Owl Sense

  OWL SENSE

  Miriam Darlington

  For Wendy

  the wisest owl of all

  A wise old owl lived in an oak

  The more he saw the less he spoke

  The less he spoke the more he heard.

  Why can’t we all be like that wise old bird?

  ANON.

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Tyto alba, Barn Owl

  Strix aluco, Tawny Owl

  Athene noctua, Little Owl

  Asio otus, Long-eared Owl

  Asio flammeus, Short-eared Owl

  Bubo bubo, Eurasian Eagle Owl

  Glaucidium passerinum, Pygmy Owl

  Bubo scandiacus, Snowy Owl

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  Readings

  Associations and Websites

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Strix nebulosa

  GREAT GREY OWL

  PROLOGUE

  My son Benji saw the owl first. She was perched like a silky totem pole, talons grasping the gloved hand of her keeper. At first, too busy with getting a place in the queue for artisan bread, I walked straight past the owl man as he stood quietly holding his charge. How was it that they were barely visible? They blurred into the humdrum busyness of the townscape, as if there was something self-effacing – a kind of greyness, an owl-camouflage that both possessed. I learned then that the mind does not easily register things that we are not expecting to see.

  The owl relies on the cryptic facets of its colours, markings and posture to shield it from the gaze of others. But something about the plumage flared on the edge of my vision and perhaps my deep-seated fascination with owls made me turn, and when I saw her I lost all interest in buying fresh bread.

  Benji was already right there. Together we stared. The Great Grey Owl, Strix nebulosa. Grail of the boreal forest. Keenly aware, she gripped that leather glove tight as her head swivelled from side to side and her eyes settled on each and every distraction. I drifted closer, not wanting to startle her, but longing to be within reach of those smoky, brindled feathers. Could I touch? – Yes, it was important to get her used to people, he said. She was only a few months old.

  Her softness took my breath away. Deadly beauty. She turned her face towards me and I noticed its astounding circumference. There is a narrow area that falls between pleasing and preposterous, I thought, and this owl’s circular face and bright yellow eyes fitted into it with perfect grace. The massive facial disc, the owl man, Pete, explained to me, produces a funnel for sound that is the most effective in the animal kingdom; she had the most sensitive ears known to humankind. The owl didn’t miss a word.

  Pete told us that he had known about the batch of three large, cream-coloured eggs (which had been laid in this country by a captive owl) and once they hatched he had chosen this owlet at two weeks old and raised her. She had needed constant supervision and care, and was now, as with all young birds on seeing their first carer, ‘imprinted’ upon him. They were inseparable. I watched as he repeatedly leant his cheek on her feathers, closed his eyes and spoke to her with such tenderness that I felt as though I was intruding on a private conversation.

  ‘I want an owl,’ Benji said, his hand on my shoulder. ‘Can I have an owl?’

  He must have known what I’d say. This is a wild creature. Shouldn’t it stay in the wild? We wrestled with ourselves, with our consciences, with our hearts.

  When she was fully mature, Pete was planning to show his Great Grey Owl at the local rare-breeds sanctuary. My mind filled with a strange concoction of feelings. She’s a captive, I thought. A pet. She’ll be an exhibit, a misfit, unable to do what she has evolved to do, dependent on her enemies.

  She could be bred, Pete added, noticing my expression, and her chicks could be taken and released into the wild. Again he laid his face against her feathers and closed his eyes.

  Could they be released? The laws around captive breeding are very strict on these matters, surely? The magnificent foreigner turned her head and looked past me with her lemon-coloured eyes.

  ‘The yellow eyes,’ Pete said, ‘mean that she hunts in the daylight.’

  Of course, in her native Lapland, during the summer months, there is no night-time. And in the winter, she must rely on her ears for the months of darkness. In spite of all the qualms, I was captivated.

  Then, something startled her. For a split second she tottered on her tethers and I felt the breeze from her spreading wings. I must have closed my eyes, and when I opened them again, in front of me a striped grey haze of staggering silence and softness was rising; a giant butterfly, a god of the tundra. As her wings filled the air, I heard nothing but the whisper of snow falling in thickets of spruce and pine.

