The Tawny Owl's Autumn Call, and Why You Hear It More in October

If you have been lying awake lately and heard a long, wavering hoot from the trees, you are not imagining that there is more of it. October and November are when tawny owls are at their loudest, and in a lot of British towns and villages they are the main sound of an autumn night once the traffic has thinned out.

The reason is housing. Tawny owls pair for life and stay on the same patch of woodland, park or large garden year after year. Their young, hatched in spring, are now grown and being pushed out to find a territory of their own, and they rarely move far, often only a few kilometres. So autumn is a season of newcomers calling to see whether a patch is taken, and established pairs calling back to say that it is. The British Trust for Ornithology describes autumn as the time when tawny owls are most vocal for exactly this reason.

The famous twit-twoo is not one bird. It is usually two. The male makes the long hoot, a drawn out hooo, a short pause, then a softer, trembling run of notes. The female answers with a sharp kee-wick. Heard together they blur into the call everyone knows, but if you listen for a minute you can often pick out the two voices and where each one is sitting.

They are also a bird worth hearing while we can. The tawny owl has been on the amber list of Birds of Conservation Concern since 2015 because of worries about a long, slow decline. The picture is not all gloomy. When volunteers for the BTO listened for owls at the same survey sites in 2005 to 2006 and again in 2018 to 2019, tawny owls were heard at about 87 per cent of sites the first time and about 84 per cent the second, which suggests they are holding on in most places. But they are hard to count, because they live almost entirely at night, and nobody is quite sure why numbers have slipped.

Part of the pleasure of an owl call is that it is easy to listen to. It is slow, it is spaced out, and it comes from somewhere further off than the room you are in. A sound like that gives your attention something to rest on without demanding anything, which is a little different from the sudden clatter of a bin lid or a car door. Research on natural sounds more broadly, including a 2021 review of 18 studies by Rachel Buxton and colleagues in the journal PNAS, links them with lower stress and better mood, though none of that work was about owls in particular, and an owl right outside the window at three in the morning can be a lot less soothing than one in the distance.

If you would like to hear them, the best time is the first hour or two after dark on a still, dry evening. Wind and rain both muffle calls and seem to make owls quieter too. Open a window or step outside, give your eyes and ears a few minutes to settle, and listen towards the nearest tall trees. You may hear the male first and the female a beat later, or two males calling across a road at each other. It is a small, free thing to do on a dark evening, and a nice reason to put the phone down for ten minutes.

On nights when the trees are quiet, you can borrow some of that feeling indoors. In Create Your Zen, pick the forest and layer crickets with a slow stream, both at a low volume, then leave it running while you read or wind down. It will not stand in for the real thing, and if sleep has been difficult for a while it is worth a chat with your GP. But an October night, with the windows dark and an owl somewhere out in the trees, is one of the quieter pleasures of the year.