Bohemia Village Voice

Owl lady Jackie Cullen and Kali.

If you have lived in Hastings and St Leonards for any length of time then you’re bound to recognise Jackie Cullen, otherwise known as the ‘Owl Lady’. Jackie and her owls are often to be seen walking up Bohemia Road, on their way back from Priory Meadow. Collectively, they make up the shopping centre’s pigeon-scaring team, though they’re just as happy shooing away seagulls. Jackie, who lives in Chapel Park Road, currently has seven owls: three Bengali eagle owls, including four-year-old Kali, plus two European eagle owls, a Turkmen-ian eagle owl and a tawny owl called Ollie. Most of the owls have been reared from five-day-old chicks that Jackie bought from a registered breeder, though Ollie and Shady, one of the European eagle owls, were both rescued.
 Jackie’s work as a bird scarer started by accident a few years ago. ‘I was always going into the Fur and Feathers, a pet shop in St Andrew’s Market. They had a big problem with pigeons, but then one day I went in when Kali had grown just a little bit bigger, and the pigeons all scattered. So Lynn, the pet-shop owner, asked me to try coming in on a regular basis, and it worked like a dream.’
 It was around this time that Priory Meadow invested in a few robotic hawks as a tactic to repel unwanted birds. Jackie says, ‘The hawks cost them a small fortune and they weren’t very effective. Within a week the pigeons were sitting on their heads. So I said, “How would you like the same job done better for a fraction of the cost?” They leapt at it. They gave me a couple of weeks’ trial and then it was, “When can you come back? How many days can you do?”’
Jackie also has a good relationship with the fire station on Bohemia Road. ‘They’ve used my owls to clear pigeons out of the training tower and my ferrets to get the rats out of the drains. But it’s not all scaring, of course. I also do shows at weekends to raise funds for the Old Hastings Preservation Society.’
Jackie has been rescuing animals for 15 years, and her special area of knowledge is birds. ‘I started with one humble pigeon who’s still with me, and I now have five in total, all of them too maimed to go back into the wild. Then, as well as the owls, I’ve got a fluctuating population of rescued seabirds which at any one time might include herring gulls, common gulls or guillemots. There are also two cats, both rescued, and four border collies, three of which I’ve rescued, and the ferrets, of course. The pigeons ignore the cats and the owls, who ignore them back. But all my animals are well fed and secure at night, and they have their own kind to play with, so they want for nothing.’
Jackie gets a lot of birds in distress referred to her from various sources. ‘If it’s still alive I’ll rescue it,’ she says. ‘I get the dregs of what the RSPCA won’t deal with – pigeons, seagulls, birds behind fireplaces. I can’t leave them to die.’