Europe's largest owl turns up in a Belgian forest

August 27, 2026European Atlantic mixed forests

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A Eurasian Eagle-Owl was confirmed at De Schavuienhof, near Bierbeek, on August 17, verified across three separate reports by regional reviewers. In the past two weeks it was the only species flagged as notable anywhere within 25 kilometers of this stretch of Atlantic mixed forest, which says something about how far outside the ordinary checklist this bird sits.

This is not a small owl passing through on a whim. Bubo bubo is Europe's largest owl species, a sedentary, territorial hunter with a wingspan that can top six feet, built to take prey up to the size of a young fox or a heron. It doesn't migrate; where it settles, it tends to hold ground for years, which is part of why a single confirmed sighting carries more weight than a stray songbird would. Hunting pushed the species out of much of lowland Western Europe by the mid-20th century, and it has spent recent decades recovering and pushing back into former range, helped in places by reintroduction projects and by protection of the nesting cliffs and old quarries it favors. A bird turning up in a Belgian forest like this one fits that pattern of recolonization far more plausibly than it fits the alternative explanation of an escaped falconry bird.

What it would find if it stayed is worth a note of its own. This same forest holds a small, recurring population of , an Asian squirrel that has become established in patches of Belgian and French woodland after escaping or being released from captivity. Eagle-owls are generalist hunters that take rodents readily in exactly this kind of habitat, so the owl's arrival and the chipmunk's foothold here are worth watching as connected threads in the same patch of woods, even though nothing so far confirms one is preying on the other.

Data from iNaturalist

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