WITH rows of cages containing 30 owls, it looks like a scene out of a Harry Potter film. But it isn’t the aviary at Hogwarts...it’s a back garden in Didcot.

Security officer Christ Ashwin, 61, has dedicated his life to owls since finding an injured tawny owl 15 years ago.

He now has more than 30 of the birds in his back garden, and feeds them a selection of rats and chicks each night.

Mr Ashwin has rows of custom-built aviaries in his garden and admitted that while his wife Angela “didn’t show a lot of interest”, she was a saint for putting up with his hobby.

He said: “In the winter, our utility room is turned into a juvenile centre with baby owls being cared for.”

And the neighbours?

“I’ve had this passion for so many years that everyone knows me,” he says. “They just say ‘there’s the owl man’.”

Mr Ashwin, who works at Didcot Power Station, specialises in breeding Mackinder’s eagle owls, and has managed to breed 14 of the rare species.

He feeds his collection with day-old chicks each night and then rats and mice in the run-up to breeding season.

He said: “I get through an average of 3,500 chicks a month and then a couple of hundred rats and hundreds of mice.

“Each box of 1,000 chicks costs around £12 and it’s £25 for a bag of rats.”

But he said the previous cold winter had led to a poor year for his feathered friends.

He said: “I haven’t had a very good season this year. I only managed to breed one owl. January and February is when they breed. It was so cold they were concentrating more on getting warm than on their eggs.”

He confessed there had been a few hairy moments with the creatures over the years.

He said: “I was travelling along the road once when a barn owl flew in front of me and hit the road. It was unconscious.

“I picked it up and put it in the car, but just a few miles down the road it came back to life, and started flapping around in the car. It was a bit of a shock, but I opened the door and let it fly off into the night sky.

“That’s when my love of owls started.”

He added: “I always wanted to work with animals. I’ve always loved nature, but I ended up being a butcher for 26 years, so it’s nice to have come full circle.”

Mr Ashwin has been voted on to the council of the International Owl Society, a worldwide group for people interested in owls.