are not strongly territorial. A pair uses a home range around the nest, which for males in Scotland averages about 3 km² (1.2 sq mi), and outside the breeding season the male and female often roost separately. When disturbed, a barn owl lowers its head and sways it from side to side, hisses and spreads its wings; if cornered it may throw itself on its back and strike out with its talons. Like other owls, it cannot move its eyes much in their sockets, so it turns its head instead, through about 270 degrees.

Reproduction and life cycle

Barn owls are usually monogamous and often keep the same partner for life. The male advertises with screeching display flights and brings prey to the female before laying. No nest is built: the eggs are laid on a bed of shredded old pellets in a tree hole, cliff cavity, building or nest box.

In Britain the first eggs are laid between late March and early July, most often in May. A typical clutch is 4–6 white eggs, though anything from 2 to 12 has been recorded, laid about two days apart. The female incubates for about 30–34 days while the male feeds her. Because incubation starts with the first egg, the chicks hatch days apart, and in a poor vole year the youngest often starve.

Young barn owls leave the nest at about 50–60 days old and depend on their parents for several more weeks. In years with plenty of voles a pair may raise two broods, and most barn owls breed for the first time at about one year old.

How long do barn owls live?

Barn owls are short-lived for their size. According to the British Trust for Ornithology, a bird that reaches breeding age typically lives about four years, and only about one young owl in three survives to breed. In one American study, 572 banded barn owls died at an average age of under two years.

A few beat the odds. The British ringing record is 15 years 3 months, the North American banding record is 15 years 5 months, and a wild owl in the Netherlands reached 17 years 10 months. In captivity barn owls often live 20 years or more. Learn how other species compare in How long do owls live?

Predators and threats

Adult barn owls are killed by larger birds of prey, including Eurasian eagle-owls, goshawks and buzzards in Europe and great horned owls in the Americas. Most deaths, however, come from starvation, especially among young birds in their first autumn and winter, and during spells of deep snow.

Human-related threats include:

• Road traffic, a major cause of death, as owls hunt low along grassy verges.
• Rodenticides: many barn owls found dead in Britain carry traces of rat poison picked up from their prey.
• Loss of rough grassland to intensive farming, which removes the voles they depend on.
• Loss of nest sites, as old hollow trees are felled and barns are converted or sealed.

Conservation status

The IUCN lists the barn owl, assessed as a single worldwide species, as Least Concern (2019), because it has an enormous range and a large population. Regional trends are very mixed.

In Britain, numbers fell steeply during the 20th century: an estimate for 1932 put the population of England and Wales at 12,000 pairs. The UK population is now about 4,000 pairs, and monitoring by the British Trust for Ornithology suggests it has recovered strongly since the 1990s, helped by thousands of nest boxes and wider grassy field margins. The barn owl is one of the owls in the UK that most benefits from these schemes. In North America, the American barn owl has declined sharply in the Midwest and Northeast, and several states list it as endangered.

Barn owls and people: myths and facts

A pale bird that screams in the dark and lives in church towers easily became a symbol of death. Across Europe barn owls were long seen as bad omens, and in parts of France and Switzerland dead owls were still nailed to barn doors to ward off evil as late as the 1960s.

Some popular beliefs are simply wrong:

• “Barn owls hoot.” They scream; the hooting owl of European woods is the tawny owl.
• “Owls can turn their heads all the way round.” They can turn about three-quarters of a circle, not a full 360 degrees.
• “Owls are blind in daylight.” Barn owls see well by day; their eyes are simply tuned for dim light.

Today farmers value barn owls as free rodent control. Nest box programs in Israel and Jordan and in vineyards and orchards in California encourage barn owls to hunt rodents on farmland. Find out more about life after dark in our list of nocturnal animals.