Meet Yorkshire's 'Owl Man' who says it is his 'duty' to look after beautiful birds
As a child growing up on Hull’s Greatfield estate Robert Salter got to know the great outdoors on the fringes of the city, along the old railway line to Hedon.
It was where he started seeing barn owls, their enigmatic white shapes flitting over the fields, which have become a lifelong passion.
In 1990 when he got his first car, a Ford Escort, he started exploring the lanes of Holderness in earnest and saw a TV interview about conservationists putting up nestboxes in the Lincolnshire Fens.
“As soon as I saw it, it was a light bulb moment and I thought that's what I'm going to do.”
Fast forward 35 years and Robert, 56, known to all as The Owl Man, is still going.
This year the licensed ringer for the British Trust for Ornithology is celebrating a bumper year, ringing a total of 308 owlets, from 350 nestboxes, most of which he's put himself in outbuildings and up trees.
The season has ended and its the turn of the last owlet, number 308, from a nestbox at a farm near Hull, to have its measurements taken and a ring placed around one leg.
Often these impossibly cute balls of fluff lie back placidly, eyes barely open in their heart-shaped faces, sometimes fast asleep.
Each year he takes four weeks off in June from his job as a bricklayer, and with wife Sue does the rounds, scrambling up ladders to boxes high in trees or farm sheds, ringing birds and repairing and cleaning boxes.
Lowland East Yorkshire has long been a stronghold with its networks of land drains and grassy margins that are a home to field voles, the owls' main food.
They also eat wood mice, shrews - and birds up to the size of a blackbird.
This year the vole population continued reproducing overwinter, feeding the females to a weight where they could breed successfully.
This year they all seem to have fed well: "I weigh all the owlets and haven't come across one this year that's been emaciated. Some years you can be going box after box and there's nowt in them and when there are they are in poor condition.
"The farmers are just so keen and interested in having barn owls nest on their land because of just how beautiful they are."
Robert, who has built a brick “owl tower” in his own garden, has recently started putting videos on YouTube and wants to build his audience so hopefully one day he can make enough money to dedicate more time to the owls: “I'm a big believer that we all have a role to play in life.
“I don't see it as a hobby, I see it as my duty. As long as I can keep doing it I will keep doing it.
“The overall message is that there's no room for complacency. When it comes to sites they are constantly under threat. To sustain a viable population needs constant monitoring."