BRITAIN'S favourite farmland bird, the barn owl, is in serious trouble and for the first time ever West Devon landowners are being asked to help get them through the winter by providing an artificial food supply.

The Barn Owl Trust has warned that there are now so few barn owls in England, all the stops must be pulled out to help get them through this winter.

The trust's senior conservation officer David Ramsden said: 'This is not a long term solution; it's an emergency measure. Britain's barn owl population can usually recover from severe winters such as in 1947 and 1963, but 2012 and 2013 have been an unmitigated disaster.'

The trust claims that this year there are fewer barn owls nesting in England than at any time since farming began around 3,000BC.

Reports from Devon, Cornwall and other locations across the country are telling the same story. The trust has said that the proportion of sites where barn owls have attempted to breed this year is up to 90% down on previous years.

Britain's biggest county barn owl survey, carried out every ten years by the Barn Owl Trust in Devon, has so far checked 707 sites.

Mr Ramsden said: 'We would normally expect to have found 170 nests by now. Actually we have found only 44 and most have either failed, or produced only a single owlet.'

Mr Ramsden said supplementary feeding is not a long-term solution to the crisis facing barn owls: 'What the birds really need is more prey-rich foraging habitat and a few years without extreme weather conditions.

'We are also extremely concerned that around 30 per cent of all young barn owls end up dead on the side of a major road before their first birthday and 84 to 91 per cent of all barn owls contain rat poison.'

Numbers are so low that another severe winter or cold spring could be the last straw.

Anyone who owns a building or a nest box containing a roosting barn owl is urged to keep a small stock of dead day-old poultry chicks in a freezer and be ready to start putting out food as soon as snow or sub-zero temperatures are forecast.

'Food items placed outdoors in the open will be taken by scavengers, so we have produced a set of simple instructions to follow,' said Mr Ramsden.

If you are lucky enough to own an occupied roost site, please visit http://www.barnowltrust.org.uk">www.barnowltrust.org.uk for details.

If you see a barn owl, dead or alive, you can record your sighting online at http://www.barnowlsurvey.org.uk">www.barnowlsurvey.org.uk