A lion ate this tame barn owl at the Colchester Zoo.
From The London Evening Standard:
Children visiting a zoo were left in tears after an owl taking part in a display was caught and eaten by lions.
Families were horrified when a female lion “clubbed” the bird out of the air before a male pounced and devoured it in front of them.
The barn owl, called Ash, had been taking part in a falconry display with her handler at Colchester Zoo when she accidentally flew over the lion enclosure. Although she landed safely on the side, she was said to have lost her footing and fallen. Seconds later she was killed.
Gavin Duthie, from Colchester, had taken his two-year-old son Daniel to the zoo on Saturday. He said: “Daniel was in tears along with most of the people who were there. Women and children were screaming but it was all over in seconds.
“It’s in the lion’s nature – I have taught Daniel that lions are not fluffy animals. He was very upset.”
Alex Downing, the zoo’s marketing director, said: “We are very sad to report that our little barn owl ‘Ash’ sadly died at the weekend.
Unfortunately she got spooked during an experience and flew right out of the falconry arena and hit the window of another enclosure. She picked herself up and flew onto the roof of the meerkat enclosure where we hoped she’d settle but she was obviously dazed and as a result flew low across the lion enclosure.
“Although she landed on the side of the enclosure she very sadly lost her footing and fell in whereupon she was killed by one of the lions.
“Everyone involved is obviously extremely upset about such a combination of events but there is nothing that anyone could have done at the time to avoid such an awful outcome.
“In 25 years of falconry displays nothing like this has occurred as the birds do normally instinctively know that this isn’t a safe place to go.”
I wonder if any of these children has ever been around a dog or cat that has caught something.
These things happen.
But I think we have a bigger problem.
Nature shows in recent years have tended to sanitize predation.
When I was a child, the nature shows always showed big cats killing things.
That was like the big draw for most these programs.
But now, they tend to overly personalize the animals, which makes explaining predation somewhat more difficult.
I know that a lot of BBC nature films do show predatory sequences. I’ve been told that that new Frozen Planet series had lots of epic predation sequences in it.
Maybe films like these will prepare children for things like this.
Personally, if I had been at a zoon when I was a boy and saw a lion kill an owl, I would have been totally pumped!
Not just predation. Life.
My elementary school was right next to a horse farm. When I was in the fourth grade, one of the mares foaled, about 25 feet from the school fence. At recess. We got to see the whole thing, from the first bit of hoof poking out to the foal’s first meal. No a single one of the teachers monitoring recess tried to get us inside. No parents complained. There was no outraged article in the newspaper the next day.
Think about how that would play out nowadays.
When I was about 3 years old, one of my grandpa’s hereford cows had a calf right beside my swing set.
That made my week!
You must have grown up at a different time or been allowed to see different programs. Disney nature films almost never showed the “kill”. Ditto for “wild kingdom”. Even to this day, much of what’s shown is clearly favoring the prey animal. Even in college I knew people who had no idea that California was an agricultural state and had NEVER seen a live sheep or cow outside the LA fair. You see a lot of that reflected in attitudes about animals –both wild and domestic. Just take a look at some of the comments on some of the videos on the internet — as with the one you had that showed the wolves killing the moose calf. Sadly, these are typical. Peggy Richter.
I grew up on the Marty Stouffer, George Page, and Survival Anglia films.
I never liked Disney “Nature” films at all. Even as a kid I knew they had almost no facts in them. I never counted them the same way.
Marty Stouffer may have contrived things, but now, all you get are really anthropomorphized and superficial documentaries.
The only good ones seem to come from the BBC. Nat Geo will have a nice one every once in a while.
“Women and children were screaming but it was all over in seconds.”
Just sad.
i was a bit surprised by the women and kids screaming bit too. it just amazes me what people think actually happens everyday in the natural world. it really annoys me when people call animals evil. a lion isint evil he is just doing what he needs to survive or as in this case what instict drives him to do, a crow or magpie isint either when they kill a songbird. frozen planet was a wonderful series, i can highly recommend it. in fact i did to a friend of mine who doesnt have tv but watches stuff online, i said show it to your boys they will love it, but no apparently the scene which showed the orca hunting a seal didnt go down to well. yes ok it was pretty unpleasant to watch. the seal was sat on an ice flow and 3 or 5 orca just kept tipping it till it got so exhausted they were able to catch it. but it is natural how do people think large and beautiful things like orca live.
I grew up watching BBC nature docs, apparently this isn’t the norm?
Frozen planet was excellent.
I quite enjoyed Earth flight as well.
I find the reaction to the lion killing the owl sad, pathetic and as a woman and British citizen, cringe worthy and somewhat embarrassing.
me too tazer. i dont know about you but some days i am embarrased to be british and i should be and normally am proud to be british but my fellow citizens are becoming more and more moronic. we dont all scream and cry when a wild animal kills another for food, we dont all get drunk and stagger about the streets screaming at each other and the police. they get worse as each year goes by. i blame that stupid towie mentaity.
I suspect there was a bit of the pet image w/ this particular owl. The spectators had probably bonded w/ it a bit before it flew over the lion enclosure. If the owl had been totally wild the reaction would probably have been less pronounced.
As strange as it sounds for Americans, there are a lot of pet barn owls in Britain.
Maybe we could some of them as a source to restore our Barn Owl population (LOL). When we moved to our current home in ’76, there were Barn Owls (and Barred, Screech, Saw-Whet, Long-Eared and Great Horned owls as well) all around here. I remember that there was a nesting pair in one my neighbor’s out buildings. One year they killed and ate a skunk in there and his Holsteins wouldn’t go anywhere near it after that. There are no Barn Owls left in our area.