  This owl’s origins were in the far north, in the boreal forest. To somebody out shopping for food at the market on a Saturday morning, from the cosy shires of England where at worst it is just wet in the winter, the very name ‘boreal’ released an aromatic dream of resiny spruce forests, the whiff of wildcat, the pocked tracks of wolverine ghosting through the snowy tundra.

  But this owl was on a leash. She bated again, tethered by jesses. Her wings worked, but she would never fly free. She righted herself, folded her wings and settled, neatly doing what she was trained to do.

  The joy of an encounter like this is always woven with an uncomfortable undercurrent. Owls, like so many species, no longer exist purely as astonishing, innocent, wild beings. They are emissaries from an imperilled ecosystem, rare representatives of natural freedom and abundance. Once we were conscious of being surrounded by wild things – they shaped who we were. Without their presence we feel, as poet John Burnside perfectly described, a sense of homesickness. Surely, to be fully human, we still need their wild company, even at a distance?

  So what can a writer do, faced with a world whose wildness appears to be unravelling? The first thing perhaps is to get to know the wild, experience it, and pay attention to it. By giving our attention in this way we might avoid the blandification that happens, especially to so many ‘cute’-faced animals. As we ‘cutify’ the natural world it is at risk of becoming tame and ornamental. Once we have encountered the wild face to face, been brushed by the downdraft of its phantom swoop or been awoken by that spine-shivering nocturnal cry it becomes real, embedded in our minds, a subtle but vital part of our being. Perhaps with this kind of attention, we can come to fully care: a word that derives from the Old English cearu, which means to guard or watch, ‘to trouble oneself’. Facing up to our scars and losses, taking the trouble and the time to explore the ecological details of some of the most fragile species and to record them accurately on the page, is the least we can do.

  This is the story of my journey to explore those ecological details, paying attention to the incremental shift owls have experienced, and still are experiencing, from wildness to a kind of enforced domesticity. I wanted to immerse myself in their world, from the wild owls to the captives that are kept in aviaries and sanctuaries and beyond, to look into the mythology, kinship, otherness and mystery that wild owls offer. I hoped that during my search some wider truths would rise to the surface. I would try to find all of the wild owl species in Europe, to extend the limited baseline of the six British species that I knew lived on my patch and might survive extinction here during my own lifespan.

  In his book Biophilia biologist E. O. Wilson explains: ‘We are human in good part because of the particular way we affiliate with other organisms. They are the matrix in which the human mind originated and is permanently rooted.’ Losing sight of the natural world in which the brain was assembled over millions of years is a risky s
tep, Wilson says. Offering a formula for reconnection he urges: ‘Mysterious and little-known organisms live within walking distance of where you sit. Splendour awaits in minute proportions.’

  My manifesto was an exploration of the nearby, then, accepting my part, my own implication in it all. To try to regain some balance, I would invite in some sanity for myself and for others, and along the way a sprinkling of enchantment might seep in. I would scour the twilit woods, fields and valleys of my home archipelago and then reach further afield, learning about the ecology and conservation of these night-roaming raptors, about their presence as well as their absence. What was their place in our ecosystem; how and why have we made them into stories, given them meanings, wrapped them with all the folklore and superstition that we could muster? And why was it that owls were becoming semi-domesticated, kept as pets in aviaries and shown in ‘owl-displays’, like a new kind of surrogate kin, when so many of their kind were threatened in the wild?

  I would rise at dawn and follow the flicker of the white Barn Owl near my home; I would drift along the leafy Devon lanes at dusk to find the Tawny Owls I had heard calling. I wanted to track down the species I hadn’t ever seen: the irascible, yellow-eyed Little Owl, the rare Long-eared Owl and the elusive, migratory Short-eared Owl. I might even be able to see one of the feral Eagle Owls that I had heard were living wild in northern England, and perhaps, if I were lucky, a vagrant Snowy Owl might appear.

