TMPA Presents Owls & Cuts Cake For 106th
Did you know one family of barn owls can remove up to 2000 rodents per year? Owl Whisperer and Wild Life Warrior extraordinaire Stefan Hattingh recently presented a talk for the Tamborine Mountain Progress Association at the Zamia Theatre and said “They are ‘nature’s killing machines of rodents’!” Stefan said that Barn Owls are known as the ‘Silent Hunter’ making no sound when flying. Their call is one of a high-pitched
short screech but mostly they tend to stay quiet. Silent but deadly, they rely on the rodent population for breeding. They have 7 babies on average in a season, with the largest hatching recorded in Australia of 11, and of 19 in Europe. Teenage owls can eat 9 mice a night, so Stefan said “Imagine if there were 10 babies in the nest all calling for dinner at the same time! The parents would be kept extremely busy hunting each night!”
Stefan then went on to say that if you remove a top predator from the food chain, the rodent population would run wild! He is extremely passionate about all owl species and wanted everyone to know that rodent poison (such as Rat Bait which ‘kills in one feed’) also kills owls within two hours. “Rat poison is wildlife poison!” Stefan said, “It only takes one poisoned mouse to kill an owl – or any other warm-blooded creature for that matter – every year it kills 349 children in the US” This is also apparently true of a cockroach – if it eats poison, while it remains unaffected, when it gets eaten, it will subsequently kill the other creature or bird. At the end of the presentation, Stefan was very pleased to report some of the attendees were
going straight home to dispose of their rat poison.
You can also help with rescues of these important raptors at: www.gofundme.com/f/Help-for-a-Raptor-Rehabilitation-Centre
