Glad you liked it!
About the ecology, I can’t point to anything particular that makes them thrive now. Something interesting that I left out of the post which I read in the article that wasn’t available online, was that the owls eat different food in the Netherlands than in Germany. In Germany there are a lot of rodents, but in the Netherlands the rodents populations are smaller because of very intensive agriculture. Because of this, the Dutch owls eat more other species (they unfortunately did not specify what those species were).
One trend that is visible in nature in Western Europe is that smaller fauna are struggling, but larger species are doing really well. In the Netherlands we have seen reintroductions of not only the Eagle Owl, but also the white-tailed Eagle, the beaver, the otter and the wolf (and maybe the lynx too in the near future). On top of that we have seen big population increases of cranes, geese, deer and probably some more that I don’t know about. This is mostly because of conservation efforts and hunting being banned.
And I didn’t know that about the Kattenstoet, sounds very interesting!
For me, [email protected] is basically the only active community that I really love on Lemmy and the main reason why I keep coming back here. Other places can be fun too, but Superbowl is just different. There are so many funny owl pictures in them as well as so many informative posts (mainly the Owl-natomy Posts). Also, it is a very positive place. I highly recommend checking it out!