What the Owls Taught Us: Part One
- Glen Sealy
- May 1
- 5 min read
April 2026
It started, as the best things often do, completely by accident.
My daughter and I were visiting Hall Place in Bexley when we stumbled across something neither of us had planned for: a parliament of owls, presided over by a quietly passionate man in a blue polo shirt whose knowledge turned out to be bottomless, and whose love for these birds was impossible to be in the presence of without catching some of it yourself. His name is Matthew, part of the father-son team behind Jambs Owls, a family-run business.
There is something fundamentally familial about the way these birds are cared for, talked about, understood. We grabbed our phones midway through a sentence when we realised what we were in the middle of, and we are deeply glad we did.
What follows is the first of what will be several posts about owls. We learned more in one afternoon than we had in years of passing interest. We are not the same people who walked in.
The first thing that stops you is the faces.
There is a biological reason for this, as it turns out. Matthew explained it with a smile he'd clearly deployed before but clearly still meant: we are drawn to large round faces and large round eyes because of a process called infantile infatuation, a feature of the prefrontal cortex that evolved to make us find our own children beautiful. It protects our genes. It explains why your child is always more beautiful than your neighbour's. And it is, incidentally, precisely why owls are so disarming. A barn owl's face is not accidentally appealing. It is, to the human brain, a trigger for something deep and protective.
Knowing this does not make it less powerful. If anything it makes it more interesting.
At the time of our visit, Jambs Owls was caring for 22 species. Not a round number, not a target: just the number that keeps one person, in Matthew's own words, out of mischief. There are 248 known owl species in the world, a figure that had been 247 just six weeks before our visit. Genetic testing had confirmed that what was previously classified as a subspecies of the Spectacled Owl in Argentina was in fact a fully distinct species. The Southern Spectacled Owl had been reclassified. The count went up by one.
This is happening more and more. Blood work and genetic testing have opened, in Matthew's phrase, a whole can of worms in owl taxonomy. Birds that spent decades in one classification have been quietly moved when the genes didn't marry up. One of the owls at Jambs was classified as a Scops Owl for 25 years before genetic testing found it belonged to an entirely different family.
Researchers had noticed something was off, subtle things, the way it moved its facial disc, the way it held itself, small signals that something wasn't jelling with what a Scops should do. It took 30 years to act on that intuition, and another two years of testing to confirm it. The bird is now classified in the genus Ptilopsis, the White-faced Owls, a family of just two species all its own.
Science, when it moves, moves carefully.
Several of the birds had names, and with names came stories.
Zulu is nine months old. When Zulu hatched, Zulu was the size of a ping pong ball and weighed 25 grams. That fact sat in the air for a moment after it was delivered. Twenty-five grams. Matthew said it the way people say things they have said many times and still find remarkable.
Nutmeg is a British Barn Owl, and you can tell he's male because he's small. Male British Barn Owls are typically smaller than females, and blonde on the back, with no spots on the belly. Females are ginger on the back with spots, and the number of spots is actually an indicator of fertility: the more spots, the more fertile. This matters less for British Barn Owls than it might for other species, because they are, Matthew told us, highly monogamous. They partner for life.
He paused here, and then told us about his first breeding pair. The female died. Within three weeks, the male was gone too. Not from any identifiable physical cause. He just didn't know what to do with himself. Broken heart syndrome, documented in birds. We did not expect to hear this. We did not expect it to stay with us as long as it has.
And then there was Spectre.
Spectre is a melanistic barn owl, and we were not prepared.
Melanism is the opposite of albinism: an excess of pigmentation rather than an absence of it. In barn owls, it occurs in an estimated one in every 100,000 births. The result is a bird that should look like Nutmeg, all cream and pale warmth and the iconic heart-shaped face, but instead wears deep charcoal feathers with hints of rich chocolate and amber. The facial disc is still there, still unmistakably barn owl, but rendered in dark tones instead of the usual white. The eyes, dark and calm, looking out from that dark face.
Spectre is one of around 600 melanistic barn owls in the UK. Worldwide, there are thought to be about 5,000.
Most do not survive in the wild. Because nearly all owl species see only in black, white and shades of grey, melanistic owlets are effectively invisible against the dark interior of a nest during their secondary down phase. Their parents, unable to see them clearly, may not feed them. Many starve. Many are trampled. The darkness that makes Spectre so extraordinary to look at is the same darkness that would almost certainly have ended Spectre's life in the wild.
In captivity, under the care of people who understand what they're looking at, Spectre thrives. And goes on being looked at by people like us, who came in expecting a nice afternoon and left carrying something they hadn't arrived with.
We will be back with Part Two, which is where things get harder, and more important.
Because the same afternoon we spent marvelling at these birds, we also heard what is happening to them. Roads. Windows. Rodenticides. Habitat loss. The weight of a barn owl in your hand, 270 to 360 grams, Matthew told us. Nothing. A car's downdraft alone can pull one into traffic.
The beauty and the threat exist in the same moment. That is, increasingly, what paying attention to the natural world means.
Jambs Owls can be found at Hall Place and Gardens, Bexleyheath. Open Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays and Bank Holidays, plus Wednesdays and Thursdays during school holidays. Adults £4, children £3. No booking required.
April 2026.
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