1. This is a thread about the most powerful bird of all: a Guardian Giant. It’s essential to the recovery of nature – and could help farmers and landowners too. This thread explains how Eagle-owls could transform Britain: our island's most important avian keystone species.

2. The presence of eagle-owls results in a balanced landscape, where the small survive, but the ‘middle’ tier live in perpetual fear. This trophic cascade has evolved over more than a million years. What impact will eagle-owls have in Britain? An enormous and much-needed one.

3. Few birds can be classed as keystone fauna; the eagle-owl is one. When gamekeepers & farmers tell me that crows & buzzards are too common, wrecking wader nestling success, they are right. But perhaps we’ve all forgotten the giant owl that once took care of such issues.

4. As surely as wolves cull foxes and other ‘meso-predators’ on the land, eagle-owls will predate anything from badgers to adult goshawks from above. They lay waste to buzzards, kites & even peregrines: in some studies, up to a third of their avian diet consists of birds of prey.

5. The return of buzzards & kites is commendable – but meso-predators are not designed to reign. This is a universal ecosystem rule. By removing a portion of mid-sized raptors and crows, eagle-owls extend life to the vulnerable. This is how they do it!

6. Whilst the goshawk has a big effect in reducing crows & magpies – as can be seen in the New Forest (where small birds like hawfinches often nest near goshawk nests), the eagle-owl is the master regulator of a whole predatory tier. No other bird fulfils its ecosystem function.

7. Few giant birds directly benefit farmers. When farmers tell me ravens are taken eyes from their lambs, or foxes harrying young stock, the solution they arrive at is seldom a giant owl! But eagle-owls, removing meso-predators in numbers, could be seen as assets to upland farms.

8. With upland curlews in critical decline, @Natures_Voice, farmers & gamekeepers all agree that nest-raiding crows are a major factor: as a Nest Recorder, I have seen this catastrophic impact first-hand. The eagle-owl exists so that birds like the curlew stand a chance.

9. This time, we should not wait to prove that the eagle-owl is native: the onus of proof is on the doubters. The last proven fossilized bone is 10,000 years old. 8200 years ago, Britain became an island. Unless the owls politely left on cue before this, the eagle-owl is native.

10. How early a species vanished has little relevance. As Professor Ian Newton suggests, eagle-owls may have vanished before other birds because they were giant, loud, fierce & shared our cave homes. Our historical ability to wipe out life does NOT render it alien to our shores.

11. If we want to stop fiddling at the edges and effect meaningful wildlife recovery, protection of the small and the fragile – like the curlew, or indeed many other birds – will be key, as many realise. But must now look back, in time, to how nature once ensured their survival.

12. In recent years, many have done their best to sentence us all to an impoverished avifauna; creating ‘definitive’ narratives as to what is native. Now is the time to challenge this: the onus is on those who seek to prevent reintroductions. See Rebirding: 'Memory' for more.

13. Right now, I accept that the likes of the wolf, whilst ecologically beneficial (and economically too, to many sectors), are many years from making their home here. The eagle-owl, however, is a rare apex-predator that blends well into a busy human landscape (below in Belgium).

14. Without species like eagle-owls governing our ecosystems from the top-down, we will fight expensive and failed wars to save many other birds; subject to unnaturally high levels of predation in small habitat islands. We need eagle-owls back, accepted, native, widespread – now.

15. Lastly, call to mind the wonder of this giant bird governing the night sky – lording over farms and wilder lands alike. The booming resonance of its call; its tufted silhouette against the setting sun. This is our winged wolf. For once, let’s unite to bring this beauty back.