  The plan was to unveil each of these species in their wonder, amongst their forests, meadows, moorlands and marshes. But no sooner had the owl scheme spread its wings in my mind than my son Benji fell seriously ill. I knew I had a choice; I could accommodate his illness and work my owl search around him, writing up my findings as and when I was able to, or I could put the whole thing on the shelf. It felt wrong for our lives to be stopped in their tracks and so slowly, with an open mind, I began. Difficulties repeatedly muscled their way in. Every parent’s fear is that our young might be afflicted by injury or illness. How could I hide the frightening personal drama that was invading our life? The line I had read in Dante’s Divine Comedy years earlier while studying as an undergraduate student was suddenly very real: ‘Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita/ mi ritrovai per una selva oscura/ché la diritta via era smarrita,’ Dante says. ‘Midway along life’s journey, I found myself in a dark wood, and the path was lost.’

  If I had known my year of owls was to be so difficult I might have faltered. The illness stretched out into one, then two, then three years. Benji did not get better. Alongside the fears and challenges my owl research slowed and expanded. Unexpected opportunities arose – invitations to Finland to see Eagle Owls; to Lapland to see Hawk Owls, Great Greys and Ural Owls; to Serbia for Long-eared Owls; Scops Owls in France; and more Eagle Owls in Spain. In the end I managed to travel the length and breadth of Europe finding commonalities just as my own country was breaking away from the unity we’d known for many years. Going in search of all thirteen species of owl that inhabit our vast, multilingual, many-owled corner of the world, I found uniformity in a shared devotion to our wondrously varied wildlife. And far from distracting me from my family and my roots, my journeys deepened my sense of home and my ability to listen to what was near. As I learned from one of my wise-beyond-her-years undergraduate students at the University of Plymouth, adversity leaves you both a stronger and a softer human, and it is underwritten with a strange kind of joy, even at its worst moments.

  Carl Jung said in a letter to Karl Oftinger in 1957, ‘fear seeks noisy company and pandemonium to scare away the demons.’ I endeavoured to slow down and forgo many of my modern-world distractions. The clamour of gadgetry is as distracting from our purpose as it is sometimes helpful – and it disturbs the owls. For the owl years, and still now, I abandoned having a tablet or a smartphone, preferring to stay with the quiet insights and privacy of my senses, and my pen and notebook.

  Women habitually remain silent about their personal lives for fear of repercussions. I hoped that the honest inclusion of some small truths would add up to a bigger truth. For better or for worse, raw life had butted in. Again and again, I found myself living with hope when it seemed as if there was no hope. And so, as for many lovers of the natural world, my story became braided with two ecologies – the ornithological and the personal.

  *

  For more than 60 million years owls have roamed the night sky – Homo sapiens have only been here for a fraction of that time, less than 200,000 years. And just as our ancestors might have done, in some ways we still struggle to understand these birds. With the aid of genetics and taxonomy we have made progress, and distinguished owls into two ancient families: the Tytonidae, those large-headed owls with a tall, narrow skull, asymmetrical ears, a heart-shaped facial disc and long, feathered legs (this group includes Tyto alba, our Barn Owl) and the Strigidae, the owls with shorter, asymmetrical skulls, and this group includes all the other European species. Both have particularities that no other bird has, adaptations for nocturnal activity and predation. The flat facial disc, large eyes and downward-turned beak lend the owl its wise, human-faced quality. The familiar face provides a contrast to the eerie ability to turn the head up to 270 degrees. This unique, uncanny feature – and the fact that it was difficult to see and to know in the dark, with its noiseless flight when all other birds fly with more obvious sound – disturbed and intrigued our ancestors, and produced a fear and fascination that have never quite disappeared.

