Thanks to a EEC ruling Eagle Owls are now protected.

If the chap referred to in the first was Roy Dennis - this is doing him a great injustice as his work was to try and ensure that they were admitted to the correct category of the British List and thus protected. I am also pretty sure that no one from the RSBP was encouraging anyone to go out and shoot Eagle Owls.

The British Ornithologists Union (BOU) was the one who was trying to maintain that because there was no records in the last few hundred years that the Eagal Owl was not a British Bird. A rather dodgy criteria to use when breeding bird populations can rise and fall in just a few years.