Tengmalm's Owl Aegolius funereus
Tengmalm's Owl (Computer-generated image by Colin R Casey).
An adult was shot on the dunes north of Saltfleet Haven on Oct 22nd 1880. One can only imagine the mentality of the person whose first reaction on spotting this magnificent little Owl was to shoot it. The bird was described thus by Cordeaux (1880): It is a mature bird, the plumage somewhat injured in shooting; sex undetermined. This bird must have arrived with the same winds (N and NW) which brought the great flight of Woodcocks on our coast from Flamborough to Cromer on the night of October 18th and morning of the 19th, and again on 22nd, along with large numbers of Short-eared Owls and other immigrants. One wonders how many Woodcock have arrived on the Lincolnshire coast since then with apparently no vagrant owls!
To label this as a county “vagrant” seems a little understated and given its great rarity countrywide it’s anyone’s guess as to whether we will see another one in the county. Pre-1950 there have been 51 records, most of them shot or ‘obtained’, the first being in 1812 in Northumberland. There have only been nine records since 1950 though, with six of them in the Orkney Islands. The most recent one on Shetland in Feb 2019 understandably attracted a lot of attention after the short-lived stay of the bird on Copinsay, Orkney in Nov 2018 which was not twitchable. If only the unannounced Spurn Point bird in Mar 1983, whose occurrence was extensively discussed by Roadhouse (2016), had managed to slip across the Humber!
There have been about 50 British records up to 1929, most of them in the nineteenth century, and only been ten since. The most recent ones being at Spurn, Yorkshire, in 1983; Egilsay, Orkney in 1986; Copinsay, Orkney in 2018 and Shetland in 2019.
| Site | First date | Last date | Count | Notes |
| Saltfleet Haven | 22/10/1880 | - | 1 | Shot |
(Account prepared October 2017, updated with reference to the new Birds of Lincolnshire (2021), October 2022)