Barn owls are virtually nonexistent in West Virginia on the western side of the Allegheny Front.
I agree. I’m sure part of the reaction is just shock. I mean, I’ve seen feedings at the zoo and the reaction is totally different. Usually the meat isn’t recognizable as animals, but it’s still pretty graphic.
…though it’s pretty cool that the lion just smacked it out of the air. It reminds me of slapping down the disc in Ultimate.
BTW: The reason I’m the only one in my family who eats things like venison, rabbit and goose (or even lamb fer cryin’ out loud) is that the rest of the family has been indoctrinated with what I call the “Bambi Syndrome.” It is most definitely a product of Disney-like productions and biased reporting in the media.
We’ll send you some barn owls and you can grab some wolves and send them over.
That should help sort out the fox and deer problem.
I’m sad in that it was obviously a very loved, very tame owl. But, that’s nature for you.
I’m also one of those children who grew up watching BBC documentaries (TVOntario for you!) and spent a great deal of time outdoors. I was also a magnet for baby birds it seems.
I managed to come across a baby bird on a weekly basis. Many I nursed back to health enough to fledge while others sadly passed on. Hopefully my children will learn that death is simply a part of life and not be so upset if something like the above happens while we’re at a zoo lol.
I grew up knowing the programs were bunk because I grew up in a rural area where a good percentage of the people still had ranches or farms. I just never remember seeing the more honest programs in comparison to all the Disney stuff. And to be fair to Disney, some of their early nature films were “leading edge” at the time. But even now, it’s far more common to have a “happy feet” type penquin or a lion that is friends with a baboon than it is to have a movie portraying animals “as they are” — we either make them heros (usually a prey animal or a predator that never seems to predate) or villans (almost always a predator). As note the movie “Grey” which, like Jaws, Orca and a dozen other similar movies (including Jurassic Park II) has animals as some kind of vengeful stalking bigger than life enemy. And unfortunately, since most people are urban dwellers, the media is about the only way they encounter nature.
Peggy Richter.
Peggy,
I did, too.
I didn’t grow up in the middle of nowhere, but I could see it from my house.
Well I grew up in an industrial town in the north east of England and still reside in that area.
There was and still is a small seal colony about a mile from where I used to live.
We get all sorts of bird life from the usual gulls, pigeons etc, to merlins, short eared owls and harriers.
No idea what this word “pumped” means, a new one on me.
Whenever I visit London zoo to see the lions, I am always annoyed to see women and little children standing against the perspex screen which separates them from the lions, screaming their heads off! THe adults encourage the children to shout and yell to get the animals’ attention. School kids with their teachers also do this. It was different in my day – as a child you were supposed to keep quiet near animals. I have seen a lion trying to grab a small screaming child through the perspex screen, trying to hook its paw around her. Probably thought she was an irriating rodent.
It means very excited.
Do they not use that term in British English?
It’s standard English:
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/pumped
I guess they didn’t teach you proper vocabulary over there :).
scottie you didnt just say that did you. naughtyyy.
i expect we have a fair few tems you havent heard of. i think ive heard the term “pumped” on tv but never thought much about it. for me it would mean to pump, i.e pumping up a tyre. oh well that is what makes english so intresting it isint the same every where it is spoken.
Tyre is tire in American English. Tyre is in Lebanon.
LOL
I was just making fun of what I thought was a bit of a pretentious comment. Pumped in this context is hardly a new word.
Oh and
Green is my favorite color.
No u’s.
Canada is the bastard child of the Anglo-American Empire.
Oxford Canadian Dictionary: the only accurate one we have, which a hard-copy is sitting on my shelf as we speak. A somewhat okay free online version can be found here: Truly Canadian Dictionary of Canadian Spelling
Our grammar is so messed up, that a journalist had to publish a book on how we differ from the American and British, Organizing Our Marvellous Neighbours: How to Feel Good About Canadian English. I keep meaning to purchase it since my grammar is absolutely fucked. More resources can be found here.
Some Canadians use zee for z.
Most use zed.
If you use zed in the United States, we’ll beat you.
I’m going to name a dog Zed now.
I say “zed” for Z. I also pronounce route differently than most. “row(like wow)-te”
Either “eye-ther”, neither “nye-ther.”
I don’t say “aboot” though. Nor do I say “eh” all the time.
Eh?
Our spellings have been standardized since the early nineteenth century, when Noah Webster put out the first editions of his dictionary.
The only people in America who want us to use British spellings are some Neo-Confederate groups, and they only want to use them because Webster was from New England.
i know you was only teasing, so was i back.
there are lots of words that differ its a wander we both speak english, for example what is a bum to you may not be the same as for me, im sittng on mine. i wander if i can think of any more. can you lot over there.
it amuses me sometimes how when i watch amercan programmes tryng to work out what odd words mean, for years i often wandered what taking a rain check meant, sounds silly to you guys i expect but its not something we say.
the other week i was watching an episode of destination truth and they put subtitles up for an english person, speaking english and the subtitles were english. that did make me chuckle. mind i sometimes wish for subtitles for the fast talking new yorkers, they just speak so quick to me.
i wander if dogs have this problem, does woof, woof sound the same in every country. hummm.
Crisps = Chips
Fag = Smoke
Chips = Fries
Nowt = Nothing
Owt = Anything (thats Yorkshire only I believe)
Oh geeze.. when I lived in Leeds for a few years, I learned most of all the lingo there. It’s escaping me now.