ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

The Little Owl controversy in twentieth-century England: Gamekeepers, protectionists, and the science of bird diets

• In Event: (Mis)Understanding Animals? Biology, Epistemic Uncertainty, and Non-Human Animal Management in the Late Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

English Abstract

‘Probably more nonsense has lately appeared about the little owl than about any other bird or mammal’, wrote the celebrated ornithologist and environmentalist Max Nicholson in an article for the News Chronicle in 1936. The press, he complained, had been ‘flooded with inaccurate statements’ about this creature, and he worried that it was rapidly becoming ‘the symbol, or at least the focus, of ignorance and prejudice in modern England’. Described variously as ‘a wretch’, a ‘pest’, ‘the worst bird in Britain’, an ‘aggressive little alien’, an ‘exterminator’, ‘cruel and remorseless’, a ‘deadly marauder’ and ‘a feathered devil… the most destructive pest we have’, this unassuming little bird was the product of considerable strife in England roughly between the years 1912 and 1954. Debates about the Little Owl during this period, which drew in ornithologists, agricultural scientists, gamekeepers, landowners and casual observers, reveal a great deal about changing ideas about science and the environment in the first half of the twentieth century.

In this paper, I explore how the Little Owl debate developed by analysing discussions about the bird in mainstream newspapers and specialist periodicals including The Gamekeeper and The Field. Introduced in the late 19th century, the Little Owl (Athene noctua) rapidly became a target pest of gamekeepers and poultry farmers, who believed that it posed a threat to game and poultry chicks. Due to the quirks of Britain’s labyrinthine bird protection legislation of 1880, the Little Owl was a protected British bird, which drew the ire of gamekeepers and shooters, who insisted that its ‘foreign’ status should exempt it from protection. In the face of these accusations, scientists sought to convince its enemies that the owl, far from being a menace, was a net positive to agricultural interests due to its appetite for insect ‘pests’. My paper explores how two studies from the 1920s and 1930s by W. E. Collinge and Alice Hibbert-Ware, sought to make the case in favour of the Little Owl by analysing what the birds ate.

Author

• Max Long, Lincoln College, University of Oxford