  Owls have a complex attraction for humans. Their loose, soft feathers rather than the stiff rigid plumage of other birds can give an attractive ‘fluffy’ effect. The gentle contours are not for cuteness, however; they are solely evolved to insulate, and to cloak this predator in invisibility. Their patterning produces visually confusing camouflage that breaks up a silhouette beyond any hunter’s wildest dreams. Their feathers are silencers, to mask themselves but also designed not to drown the subtle sound of their prey. While our ancestors may have been in awe of the owls’ fearsome abilities as a nocturnal predator, these days we can have a tendency not to see beyond the fluffiness. But the hooked, sharp-edged bill, unlike that of the majority of other birds which have a horizontal bill, is for ripping flesh. The acute hearing and the stealth-swoop are for murder by momentous, feathered eruption. The ferocious raptorial talons are for striking and gripping – these are zygodactyl talons: instead of three toes facing forward and one behind, the outer digit has a joint that enables it to swivel backwards so two toes can be placed at the front and two behind. The prodigious strength of its grip is vital. The Eurasian Eagle Owl’s deceptively velvet-feathered feet act as boxing gloves. This giant owl deploys its thunderous punch to grasp, snap and puncture. Blakiston’s fish owl, of a similar size and weight to the Eagle Owl, has spines called spicules on the underside of its toes to enable it to grip dicey aquatic prey.

  But perhaps what also attracts us humans to owls is admiration, particularly that they have the skill to fly at night. This bird is feathered perfection; grace and beauty with talons. Just as a poem is the best words in the best order, this bird must be the best night-hunter in the best kit. Even without the glamour, we can’t fail to envy the finely honed precision that is compressed here. The owl is made for one thing only: to survive, and to do so by stealth. For this reason, over time our suspicious minds have wondered whether it also has any supernatural qualities: hidden in its cloak was there the capacity for evil, for instance? For if Homo sapiens, the wise humans – who in general do not appear always to have entirely mastered their own baser instincts – possessed the same set of abilities, it would surely make a potent concoction. And so by projection this mysterious night creature has gained human meanings that meant nothing to it.

  In Egyptian, Celtic and Hindu cultures, the owl’s symbolism was involved with guardianship of the underworld. The owl was revered as the winged keeper of souls after death. In Malaysia and Indonesia it is ‘burung hantu’, the ‘ghost bird’. The ancient Greeks associated
it with wisdom and courage; the Romans with foreboding and fear. Wise or evil, the owl was a porous receptacle for all of our chosen meanings. But why all this mythologising? Perhaps we need and enjoy a story with a good fright in it, to bond us, to explain ourselves to ourselves, to remind us on some level of our origins. That ‘sweet sense of horror, the shivery fascination with monsters and creeping forms that so delights us today that could see you through to the next morning – the natural stuff of metaphor and ritual’ that Edward O. Wilson confirms is wired into our minds. The human brain is configured to be wary of predators and their movements, and as predators tend to stare at their prey, the large-eyed owl provokes that trigger, the age-old possibility of threat. Humans were kept awake and alive by that possibility, whether it was perceived to be supernatural or natural, a spirit, a bear, an owl, a wolf or a lion.

  In order to survive, humans learned to outsmart dangers; the domestication of dogs and cats may have been one way of doing this. Storytelling may also have been another way we learned to do it. To think about, predict and prepare for danger with a story was to teach our vulnerable young how to do the same. Perhaps we love the owl for its spookiness because it reminds us to be on the lookout. Literature has never failed to embolden our fascination for nocturnal ghostliness and its creatures: in Sylvia Townsend Warner’s haunting novel Lolly Willowes, or the Loving Huntsman the heroine longs for something shadowy and menacing, ‘a something that lurked in waste places and that was hinted at by the sound of water gurgling in deep channels and by the voices of birds of ill-omen’.

  In Japan, on the other hand, the word for owl is ‘fukuro’, which means good fortune, and so the owl is lucky. In Aboriginal Australia, eerin the grey owl is a protector, sleeping by day and flying by night to keep watch and to warn if danger approaches. In South Australia the Nyungar tribe protects a standing owl-stone, Boyay Gogomat, a creator, healer and destroyer. The Wardaman tribe in Northern Australia believes that at a unique rocky outcrop that overlooks the outback dwells Gordol, the owl who created the world.